What a mess. The graph nodes slowly crawl around, as if to ensure that when you click you won't hit the thing you meant. Feels like something built in Flash during Nokia's heady days. (Unintentional irony? Nokia was known as a company with lots of Flash concepts and little software product execution.)
But the content seems really interesting. These are internal prototypes and documents from Nokia's archive, now released for the first time. I wish there was a way to browse them in chronological order without all this janky graph visualization nonsense.
There's a link in the corner that takes you to the actual archive repository:
https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8...
This seems like it might be a less brain-melting way to browse the content.
The UI for this does seem a bit "Baby's first force-directed graph". It's quite hard to use for navigation - if it sprang to life on load but then stayed static (other than hover highlighting) I think that would be much better.
What a mess of a webpage. Probably there is interesting content there but the presentation made me close it down immediatley.
Yeah, I don't understand what's going on.
I was curious, but that mess of a webpage made me close it right away.
No mention of my fav Nokia of all time, the N9; also no mention of MeeGo and Maemo
I came across something interesting titled "Apple iPhone was launched, presentation (2007-12-31)"[0]. It mentions Nokia N800 and implicitly implies a lineage of devices (N770 > N800 > N810 > N900 > N9). Sometimes I wonder what Nokia might have been like in a timeline without Jobs and Ballmer.
> Leverage N800 with its touch screen - it competes nearly in the same arena
[0]: https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a0...
I had the N770, the N800 and also the N900.
It’s very telling that someone at Nokia thought it’s basically like the iPhone. In fact the N800 was a thick plastic chunk with no cellular, a resistive touchscreen, and a stylus-driven GTK+ user interface. Its most popular software feature among its userbase seemed to be that you can open XTerm.
They did eventually make an iPhone competitor on this same Linux platform (the N9), but it took five years. “Competes nearly in the same arena” indeed — in the same sense that my 8-year-old daughter competes in Simone Biles’s arena because she also likes jumping and takes some gym classes.
It looked like Nokia felt shaken by the iPhone and had the right mindset at the time, but their actions didn't match what was presented, the world would have been different indeed if Nokia had stepped up their game in this time.
https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_ebb0df1b-4db3-4b3c-ad...
Is this a Nokia Watch or rather a Nokia Cuff?
"My First Nokia" designs were funny in this presentation: https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_47c69f41-6009-4520-9e...
This means also, that the expected lifetime of a phone is more than 20 years. It must be updateable and durable.
This is in relation to a concept of phone "body" combined with a replacable faceplate which would expose different functionality (additional buttons, slide-out keyboard). One year later they introduced "Xpress-on" covers, which seem to boil down to having different colors. A bit more mundane.
There is some really interesting media in there, I'm not a huge fan of how it's surfaced with this network visualization tbh - the small viewport version you get on mobile or when shrinking the window down is actually nicer imo, you can just flip through the individual entries
I wonder if the software empowering this data is an open source project?
I just want to know how it was made. It looks like the entire presentation is encapsulated inside of a "canvas" tag.
Hm, for a site specialized in Nokia phones, it sure has a lot of "unknown models". I assume those are design mockups or prototypes of phones that didn't make it to mass production? At least this N-Gage lookalike https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_e3183882-13b3-48a0-a5... clearly has a dummy screen...
It's an internal Nokia design archive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42723034 So there are a lot of internal designs and prototypes
"low power" has zero hits. I guess low power is implied.
This archive more about the aesthetics design, not technical stuffs.
Can anyone find the Nokia touch screen prototype that came 7 years before iPhone around 2000 but was rejected by management.
This is probably the one you mean, the oval-shaped "3G concept" touchscreen device from 1999-2000:
https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/index.html?node=C0001
You can hover over the "related entries" links to view the images.
That's not it. Those had roll wheels or something and no touch screens.
I have seen picture of the prototype somewhere. It was square blue prototype with big screen with shape like iPhone. It might not be in the design archive at all because it was R&D prototype.
This archive is all about the R&D prototypes. Unfortunately the website makes it impossible to find anything.
No it's not. It's a design archive. It includes design concepts, some involving prototypes, but only in relation to design.
Industrial design and engineering R&D are different things.
Can't find it from this archive, but the concept appears on this PDF
https://www.aalto.fi/sites/default/files/2020-11/Haikio2.pdf
"Pocket office"
"Phone, computer, television, video, all are becoming one"
http://twitpic.com/btc934 "Taskuterminaali 2002", the concept is from 1996 envisioning what would be released in 2002.
I guess the technology components were not yet on that level by then.
Found a sketch here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Nokia/comments/vf8k58/nokia_history...
Guys, what are we doing here?
To me it's a very confusing website, that's also a stuttery mess(Chrome, Win10, Ryzen 4000 6 core). I would much prefer the web page styles of the 90's with just hyperlinks and pictures instead of these fancy orbital sci-fi neural net styles so that some fron-end designers can flex their skills. It looks cool but the UX is bad.
Is this the future of European tech? Online museums to show digital tourists our glorious long gone tech past similar to our IRL museums? The irony is not lost on me.
Here: https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_d5d11763-74a5-40a7-a...
This page is just front end to Aalto repository.
Thanks
They were being thrown away/deleted so some researches from the university decided to save them. I much prefer this to losing this information/history fully.
>I much prefer this to losing this information/history fully.
Edit: Fair enough but I Still maintain my option on the site's poor design.
These are not pulled from some random website. These are actual internal archives donated from Nokia (well Microsoft Mobile Oy these days)
https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/about.html
> The Nokia Design Archive is a graphic and interactive portal designed by researchers from Aalto University in Finland. It currently hosts over 700 entries, curated from thousands of items donated by Microsoft Mobile Oy and representing over 20 years of Nokia’s design history — both seen and unseen. You can freely explore the archive, learn about designers’ experiences working in Nokia and discover interesting topics surrounding design and mobile technologies.
You can look at the uncurated collection at aalto university repo https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8... (not sure if all of the materials digitized/online though)
How exactly would wayback machine allow you to have a collection of related items and their connection to each other?
How do you go from e.g. Vision 99 (if you manage to find it in Wayback machine) to all related entires? https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/?node=C0027
By using HyperLinks, embedded in your HyperText document written in HyperText Markup Language, that was sent to your terminal using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol.
This is all 1960s era concepts.
Literally any wiki style site will be a perfect fit to serve this content.
> By using HyperLinks, embedded in your HyperText document written in HyperText Markup Language
Yup, linking millions of documents that you are required to sift through to combine the information you need
> Literally any wiki style site will be a perfect fit to serve this content.
And does wayback machine have this "any wiki"?
Meanwhile the site in question is literally the wiki with hyperlinks you're talking about
I feel genuinely stupid trying to use a website like this.
Here you go the 90's style web page with folder structure :
https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8...
The interface is a mess, but the data is phenomenal.