Category: mobile phone

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The Nokia Design Archive

The Nokia Design Archive is a digital portal covering over 20 years of Nokia’s digital design history that has been pulled together and launched in January 2025 by Aalto University in Finland.

There is so much stuff there to explore such as sketches, photographs and videos, both publicly seen and behind the scenes work on the many, many devices that Nokia produced (and many that never saw the light of day):

https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi

Screenshot of the interface of the Nokia Design Archive

I’ve written a few posts mentioning Nokia over the years on this site and I owned and enjoyed using quite a few of their mobile devices in the early 2000’s. In 2003, a few years before the iPhone disrupted many of the incumbent mobile device companies, Nokia stood out as being a company willing to try many different formats and ideas.

So much of what Nokia did was ahead of its time, but unfortunately also was ahead of the widespread, cheap mobile data access that we now take for granted. There is a ton of stuff in the archive to look through, but it’s a fantastic resource if you want to find out more about the design processes and thinking that was going at Nokia.

N-Gage

I wrote an article “Dis-N-Gaged” back in 2010(!) where I looked at the rise and fall of the N-Gage “mobile game deck”1, I loved the N-Gage device and still have mine and its original box along with Tony Hawk Pro Skater and Tomb Raider games. Mobile connectivity just wasn’t widespread and cheap enough to make some of the multi-layer or location-aware goals for this device a compelling reality.

This device was really impractical as a phone, but I loved it. It’s now proudly one of my favourite amongst the 12 “Handheld Heroes“2 illustrations I made a few years ago:

N95, N80 and Symbian OS

Despite the demise of the N-Gage I still used Nokia phones for a few years before eventually getting an iPhone, the Nokia N80 and the Nokia N95 being a couple of my favourite devices.

The Symbian operating system these phones used was kind of like the linux of mobile phones, there was a lot of software available for them3 and Nokia had some interesting experimental software such as running the Apache webserver directly on your phone so you could make your phone serve up websites – why? I’m not really sure, but I loved that there was a lot of experimentation going on within Nokia’s world. It also worked well with Apple computers, you could sync calendars and contacts to it and easily copy of photos from the device to your Mac.

I think Blackberry often gets credited as being the defining mobile device before the iPhone came along, but I think that Nokia deserves much more credit for the massive impact and breaking of ground for mobile computing devices that it did in the early 2000s.

Nokia Push4 is a great example of their experimentation, this involved putting sensors on skateboards and snowboards to track the telemetry such as rotations, flips, height, speed etc. You could share your location, movements, tricks etc and “compete” with other people elsewhere in the world.

  1. “Mobile game deck” is how Nokia referred to the N-Gage devices rather than a mobile phone. ↩︎
  2. I’ve made a few t-shirts and also an iMessage sticker pack for iOS devices ↩︎
  3. Most games on mobile devices at that time were fairly expensive JAVA apps, limited by the lack of affordable mobile data. Also, remember WAP? I haven’t thought about that for a while! ↩︎
  4. I wrote more about Nokia Push in this post: Nokia N-Gage – another “Handheld Hero”. ↩︎
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Dis-N-Gaged

Almost exactly seven years ago, before the launch of Apple’s iPhone and the ubiquity of the App Store, Nokia launched the N-Gage. The N-Gage was a combination mobile phone and gaming device that was intended to take on Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance.

The N-Gage (mk1 pictured below) was pretty much the first gaming phone and should really be considered a failed yet bold attempt to kick-start what is now a huge multi-billion dollar business globally. The N-Gage didn’t get the kind of success Nokia really hoped for despite the many millions invested in marketing. I actually liked this phone and did happily use it as both a phone and gaming device, although admittedly the main game I played was Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater! Combining a gadget with skateboarding is a sure way to catch my eye.

Sidetalkin’

The most obvious quirk of the phone’s design was that you had to hold the thin edge of it to your head to make calls, so it looked pretty comical! (Check out http://sidetalking.com/ !) Nokia subsequently brought out the ‘N-Gage QD’ which removed the side-talking feature and added a backlight and made it a bit smaller, as well as putting the game card slot on the outside instead of inside behind the battery!

The demise of the N-Gage started back in 2005 when the N-Gage as a hardware device ceased production leaving only N-Gage as a software component on various Nokia devices. However, September last year marked the final nail in the coffin (N-Gage 2003-2009: An Obituary) of the N-Gage when it was finished off completely.

As quirky as it looked, I think the N-Gage was an interesting concept which was ahead of its time – location-based multi-player networked gaming via bluetooth or over the internet via mobile-phone networks? Back in 2003? Who would ever be able to afford the data fees that the carriers would have charged you back then?!! Nokia spent a lot of money trying to make it a success, but the timing just wasn’t right for a device with those capabilities.

Nokia are really up against the wall these days with Apple’s iOS platform and the Android platform pushing the bar in both hardware and software capabilities. Although I’m a hardcore iPhone user I used to be a very happy Nokia user, the Symbian S60 OS integrated pretty well with my Mac. Once I got an iPhone of course that all ended, but I’ve still enjoyed using my various Nokia handsets such as the N80 and N95.

Pushin’ the envelope

Nokia do seem to be trying to find their feet in this changing mobile device landscape, certainly the Nokia N8 device has some great features, especially the 12MP camera which seems to produce some pretty spectacular photography.

Innovation like Nokia’s Push project also seems to demonstrate some of the same pioneering spirit behind the N-Gage, breaking new ground by exploring the use of mobile devices as part of our physical activities – of particular interest to me are the skateboarding and snowboarding prototypes (as I said earlier, a sure way to get me interested is to combine gadgets with skateboarding!).

I’m looking forward to seeing what comes out of these initiatives (I’d like to get my hands on either the skate or snow prototypes to play around with them!). For now I’ll just end with saying farewell to the Nokia N-Gage!