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Nokia Had a Production-Ready Web Tablet 13 Years Ago
An anonymous reader writes "Here's another story of a tech gadget that arrived before its time. Nokia created a web-ready tablet running EPOC (later to be renamed as Symbian) thirteen years ago. The tablet was set to go into full production, and they actually built a thousand units just before it was canceled. The tablet was scrubbed because market research showed there wasn't demand for the device. The team got devices for themselves and the rest were destroyed. The team was then fired. The lesson: Don't try to be pioneer if you're relying on market research studies."
and resistive touchscreen, USB 1.0, running on AA batteries.
In other words, not ready for prime time.
"If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse"
don't be a Commodore.
Mostly random stuff.
... is that the vast majority of senior executives won't learn from these mistakes. They'll all listen to some talking head consultant (that they paid way too much for) consult some sort of magic crystal ball and claim "it won't fly!" What should've been the indication that it might catch on is the quote, "The team got devices for themselves."
If the engineers think it's cool enough that they want one for personal use, it's probably a product that has a use that could be expanded from the tech-geek segment into something profitable.
I would rather put it: Don't rely on market research studies, if you want to be a pioneer. If Henry Ford had asked his customers what they wanted, they would have said "We want faster horses".
The reason tablets became popular is because people had begun to use their phones in similar ways, and the price wasn't too outrageous. Microsoft had tablets before they became popular, too, but they didn't kick off the tablet craze. Pioneering technology is one part tech, ten parts timing.
Take that Apple!
http://nathanlindsell.blogspot.com/
Bull. Palm/Handspring devices had a ton of apps around then, I had a Handspring Prism w/ GSM module that I could IRC, SSH, browse the web and whatever else from in 2000.
My Symbian phone not-too-long-after (Nokia 6600) had all the same apps in a more compact package. The whole 'mobile ecosystem' did NOT begin with Apple or Android.
Just because you disagree doesn't mean it's not true.
If they made 1000 of them initially, why not take them to a trade show and see what kind of reaction that they got.
Instead they threw out 800 of these units and removed it from their memories.
2001. Touchscreen. Ran a Gecko-based UI. Thought it was way cool. Thought for sure they'd be out on the market within a year or two of that.
If it wasn't the Nokia unit, then someone else was working on something very similar.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
The Newton platform is a personal digital assistant developed by Apple Inc.. Development of the Newton platform started in 1987 and officially ended on February 27, 1998. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
The MessagePad is the first series of personal digital assistant devices developed by Apple Computer for the Newton platform in 1993. Some electronic engineering and the manufacture of Apple's MessagePad devices was undertaken in Japan by the Sharp Corporation. The devices were based on the ARM 610 RISC processor and all featured handwriting recognition software and were developed and marketed by Apple. The devices ran the Newton OS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
Perl Programmer for hire
Tablets only became popular when they got to their current form and pricing level. The older tablets and specifically this Nokia one wasn't going to be popular.
That tablet is ugly and looks difficult to use. That marketing team was absolutely right, that tablet would have failed. It's not the idea of a tablet that made Apple successful, but aesthetics and general usability.
That would be 2001. I had a PDA (Pocket PC) at that time that was internet-capable. However, when wi-fi was not yet widespread, the only way you could get on the internet with the thing was a complicated modem setup, plugging a cable into an extension card. Getting data over a mobile phone link still involved the horribly primitive technology WAP. So, a fat lot of good your portable device did you. The smartphone and the tablet could not really take off until wi-fi and cheap 3G did.
Thirteen years ago the network infrastructure wasn't in place to let people do with a tablet what they do now, so the market research at the time may have been spot on. You can't really second-guess it now. I mean, sure, it may have become wildly popular, but Nokia actually entered the tablet space around 2005 with the 770 and even that was rather premature by today's tablet standards. Four years LESS of infrastructure, apps, and internet-addiction wasn't going to help any tablet succeed. And while the article hints that the early designers would have made different choices with the 770, there's no guarantee they would have made a difference. There were no killer apps -- no facebook, twitter, or instagram that people just HAD to have access to all the time. No reliable data network. Definitely no YouTube or Netflix. PDAs were slowly becoming popular, but they were very personal -- glorified address books and note taking devices.
It would be nice if the team were rewarded and kept on to make use of the technology somewhere and grow the market, but it's not like they were the first -- the Newton, and devices from HP and DEC were all in development much earlier than this -- and no matter how much of a "pioneer" you think someone may be, they do need a market; either you have to build it or wait for it if it doesn't exist, but just because a device can be created doesn't mean that the entire experience was ready-to-go.
3 years before Intel. Cyrix at Comdex 98' with their WebPad. x86 CPU, Harris wireless, Resistive touch screen.
https://archive.org/details/CC...
Back when some of us were clamoring for an iOpener to add touch screen and HDD hacks, tinkering with Panasonic touch-screen large palm sized gadgets (forgot the model, still have it in box) and all that stuff. A few more were out there and fizzled too, missed this one.
Time Bomber the Book coming soon.
