Design Diversity of Nokia Mobile Phones

For many of the people around the world, Nokia was their first mobile phone. Still, elder people in the developing countries are using Nokia phones. That was the success of Nokia. As a company, Nokia has a long history. Originally Nokia was started as a pulp mill in 1865 by a Finnish mining engineer and business man called Fredrik Idestam. In 1871 Idestam started the second pulp mill with his friend Leo Mechelin and named the company as Nokia. 

(Evolution of Nokia phones)

From then, Nokia has involved in many businesses including rubber, cables, networking, radio, military equipment, telephone exchanges, robotics, televisions and computers before stepping into mobile phone business. They bought a mobile phone company called Mobira. Through Mobira, Nokia produced Mobira Senator, a car phone in 1982. It was the first mobile phone of Nokia. In 1987, they released one of the earlier compact phones called Mobira Cityman 900. 

What made Nokia cell phones success are their quality and durability. Even their plastic phones were sturdy. Their batteries were last long. Anyhow there were no heavy internet usage and graphic intense games on mobile phones in the 1990s. Another amazing thing about Nokia mobile phones was their designs.  

From 1985 onwards, they have maintained one standard form of phone for mainstream market. That is, a rectangle shaped phone with a display screen and keyboard (1100). Still, they are keeping that form for basic or feature phones. Apart from those standard phones, they produced phones with variety of designs and creativity. Those trendy phones make the Nokia’s mobile phone history unique. 

Some of those phones were futuristic (9110i Communicator), stylish clamshells (8887, 2650), weird (7600), fashionable at that time (3650, 6260, N92) and weirdly fashionable (7280, 6810). Look, how diverse the Nokia mobile phone designs were. You had lot of choices in those days. Nowadays, we are all using phones with same form factor. 

In Nokia-times, you can choose from variety of phones according to your taste. Not all people liked those weird Nokia phones. But, youngsters and hipsters might have liked those phones. You can express yourself uniquely with such a diversity in designs. 

At the same time of mobile phone history, Motorola released thinnest Razr clamshell phone. It was fashionable and was phenomenal success. Sony Ericsson also released successful clamshellphones at that time. Not only Nokia, mobile phone companies during that time, released different style of phones. For instance, Sony Ericsson’s p910 model came with stylus. It looked beautiful, robust, stylish and futuristic. It was like a phone for geeks and James Bond. 

(Motorola Razr and Sony Ericsson P910. Photo Courtesy: Wikipedia Razr & P910)

Apple changed the mobile phone history with their iPhone. They took an ergonomic and highly usable design for iPhone. With the iPhone design, you can just start using the phone. You don’t need to open the shell, slide the keyboard up or down. It is perfect for immediate use. After the iPhone introduction, every company started to use the same design for their phones. So, we don’t have variety of phone designs like once we had with Nokia and other mobile companies. Even after the iPhone introduction, Nokia was releasing unique phones like N95 and N71. Nokia N95 was like Nokia’s iPhone. It had great camera, internet capabilities and mobile office.

(Nokia's iconic N95 smartphone. Photo Courtesy: Wikipedia)

The main reason for Nokia’s failure in the iPhone era was their sluggish Symbian OS. I have used Nokia phones till N8 before buying an iPhone. Touch performance and Symbian OS were too slow in N8 while iPhone’s performance was like Usain Bolt. Lot of us feel sorry for the Nokia’s failure. They could have survived, if they had adapted Android OS earlier. 

Most of us using iPhones and MacBooks or similar gadgets for years feel bored with them. Because these gadgets have same design for several years. They are just reducing the thickness of these gadgets. That’s why design diversity of Nokia is always attractive. I hope, we will have different forms of mobile phones soon.