Nokia is the best case study of what not to do. In 2005 Nokia launched the 770 Internet Tablet. It was the groundwork for the modern smartphone. But the management did not allow it to have a GSM modem. So it was not a smartphone. Only after the iPhone Nokia launched the N900 but it was too late. Nokia did not believe in touch screen too.
The 770 and Maemo environment were pretty amazing back in the day - high resolution screen for the time, but a somewhat laggy interface given the compute available at the time. Hardware was somewhat compromised - the half-height MMC storage expansion was particularly difficult to find. I still have one sitting around somewhere.
It did support touch, with a stylus built in - I forget if the stylus was needed or if you could use your bare fingers.
I got to briefly try a N900 back in the day. When it powered on you would briefly see the raw X background stipple and the x-shaped cursor before the window manager loaded. I liked the nerd factor of it but I knew at that point the company was in the weeds.
True. But Nokia could do many improvements before Apple launched iPhone. But Nokia decided to stay only with Symbian without touch. And we had to wait 4 years to Android show what a Linux with Java smartphone would be. And we saw Nokia going down with Microsoft. It was interesting times back then.
Maemo was an actual GNU/Linux, not just kernel with custom userland. Logging into a cluster from my N900 and having plots just appear on screen thanks to X network transparency is still one of the most futuristic things I have ever seen a computer do.
Interesting times indeed. It was also just before the Nokia acquisition that Microsoft was selling their first Android phone (under the Nokia brand) so they could see the winds of change.
Nokia already had Android phones released months before the Microsoft acquisition closed. Makes me wonder if Nokia would have pulled out completely from making Windows phones had Microsoft not purchased them.
Even Microsoft changed their tune, releasing Android phones themselves years later under the Surface brand.
If the 770 was anything like the N900 then the screen was resistive and the stylus was passive. So you could use your fingers but in my experience, for any finer task, you needed the stylus.
Damn, I really miss the N900. I was seriously using it as recently as about 4-5 years ago.
I loved my N9, truly one of the best experiences i've had with a mobile phone. I've watched Sailfish from a distance but their very limited choice of phones have always been off-putting.
