Nokia Design Archive
32 comments
·January 16, 2025__jonas
There is some really interesting media in there, I'm not a huge fan of how it's surfaced with this network visualization tbh - the small viewport version you get on mobile or when shrinking the window down is actually nicer imo, you can just flip through the individual entries
ianbooker
https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_ebb0df1b-4db3-4b3c-ad...
Is this a Nokia Watch or rather a Nokia Cuff?
bni
What a mess of a webpage. Probably there is interesting content there but the presentation made me close it down immediatley.
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GrumpyNl
The interface is a mess, but the data is phenomenal.
moondowner
No mention of my fav Nokia of all time, the N9; also no mention of MeeGo and Maemo
usagisushi
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
[0]: https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_926740c7-5165-439a-a0...
pavlov
I had the N770, the N800 and also the N900.
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.
agawish
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.
simultsop
I wonder if the software empowering this data is an open source project?
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ddxxdd
I just want to know how it was made. It looks like the entire presentation is encapsulated inside of a "canvas" tag.
rob74
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...
troupo
It's an internal Nokia design archive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42723034 So there are a lot of internal designs and prototypes
neuroelectron
"low power" has zero hits. I guess low power is implied.
j16sdiz
This archive more about the aesthetics design, not technical stuffs.
nabla9
Can anyone find the Nokia touch screen prototype that came 7 years before iPhone around 2000 but was rejected by management.
pavlov
This is probably the one you mean, the oval-shaped "3G concept" touchscreen device from 1999-2000:
https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/index.html?node=C0001
You can hover over the "related entries" links to view the images.
nabla9
That's not it. Those had roll wheels or something and no touch screens.
I have seen picture of the prototype somewhere. It was square blue prototype with big screen with shape like iPhone. It might not be in the design archive at all because it was R&D prototype.
pavlov
This archive is all about the R&D prototypes. Unfortunately the website makes it impossible to find anything.
Cloudef
Can't find it from this archive, but the concept appears on this PDF
https://www.aalto.fi/sites/default/files/2020-11/Haikio2.pdf
"Pocket office"
"Phone, computer, television, video, all are becoming one"
throwaway03562
Found a sketch here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Nokia/comments/vf8k58/nokia_history...
Cumpiler69
Guys, what are we doing here?
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.
doikor
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.
Cumpiler69
>I much prefer this to losing this information/history fully.
Edit: Fair enough but I Still maintain my option on the site's poor design.
doikor
These are not pulled from some random website. These are actual internal archives donated from Nokia (well Microsoft Mobile Oy these days)
https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/about.html
> The Nokia Design Archive is a graphic and interactive portal designed by researchers from Aalto University in Finland. It currently hosts over 700 entries, curated from thousands of items donated by Microsoft Mobile Oy and representing over 20 years of Nokia’s design history — both seen and unseen. You can freely explore the archive, learn about designers’ experiences working in Nokia and discover interesting topics surrounding design and mobile technologies.
You can look at the uncurated collection at aalto university repo https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8... (not sure if all of the materials digitized/online though)
troupo
How exactly would wayback machine allow you to have a collection of related items and their connection to each other?
How do you go from e.g. Vision 99 (if you manage to find it in Wayback machine) to all related entires? https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/?node=C0027
nabla9
Here: https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_d5d11763-74a5-40a7-a...
This page is just front end to Aalto repository.
Cumpiler69
Thanks
vincnetas
Here you go the 90's style web page with folder structure :
https://repo.aalto.fi/index.php?name=SO_b66a9391-dcf8-4399-8...
emsixteen
I feel genuinely stupid trying to use a website like this.
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:
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.