Rise and fall down of Nokia,Case study

 History of Nokia

Nokia 5510:Source-Wikipedia

 Welcome to another video of 2kB of Fun. Today I'm going to have a look... at the short history of the Lumia phones... and the related operating system Windows Phone. First models were made by Nokia, and Nokia was bought by Microsoft, and the last models were brought out... by Microsoft themselves. Today I'm going to unbox all the key models... 

I've in front of me. I give them a short story, There will be 2 video's later on, one will discuss what use do they have today... and can they be used? And I will make another video of the ... remarkable imaging capabilities of the... photography oriented models, the 1020 and the 950XL, which are still very capable today. The story starts in 2011 with this phone, the Nokia N9. It's not a Windows phone yet,  and it is one of the most beautiful phones ever made, maybe THE most beautiful phone ever made. It's very smooth in the hand, and this phone set a couple of design standards... that are still favoured today. As you can see it has smooth edges of the display, going into the round corners of the phone. There are no physical buttons... on the screen side of the phone. Everything is done with gestures, how 2019 is that for a 2011 phone?

 But there was a big problem! Back in 2011, Nokia was the biggest... phone maker in the world! They had over 400 million (devices) in sales, the next one was Samsung, with roughly 100 million less, and the third one was Apple. Nokia was already loosing 8%... annual volume in phone sales in 2011, and they had to turn ship. The thing was, Nokia was making... their own operating system: it was called "Meego". But halfway 2011, the CEO of Nokia, Stephen Elop, send a message to its employees, saying he was about to abandon ship. He didn't want to continue the Meego story. We will have a look at Meego in a bit, and you will see it is very, very interesting in... how it set the bar for a lot of... operating system / GUI elements... that we still use today. They thought: "We need a bigger partner... to conquer Apple with their iOS, and Samsung with their Android phones." So they went to Microsoft. And what they actually did: They turned this phone into a Windows Phone. And that was the Lumia 800. The Lumia 800 is very similar, it's not the same. It's not like they just changed the software. There are a couple of design tweaks to it. One is Microsoft wanted their phones to have... an actual camera button. Another difference is that the screen... got a little bit smaller to... give place to three navigation buttons. A back button, a home button and a search button. Meego and Windows Phone side by side. This one looks a bit like iOS. The Lumia has the typical... Windows Phone Metro layout, with the live tiles. The tiles can be simple icons, but they can also give more information, so here you see one of your pictures, you can see the appointments in your agenda, and you get the notifications in the live tiles,

 you can see the pictures of the people... you have in your contact book, even posts from Facebook... can be included in the tiles. This is all very static. On the Meego system you have a... special notification screen. If you slide to the left... and if you slide to the right, you see all the open applications. On Windows Phone you have to... hold the back button, and you see all the open applications. On Windows Phone you can go to the right... and see all the other applications, that are not included on the home screen. So the phones do look similar, but the operating system... make them work very different. I also have a mint cyan Lumia 800. Let's have a look in the box. The Lumia 800 has a rather small screen. It's a little bit larger than the one on the iPhone. But it looks like the whole mobile phone is screen. They kind of made a seamless design. And it feels very, very nice in the hand. If you turn it around... the edges are very soft, and you can do this flip, it's impossible with the iPhone. It's very, very smooth. And although the Lumia 800 was a very nice phone, back in 2011 this is the phone to beat. The iPhone 4s. Ok, here we have the three phones... from 2011 side by side. 

And as you can see,And on the inside there is still... the original protective plastic.the N9 and the Lumia 800, have a much more contemporary look than the iPhone 4s, which looks kind of dated by todays standard. Why is that? I think because... what is actually very important right now in 2019, is the display-to-body ratio. And as you see, these phones seem to have a very large display, even though the actual display isn't that big. But it's kind off an optical illusion. And the screen is going very smooth... into the edges, which is also... a design choice that is made very often today. Nokia was unable to meet the standards... of Apple back in 2011. So they had to improve. And they did that quite fast, because the next year, things were getting very different. After the Lumia 800, Nokia came with a couple of uninspiring models, like the Lumia 610, the Lumia 710, and even the Lumia 900, which sounds a bit like a new flagship, wasn't that interesting. And as we experienced later on, all these models got stuck at Windows 7.5. So there were no more updates. 