"Well, you’re obviously being totally naive of course", said the girl, "When you’ve been in marketing as long as I have, you'll know that before any new product can be developed it has to be properly researched. We’ve got to find out what people want from fire, how they relate to it, what sort of image it has for them." The crowd were tense. They were expecting something wonderful from Ford.
"Stick it up your nose," he said.
"Which is precisely the sort of thing we need to know," insisted the girl, "Do people want fire that can be fitted nasally?"
"And the wheel," said the Captain, "What about this wheel thingy? It sounds a terribly interesting project."
"Ah," said the marketing girl, "Well, we're having a little difficulty there."
"Difficulty?" exclaimed Ford. "Difficulty? What do you mean, difficulty? It's the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!"
The marketing girl soured him with a look.
"Alright, Mr. Wiseguy," she said, "if you're so clever, you tell us what colour it should be."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
2001? Something like that would cost $1000, bare minimum. Add that it weighs four pounds without a keyboard? They made the right call.
If, of all words of tongue and pen,
The saddest are, "It might have been,"
More sad are these we daily see:
"It is, but hadn’t ought to be."
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
I'm finding it funny that you kids never saw these. Around 2001 (not that long ago), there were a bunch of tablets being shown at CES that never caught on. Some were PCs as tablets. Some were more consumption like tablets, only with a lot less to consume.
They were slow, clunky, expensive. No YouTube, no videos (the storage was measured in MBs). They were heavy, had short battery lives and terrible screens.
The user experience of these things was really poor as well. Think WebTV.
This thing was nothing like an iPad. And it's not like as if you can really say, "like an iPad would've been in 2001". If you look at what most people use their iPads for, none of that would be possible/practical on the 2001 tablets. It's more like saying that Apple had a QuickTake digital camera, but it never really took off... amazing because today we all have digital cameras all over the place.
I applaud Nokia for developing a prototype to demo at CES, but it was a good thing they didn't take this to production.
General Magic's and Sony's PIC-1000 had a graphical web browser back in 1995. Even back then nobody wanted one.
I have to say, I've been reading your psychotic rants for years, and I'm really intrigued as to what you're like in real life. I can't say I'd like to meet you, but I'd love to observe you with say, 4 or 5 inches of bulletproof glass between us.
PS Please learn the meaning of libel
And yoy have the Acorn NewsPAD from '96, you know from the gang that created the ARM :-)
http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/Co...
There were a ton of internet devices a decade ago. I had drawers full of literature from a lot of companies making new ones. We wanted to use some badly for at-home patients for a research study. We didn't buy any. Why? They were expensive, and they sucked. There are reasons tablets didn't take off 13 years ago, and it had absolutely nothing to due with market-research.
Touchscreens were not really around at that time. "pen computing" was VC rage then. Apple had their own entry a fe years later called the Newton. MicroSoft unsuccessfully hawked is Pen-Windows for years.
And no Mobile internet connections. really what use is a tablet that you would need to plug a ethernet cable? Might as well just buy a laptop or a palmtop, it would probably be cheaper even back then.
I remember when WiFi routers were luxury items that only the really rich had. Tablets would never get off during those days.
Most of the previous tablet GUIs tried to cram the complexity of multiwindow destop on to a small tablet screen. Apple mainly enlarged the simpler, single-window phone GUI. Samsung is hawking side-by-side Android screens this year. But you really dont want to get all that much more complex than that.
But it didn't mean there was a booming market for them.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
"The tablet was scrubbed because market research showed there wasn't demand for the device. The team got devices for themselves and the rest were destroyed. The team was then fired. The lesson: Don't try to be pioneer if you're relying on market research studies."
Don't be a pioneer?
Yeah, I'm sure that was the lesson learned for every person who did not start up a company called "Apple" out of their garage.
Or pioneer the use of this little thing we call "Windows" on computers.
The real lesson? Market research can be dead wrong. Ask anyone on this team who would love to have a piece of that billion-dollar market today.
"If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse"
Too often, a quote is attributed to Ford simply because its touches upon success in business or innovation: He has become a patron saint of the entrepreneur... One of the more popular of these quotations is, ''If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse,'' which has never been satisfactorily traced to Henry Ford. In fact, the quote only begins to appear in the early 21st century, ''quoted'' by modern-day business gurus using it as an object lesson.
Henry Ford's quotations
What people wanted was clean, affordable. mechanical horse power.
The carriage without the horse. The barn. The stable-boy. The veterinarian. The manure pit.
The reason that the iPad succeed was because they already had plenty of apps (from the iPhone) available for it when it launched.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
If it was a Gecko based UI, it wasn't this device. This was running Symbian OS, using an Eikon derived UI, and using Opera for its browser.
Nokia creates tablet.
Nokia destroys tablet.
M$ destroys Nokia.
M$ creates a tablet.
A tablet destroys M$.
Linux inherits the earth?
Demonstrating the power of Symbian to ruin anything it touches.
