Sounds like these guys were channeling Xerox PARC - who had EVERYTHING, computer-wise; the mouse, Windows, etc. Xerox could be Microsoft and Apple combined today. But they were run by a bunch of “copier heads” who didn’t see the potential.
Anybody remember the Nokia 3310? This phone was HUGE for a couple of years from about year 2001 to 2003. Also very popular was the previous model which was bigger and had an exterior antenna. VERY durable. I somehow can't remember that earlier model number.
The problem for Nokia was that they could design the exterior, but they couldn’t get the battery life, CPU power or heat issues resolved and they certainly couldn’t get the software to actually, you know, work.
You get the impression this guy was one of the displaced Nokia employees who is now backing a bus squarely over someone’s career?
apple is a superior software company...software rules...
WSJ expects Nokia to recover and RIM to fail.
Tablet computers existed in 1992. I was selling them! Apple even brought out the Netwon. But the market wasn’t there.
Internet browsing smartphones existed long before the iPhone but they were expensive and marketed towards business not consumers. The iPhone used a Capacitive screen rather then the more dull Resistive screen and that made a huge differnece in the interactivity of the device. But other phone makers didn’t think consumers would spend that much money on a phone.
Well, we know how that worked out.
So even if Nokia engineers had an iPad device in the late 90’s, they would have failed marketing it.
And yet they didn’t produce it.... happens
Apple presented what is called a “disruptive technology”, and it caught on. Who’s going to disrupt Apple and with what? Steve and his craziness are gone, what’s, who’s next?
Nokia spent much money when the inferior WAP based browsing came out. Then came G3 and G4 and the iphone at the same time and the rest is history.
I remember using browsing cell phones with touch screen 2 or 3 years before my peers who would mock me using a “sidekick phone” while they retained their standard crappy num pads. Then all of a sudden the iphone came out with the G3 network, and I do not know what happened, but all of a sudden they all bought “sidekicks” and droids and iphones. I don’t know what Apple did that I did wrong in advertising that kind of tool.
I brought mine in 2002 and I am still using mine. It's been through the washing machine 3x and the river twice. The * key doesn't work but other than that it still works great including getting great reception & sound quality.
I don't need another toy to waste time on so I'm not upgrading anytime soon
In the 90's I had a prototype of a Tivo like device in my living room, we called it the VNR or VDR for Video Network Recorder or Video Disk Recorder.
It with a Motorola 68040 based set-top box. Some ex-Apple guys wrote the operating system and proprietary hardware accelerated video codec.
The device could either record to its internal hard drive or to the hard drive of a PC or Macintosh over ethernet. The ethernet could also be used to share the PC's internet connection and CPU power for encoding to the box.
It worked and it worked great, especially married to a Pentium class PC. You could either program it with VCR plus codes from the remote or using a desktop application and an online TV Guide. Among its features was purging commercials (to preserve valuable disk space of course), it could also record music and recognize and catalog songs with the internet connection. You could also import music from CD's using the PC's CD-ROM drive.
The product sat complete for more than a year as management dithered over shipping it. They feared litigation and while our counsel was confident they would prevail over Hollywood in court it was decided it wasn't a worth the trouble for such a niche product - they also thought the networking feature was essential and would be impossible to support. One executive beta tester complained his wife threatened to hang him with the ethernet cable he ran clear across the house. All they have to show for the effort is a few patents.
During this period the Apple guys were hired back by the recently returned Steve Jobs and people scattered to other projects.
At the end of 2001 Tivo had an install base of more than 300,000. The underlying platform of our device was installed on a couple cruise ships to deliver pay-per-view and unceremoniously abandoned a short time later.
We had the cute little Nokia 8210 that came out in ‘99 I think. One of their earliest internal antenna models. One red, one blue. Never could get much reception with either of them.
I was at the airport once and all these people are walking around talking on their phones. Mine? No service. So, I just walked around talking into it anyway so people wouldn’t think I was a loser.
It might have been the provider, Cingular. I couldn’t get service when I could see their antennas. Took it to the store several times and they just scratched their heads. Cingular blamed the phone. The phone didn’t have anything to say.
