I found this series of videos looking at where Nokia’s business is at today quite interesting. I was a big fan of Nokia’s phones prior to smartphones being a thing, (see “Nokia” related posts elsewhere in this site), the Nokia N95 and the NGage being two of my favourite devices.
One thing that didn’t get covered in the videos was that Nokia was actually really experimental from a software perspective, their Symbian OS was a pretty good platform prior to the smartphone era and Nokia actually did a lot of experiments.
I guess it didn’t help in the smartphone transition, but that experimentation, along with Symbian OS, offered quite a lot to would-be developers and also to people like me who wanted to test out what could be done with a mobile device and an internet connection.
I remember installing the Apache webserver on my N95 and running a tiny webserver on my phone, that was just one of the software related experiments that I recall.
It’s interesting to see Nokia still doing well as a company, largely in the network sphere, although, inevitably it seems, with AI being part of that technology stack.