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Nokia Had a Production-Ready Web Tablet 13 Years Ago

Posted by Soulskill on from the beginning-of-the-end dept.

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."

40 of 272 comments (clear)

  1. Yeah, probably a VGA screen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    and resistive touchscreen, USB 1.0, running on AA batteries.

    In other words, not ready for prime time.

    1. Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen by cheesybagel · · Score: 2

      Remember the Nokia 770? That did not sell that much either and was another Nokia tablet. They never knew how to commercialize products that well.

    2. Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen by Spazmania · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That's the thing The capacitive multitouch screen makes tablets practical. Before that they were just toys. Nokia made the right call for the time.

      --
      Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
    3. Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      They never knew how to commercialize products that well.

      Speaking as an ex Nokian here; though one who escaped around 2004 when I realised things were had gone downhill and were going much worse:

      Nokia was excellent at commercializing many things. What made Nokia win over Ericsson and everyone else was logistics, advertising and sales; the fundamentals of commercialisation. The product handling was perfectly designed to deliver the best, most reliable (== lowest support cost) thing at the least price. Then the management went onto a "five phones every six months" cycle and paused any chance of making things that win. They; sorry; OPK specifically; believed that technology and quality was irrelevant. That the brand was all that mattered and that you could sell anything with the Nokia brand. They did wake up later and start to produce excellent things like the Noka N9, however most of the Nokia Mobile Phones people still don't understand why that was better than the windows phones (hint; try having 2000 contacts in a windows phone) and just believe in shiny shiny.

      It's not enough to commercialise. If it was, Lumia would work. You just can't easily sell crap. You have to have a good product that people serious users start to deeply love. An old, original, Nokia 6310 is still a better product than any phone on the market today. In some places the sales price for one of those is much much higher than the price of a new Lumia. If the people who made and marketed the 6310 had pushed the N9 and especially the N950 in the same way then the story would be completely different.

    4. Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Insightful

      In other words, not ready for prime time.

      Indeed. There were tablet computers in the 1990s and even 1980s. Tablets didn't become mainstream in the 2010s because someone just thought of it, but because acceptable hardware was finally available.

    5. Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen by ThatsDrDangerToYou · · Score: 5, Funny

      Moses even had tablets, but they were pretty slow I'm told.

    6. Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen by morgauxo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Why is capacitive touch so important? Multi-touch is cool but I use my Android phone all the time and for just about everything. The only multi-touch gesture I even know is pinch zoom/out. I go whole days without using that and if I didn't have it some sort of disappearing slider would suit me just fine.

      I miss the resistive touch screen on my Sharp Zaurus. No, I didn't HAVE to use the stylus. For the normal stuff I do with my capacitive touch screen now I usually just 'clicked' with my fingernail. But... if I wanted to draw a picture, write something (actual handwriting), or use tiny controls (such as desktop apps via VNC) I could do that with a stylus. Capacitive touch screens CANNOT DO THAT!!! they are way too inprecise.

      Ideally I would like to have both. My understanding is that some company has a patent on a touch screen which is basically just both a capacitive and a resistive sensor stacked. That way you can have precise single-touch sensing AND multitouch. I have yet to see any product though. It is just wonderful that we have a system where companies can patent good ideas without ever making them available to people who might want to buy them!

    7. Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen by jones_supa · · Score: 4, Informative

      Why is capacitive touch so important? Multi-touch is cool but I use my Android phone all the time and for just about everything.

      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.

    8. Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen by The+Grim+Reefer · · Score: 5, Funny

      Slow? They barely moved. And they were heavy!

      Yeah, but the batteries never ran out.

    9. Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen by jandrese · · Score: 5, Informative
      Growing up in the 90s and early 2000s, I saw Tablet Computer prototypes come up every couple of years. Sometimes they would even make it to market, where they hit with a resounding thud thanks to their horrible clunky OS choices, lack of applications, and hardware limitations. Apple tinkered with the iPad for years before finally releasing it, waiting until the infrastructure grew up to make the device practical. They actually worked on the iPad before the iPhone.

