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by Bluestein·5y ago·view on hn ↗
Somebody should make a documentary about the whole thing: "The World That Could Have Been", or some such ...

I'd watch it.

(Given the pivotal importance of mobile in our world, the title would not be an understatement).

There's - also - something to be said about giving people an idea of the "right" thing to yearn for - lust for an endless sea of possibilities, not a drumbeat - as de Saint-Exupéry would put it.-

2 comments
It was a very strange move. Initially, Nokia had some interest in promoting these devices. The N770 was released in 2005, and the N800 came in 2007, just before the iPhone.

I was a student in Scandinavia and my CS department got gifted a few hundred N800 so that students could hack and develop applications. We coded some cool mesh networking tools, and a text chat on top. It felt so futuristic.

In parallel, I brought an iPhone 1 from the US and it never felt like a superior device. I recall sitting in a SAS plane in Spring 2007, whose departure was delayed for 1 hour due to technical reasons, and hostesses came to my seat as they were blown away by that little device I was watching some videos on. I also showed them my iPhone, and they were not nearly as impressed.

Then, suddenly, before the N9 release they totally dropped the ball. Still, that device won some accolades in the press.

Stephan Elop would be the ultimate villain :-)