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:
I don't suppose you managed to grab it before we hugged it? I guess it will recover and I'll check back, but if you happened to have grabbed it locally I'd love to dig through it today :) (je @ h4x.club if you're able - thank you!:)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
I visited a lunch spot popular with Nokia R&D employees. It was extremely common for people to have a prototype phone in a fabric bag at the lunch table, so you couldn't see what they were putting to the test of daily use. Lots of very funky phones were glimpsed, only few of them later became commercial products with definite model numbers.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
This page is just front end to Aalto repository.
Edit: Fair enough but I Still maintain my option on the site's poor design.
https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8...
https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8...
I was curious, but that mess of a webpage made me close it right away.
> Leverage N800 with its touch screen - it competes nearly in the same arena
[0]: https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a0...
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.
https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_35687268-3fde-4493-a0...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX-gTobCJHs
Blew me away back then, but forgot the name. This archive helped to recover the bits in my head. Thank you!