      Technologies that had to mature before the tablet computers became practical:
      • Wifi networking.
      • Capacitive Touchscreens -- Most early designs used a stylus, which sucks, and had poor resolution to boot
      • Low power but still acceptably fast processors -- A huge sticking point, lots of early tablets had extremely poor battery life on top of being slow
      • A touch enabled OS -- WinCE is terrible to use with a finger, and really pretty bad with a stylus. Symbian was never great. PalmOS was too narrowly focused on Palm pilots
      • Battery capacity -- Battery technology has come a long way in the past 15 years. Early attempts would use NiCad batteries, which just aren't good enough, especially with the relatively high energy consumption figures from the old chips.

      Apple didn't have a smash hit with the iPad because they were the first to the market. They won because they tinkered and waited until the technology was ready, then came out with a solid finished well integrated product instead of some halfassed "laptop without a keyboard running a cut down version of Windows".

      --

      I read the internet for the articles.
    10. Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen by RoccamOccam · · Score: 2

      The Surface Pro tablets (and others) feature high-resolution pressure-sensitive stylus capabilities. Great for drawing and taking notes. Of course, you get to keep the multi-touch capacitive features. I'm surprised this doesn't get more press, because it is a great feature.

    11. Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen by sjames · · Score: 4, Funny

      According to Mel Brooks, they were subject to catastrophic data loss.

  2. ob Henry Ford by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse"

    1. Re:ob Henry Ford by BasilBrush · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."
      â" Steve Jobs

      This one *is* genuine.

  3. In other words by 50000BTU_barbecue · · Score: 2

    don't be a Commodore.

    --
    Mostly random stuff.
  4. The sad part here... by DontBlameCanada · · Score: 2

    ... 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.

    1. Re:The sad part here... by Altus · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Honestly, looking at the design of that thing, I am not so sure it had a viable market. There were few wireless networks set up in 2000 it wasn't a given that every home had one. Cell data was expensive and slow. The device seems unwieldy and large and the controls don't look like they would be particularly easy to use. Also, what OS does it run, can it do anything but surf the web? Was the web on its own interesting enough in 2000 to make this a killer device? No streaming movies and TV shows, Spotify or any of those interesting services.

      Finally, what was the price going to be? Back then 500 would have been a tough sell and I would not be surprised if this device was more expensive than that.

      Timing really is everything. The tech needed to reach a certain level and honestly the web had to reach the point where having it in your hand and on the go was valuable to consumers. Sure you can't just ask people what they want but you also have to consider that a lot of things were different 13 years ago.

      --

      "In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson

  5. Not a market back then by butalearner · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Not a market back then by Anubis+IV · · Score: 3, Interesting

      While timing did play a part, I'd suggest it's not so much timing as it is execution that made the biggest difference, in this case.

      Android and iOS tablets operate in broadly the same ways as each other and are wildly successful. Windows 8 tablets, which work in much the same way as the Windows tablets that preceded them (i.e. trying to bring the feel of a desktop OS to a tablet form factor), are failing to gain any significant presence in the market, despite having the right timing and loads of marketing. To me, that's a strong indication that the thing holding back tablets prior to iOS and Android arriving was not that people weren't ready for them, but that the tablet concept simply wasn't executed properly.

      Same deal with smartphones. Smartphones were around since the '90s, but they only represented an incredibly small portion of the cell phone market. Fast forward a few years, and we get Android and iOS, which, when they first came out, had most of the same features as the smartphones that preceded them, yet they implemented and executed those in a drastically different way that made them much more compelling to users. Blackberry and Palm had the right timing, since they were there from the beginning. What they lacked was proper execution to bring it to the general population.

      You're right that there wasn't a market back then, but there wasn't a market because there wasn't a product done right yet. Ideas are cheap. Execution is what matters.

