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 Heroes2 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”. ↩︎

Nokia N-Gage – another “Handheld Hero”

I posted an image of this on my Dribble account the other day along with a similar bit of writing, but I thought I’d should really add a blog post about it here too as it’s one of my favourite devices, plus I’m trying to write a bit more frequently on my blog again.

The Nokia N-Gage is one of what I call the “Handheld Heroes”, these are 12 handheld devices that I consider to be icons of their time and are symbolic of a particular point of technological change in the last 30 – 40 years (ok, the pencil is quite a bit older than that ?). The N-Gage was released around 2003, so over 20 years old at the time of writing this(!).

The N-Gage was an amazing device and in many ways was ahead of its time. Long before Pokemon Go was a thing Nokia explored the idea of location-based / location-aware games, but mobile connectivity was very limited, very slow and very expensive at that time. I recall thinking about how amazing it would be to be able to walk around with a device and have a constant connection to the internet, but it was a long way off from the ubiquity of 4G / 5G today. So whilst there were a few location based games for the N-Gage this lack of affordable mobile data meant it had limited appeal.

Nokia Push was one of the coolest initiatives that they tried, basically there were two aspects, one for skateboarding and one for snowboarding. Both involved using sensors attached to the skateboard or snowboard and then tracking the telemetry such as rotations, flips, height, speed etc. For skateboarding the intention was that you could compete with someone in a different location in the world, both skaters could see from their phones which tricks the other had done:

Nokia Push skateboarding promo video

For snowboarding the intention was to track telemetry such as height, speed, rotations, impact etc:

Nokia Push snowboarding promo video

So the N-Gage wasn’t successful in location based gaming but it definitely had some of the seeds of what was yet to come, Nokia Push explored that even further. Yep, the N-Gage was a weird device to make calls on (especially the first version, see “Sidetalking!“), but talking was not what was really intended for, and I loved mine. What’s not to love about a phone that can play Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater?

How to make your Nokia N95 more like an iPhone

My recent switch to an iPhone after using a Nokia N95 for the last year and a half has been great, there’s a load of features on the iPhone that just make a load of sense.

I’d always been keen to try out the various apps available from the Nokia Labs website on my N95 so I thought I’d just do a quick post with links to apps that can make your N95 just a little bit more like an iPhone! These will also work on many other S60 Symbian OS Nokia phones and they are also free downloads from the Nokia Labs website!

Conversation

SMS management on the iPhone is great as it gives you a view that’s similar to that found in an instant messaging app like iChat / MSN etc. It’s great as it allows you to see the messages in the form of a conversation. The Conversation app from Nokia allows to you something pretty similar.

http://betalabs.nokia.com/betas/view/conversation

Contacts on Ovi

This app mainly provides an Instant Messenger experience but also adds some cool features like status updates and location updates. If you’ve been envious of the Brightkite app for iPhone then this is something similar.

http://betalabs.nokia.com/betas/view/contacts-ovi

Friend View

If you need a bit of a Twitter fix (ok, I know that you can get actual Twitter apps for Symbian!) or want more of a Brightkite experience then Friend View offers location and micro-blogging service.

http://betalabs.nokia.com/betas/view/nokia-friend-view

Nokia Audiobooks

The iPhone is, obviously, a great music player that will also play audiobooks with various controls. The N95 in comparison is an ok music player but isn’t up to playing audiobooks. However, Nokia Audiobooks fills that gap by allowing playback of highly efficient audiobooks by using tools like bookmarking and browsing chapters.

http://betalabs.nokia.com/betas/view/nokia-audiobooks

Set your camera to low quality and don’t record video

Ok, this last one is a joke. It’s true that in comparison to the N95 the iPhone camera is not great, it’s poor in low light and doesn’t support video recording at all. So if you want an authentic iPhone experience on your N95 change your picture settings on the N95 to their lowest and you’ll get something similar to the iPhone! (although probably still better!).