> It's not only about multitouch. Capacitive touchscreens are more accurate to use with a bare
> finger than resistive ones, which call for a stylus.
You use Your fingernail on a resistive screen, which allows GREAT PRECISION. Capacitive screens require You to use the pad of Your finger. This leads to a great lack of precision.
Resistive screens can use a stylus, or the back of a standard pen, or just about anything else You have laying around.
I hate to flame anyone, but honestly jones_supa...You are banned from touching any PC until You learn to use touch screens!
Apple used some sorry capacitive junk on their iPods, and somehow brainwashed the rest of the world into believing it was better. IT'S NOT!
There were many tablets released before the iPad that did not sell that well.
Yes, Microsoft made them, they ran Windows, and since applications were not designed for touch they sucked compared to laptops.
What Apple did was not marketing, but make a tablet that was usage because everything from OS to software was made for a tablet, not a PC.
It also relied heavily on many IPhone developers being able to quickly write software for the tablet before it was even launched - we could only test apps on the simulator before they went into the iPad App Store on day one! Kind of insane if you think about it, but it generally worked because the devices were similar in OS. If there had not been a good base of software from day one, sales would probably not have been as good... oddly parallel to a console launch come to think of it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Firefox was initially released in 2002, you weren't seeing a gecko based tablet in 2001, try again.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
The Sumerians had tablets and writing a thousand years before Moses wrote his do's and don'ts.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
I am still using my EPOC based pocket computer. It's called a Psion.
Firefox was not the first Browser to use Gecko, there was Mozilla and Netscape.
Here's the tablet they ended up releasing. Let us know which parts Steve Jobs stole.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It's fun to speculate what might have been, whether Nokia screwed up big by ceding the iPad market. But I think any tablet like device without a touchscreen can't really be said to be the predecessor of the iPad. In the same way that Nokia had internet devices and still couldn't make an iPhone, even if they'd made this tablet, it still most likely wouldn't have spawned the iPad revolution.
Gecko != Firefox
BTW, I was using ChatZilla at around this same time.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
If APK says the sky is blue, you should assume that it's any colour BUT blue, unless and until you look out the window and verify this for yourself.
In addition, be sure that you actually *open* the window before you look, in case the glass has been tinted.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Pretty sure it was the one that was reviewed here. Had a Crusoe CPU from TransMeta (remember them, anybody?) and ran Midori Linux. Apparently some of these units also ran Windows CE, but I only saw the Midori version.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
All of Slashdot is still waiting for APK to show even one instance of one of his host file engine spamvertisements that was ever ON topic.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Unfortunately, due to a clerical mix-up, the team that was supposed to sack the people that sacked the development team got sacked first and now no one can work out what to do about it.
You can't explain WHY Jeremy Reimer and Jay Little's websites were removed by CrystalTech &/or Shaw CA hosting providers
IF I'm "so bad", why'd THAT happen to 'em? apk
As I've already said: You have not yet offered the slightest, thinnest shred of evidence that this ever even happened.
Linking to your own previous claims about this does not provide such evidence.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
UPDATE: Still haven't seen any evidence that APK got Reimer's and Little's sites taken down, but I did find Reimer's version of events (and a whole lot more), which seems to tell a rather different story. See how I happened across this info, here.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Regarding your claim concerning Jeremy Reimer: Nothing of the sort happened. Reimer's ISP politely told you to get stuffed.
Regarding Jay Little: I don't have all the facts, but it now appears that--much as I suspected--what happened was that you spammed and crapflooded his personal site until he changed to a different hosting provider that could block you. I'm sure that I'll stumble across evidence of this sooner or later, just as I stumbled across evidence that you lied about what happened between you and Jeremy.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Remember, folks--anytime you investigate a claim made by APK, you'll likely uncover a multitude of lies, half-truths, mischaracterisations, personal attacks, threats, and more lies.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
You fail to provide any proof whatsoever that Jay's site was "forcibly removed" by his hosting provider. He apparently DID change providers to one that was better equipped to handle your harassment/crapflooding.
Jeremy's ISP basically told you that you were wasting your time trying to get them to disconnect him, only you were too stupid to realise this.
Lies, half-truths, errors, mischaracterisations, and more lies.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Remember, folks--anytime you investigate a claim made by APK, you'll likely uncover a multitude of lies, half-truths, mischaracterisations, personal attacks, threats, and more lies.
And misattributions, let's not forget those.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Reposting a lie does not make it true.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
APK MUST PUT TO DEATH by Jay Liittle ...
You can't get 7 words into a post without telling a lie, can you? That is NOT what it says. Here's what it actually says:
APK should be put to death
Author:
n/a
Send To:
United States Congress
Sponsored By:
The Readers of JayLittle.com
I could easily go to that site and create a petition under the username "carlxvigustaf" but this would NOT mean the petition was created by the King of Sweden.
It should also be pointed out that expressing a wish for someone would die is NOT the same thing as threatening to kill that person. It's a bit of a fine distinction, perhaps, but it is still not the same thing.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Another lie. Already exposed as such.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.