    2. Re:Not a market back then by BasilBrush · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I did not say their products sucked. But when you have end users preordering product by the millions before anyone had a chance to try it out what can you call those people but gullible?

      Pre-orders didn't start until 2 months after the iPad had been demonstrated by Jobs. 2 months in which all the tech press reviewed it. And it was hardly an unknown to everyone who's already experienced iOS on an iPhone.

      Compared with the lack of knowledge which most people have when they buy products, they were pretty well informed.

      There is a reason why people claimed Steve Jobs had a reality distortion field you know. The fact is the products are not that good right now to justify the demand even if they were at points.

      That's not a fact. That's your ill-informed opinion. Big difference.

      I call them early adopters. I call you an imbecile.

  6. "No mobile ecosystem" by poptix · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  7. Got to play with 1 of these or something similar.. by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 2

    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.
  8. Le Sigh.... by John+Bokma · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
  9. It was probably the right decision by linuxguy · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  10. UGLY! by neonv · · Score: 2

    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.

  11. Second Guessing 13-year old market research by ZahrGnosis · · Score: 2

    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.

  12. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 5, Funny

    "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!
  13. They were smart not to release it by MrEdofCourse · · Score: 2

    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.

  14. Re:Innovation by Serenissima · · Score: 4, Funny
    Because this is Slashdot. Anytime there's ANY post (positive or negative) about Apple, Microsoft, or any other large technology company, there will always be an inane, anti-"whichever company is being discussed" comment from the person who says, "You still use [product/software/operating system] from [company]?? The only true way to use a computer is by using the command line on [random Linux distro] running off of a Beowulf Cluster of Raspberry Pi's - Just like I have setup!!! If you use anything else, you're a loser!"

    And there's always that guy somewhere. It's uncanny.

    --
    Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. But light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
  15. Hardware has advanced in 13 years. by LurkerXXX · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  16. We had electric cars in 1906 as well. by tekrat · · Score: 4, Interesting

    But it didn't mean there was a booming market for them.

    --
    If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
  17. The real lesson by geekmux · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "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.

    1. Re:The real lesson by slew · · Score: 2

      Apple wasn't the pioneer, don't you remember the Altair and IMSAI?
      Windows wasn't the pioneer, don't you remember Kildall's Digital Research CPM/86 and IBM/Microsoft OS/2 collaboration?

      The real lesson? Let other do the pioneering market research for you. Then do it better and faster than they can...

      Historically, first mover advantage often isn't what it's hyped up to be (ask CompuServe, AltaVista, Yahoo, MySpace, and AOL/Netscape)...

  18. I never said that. by westlake · · Score: 2

    "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.

  19. Its all about the apps by slapout · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Its all about the apps by SuperKendall · · Score: 4, Interesting

      That is a big reason, but it also mattered that the device itself was not OSX shrunk to a touch-screen tablet (some people thought that's what it would be instead of using IOS). That was the mistake Microsoft made.

      But it's also related, Apple had the luxury of not just plopping desktop OSX on a tablet because they knew iOS developers could produce a good range of software out of the gate. Microsoft apparently never trusted in the development community enough to take that leap of faith.

      --
      "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  20. Re:Innovation by RyuuzakiTetsuya · · Score: 2

    If you're still using an Osborne I've got a lot of questions for you.

    --
    Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
  21. Re:Nokia destroyed tablet, M$ destroyed Nokia by slew · · Score: 2

    Nokia creates tablet.
    Nokia destroys tablet.
    M$ destroys Nokia.
    M$ creates a tablet.
    A tablet destroys M$.
    Linux inherits the earth?

  22. Re:Got to play with 1 of these or something simila by BitZtream · · Score: 2

    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
  23. Re:Got to play with 1 of these or something simila by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 2

    Gecko != Firefox

    BTW, I was using ChatZilla at around this same time.

    --
    Il n'y a pas de Planet B.