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."

Comments

Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[Anonymous Coward]

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

In other words, not ready for prime time.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[Spazmania]

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.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[ThatsDrDangerToYou]

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

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[jones_supa]

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.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[The Grim Reefer]

Slow? They barely moved. And they were heavy!

Yeah, but the batteries never ran out.

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[jandrese]

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".

Re:Yeah, probably a VGA screen

[sjames]

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

ob Henry Ford

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Not a market back then

[butalearner]

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.

"No mobile ecosystem"

[poptix]

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.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

[PolygamousRanchKid]

"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."

Re:Innovation

[Serenissima]

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.

We had electric cars in 1906 as well.

[tekrat]

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

The real lesson

[geekmux]

"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.

Re:Its all about the apps

[SuperKendall]

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.