If you look at the original Lumia 800, it got a new update to Windows Phone 7.8, and that was kind of introducing a lot of... Windows 8 features to the original Lumia. One year after the Lumia 800, things get really interesting. Apple has just released its iPhone 5, and it was again setting the standard. But this time, Nokia was very well prepared. In November 2012, Nokia came with... two new models, and one, the 920,   was the very interesting new flagship. This time with the Lumia 920, Nokia had done everything right. It was a true new flagship! The phone is really, really large, compared to the iPhone 5 The screen is 4,5 inch, where the iPhone 5 had a 4 inch screen. The resolution was higher: it was 768 by 1280 compared... to the 640 by 1136 on the iPhone. Even the dot pitch was a little higher. It had double the memory, 32 GB instead of 16. With the flagship device came... a new flagship camera. And Nokia introduced the PureView camera, to the Windows Phone mobiles. It was the first camera phone, with optical image stabilisation. It had a 8 megapixel camera. And it was a wide angle camera: 28mm equivalent. And if you compared it to the Apple 5 camera, it had a wider angle, it had a larger aperture, it included optical image stabilisation, which Apple did not have. So the camera was really good on this one. They also came with the Lumia 820, it was a little bit cheaper. Although it is very good as well, the 820 had the typical removable back cover. So where the 920 has a SIM-tray, that you have to pull out with a little tool, the 820 actually has a removable back cover. So if you didn't like the yellow after a while, you could swap it with one of... the other colours available. You can swap the battery, you could insert a SD card, it came out with a little bit less memory, because of that expendability. And it had an OLED display, like the 800 had before. The Lumia 920 and the Lumia 820 side by side. The Lumia 920 was clearly aimed... at the higher end of the market. Nokia needed something for... people on a budget as well. And they came with the Lumia 520. This very, very tiny phone... was the entry into the Windows Phone... operation system for a lot of people. It's one of the best selling Windows phones ever. It was having everything you wanted... from a Windows Phone. It was having a Carl Zeiss lens, it was easy to maintain: you could pop off the back, you could replace the battery, and it was very cheap: It was around 100€, it was a really, really nice price... to get into Windows Phone. Later in 2013, things get really interesting... in the Windows mobile department. The flagship 920 gets its successor, and that is in my opinion... the most beautiful phone ever made. It's on this T-shirt. Let's have a look at the Lumia 1020! This is a small introduction. It's a nice gimmick: you could buy it with the Lumia 1020, and it looks like a grip for a camera. And that is what it is! Here it is, the Lumia 1020! I've got all three, I don't know why... but I wanted to have all colours. So let's have a look inside. OK, what is the best looking phone ever made? In my opinion it is this one, the Lumia 1020. I've them in all three colours you could get them in. In fluor yellow, in stylish black, or in very bright white. Why is this so gorgeous? The camera on the phone is enormous. It has 41 megapixels. It's a backlit sensor, so that means it captures even more photons, then the chips that we used before. It has optical image stabilisation. The camera is just fantastic.

 And the phone looks gorgeous as well. In a way the design is very similar, to the first Lumia 800. It has the same poly-carbonate housing, It has the soft edges that... go into a slightly curved edge of the screen. It has the buttons on the side, with the dedicated camera button, so you can snap a picture very fast. And on the back there is the gorgeous lens. And it also has a xenon flash. And on the front side, there is this gorgeous looking OLED display. Bright colours, clear blacks, And it has always-on display, so you could see the time when it was turned off. It would move across the screen, to prevent burn-in. And everything was well done.  This phone could film at 1080p, but you could zoom-in, to use the... full potential of the 41 megapixels. So that means this one can zoom-in... 4 times, and deliver 1:1 pixel readout. That means it has a 100mm equivalent... of a tele-lens for filming. And it really, really works well. And because this phone is capable of... zooming in so far,  and being relative stable at filming, it's still used today for filming at concerts. The sound recording is also very good. Nokia implemented microphones, that were able to capture up to 120 dB, and without distortion, and that is really, really awesome. And to give you an idea, about how this works: You can slide in your 1020, and with this attached, it's really a nice camera-phone. And inside the grip there's a battery... to extend the use and get... another half day out of your 1020. Here we have a look at the camera-grip... for the Lumia 1020. The lights indicate how much... power is in the battery. Here is the shutter button. Here we have the box of the camera grip... for the Lumia 1020. This is the black grip. As you can see, the grip is also available... in all three colours. One of the great features of the Nokia Lumia line, are their cameras. And with the great cameras, also comes great camera software. Here we see the program Lumia Camera. It was not pre-installed on every phone, but the later models had. And it allows you to shoot everything... in manual mode. You can simply drag the circle to the left, and you can adjust everything you need. You can set the focus manually, you can set the ISO, you can set the shutter speed, you can over- and under-expose. Everything very nice. And with the pictures, what is nice here is, this is the famous setting. You get a 5 megapixel JPEG, which is very nice processed inside the camera, but you also get a 38 megapixel RAW file. The size of this depends on the aspect ratio. So if I choose 16:9, we will see... the RAW file will be 34 megapixels. In video-mode, there is a little but less to set. You can only set the white-balance, and you can over- or under-expose. But you can also set a couple of frame-rates: you have 1080p in 30, 25 and 24 frames-per-second. so you can make real cinematic movies. What's also very nice in video-mode, is you can record a video, and you can zoom in while recording. The zooming-in is not the most fluent, but it will read out full 1080p every time. As we could see the screen was still a little bit... on the small size on the 1020, so Nokia came up with something epic, later in 2013. And this is... what we could say is "The Hulk" of phones. It is a big, bad-ass phone! Even today if you put it next to a 11ProXL, or a P30 Pro, this will definitely grab all the attention. It's time to meet the Lumia 1520. It's the biggest Lumia phone ever made. And it's still one of the biggest phones ever made. And this is why I can say it's "The Hulk". It's so green, and so big, yeah, there's no better name for it I think. This phone came a couple of months after this one. This phone had an OLED screen, it was still limiting the size of the phone. So Nokia had to turn to IPS again, to make this phone possible. It doesn't have the enormous camera this one has, but it's still very good: it's a 20 megapixel camera, It has all the PureView capabilities, and this is actually the first phone Nokia made, that was capable of recording 4K video, and it is capable of doing 1440p video,Because it has a resolution over... I've never seen another phone capable of doing that.7000 pixels horizontally, Nokia allowed you to zoom-in 4 times,And it allows all the frame rates: 24, 25 and 30 frames per second.without loosing any quality. And that is really really great.It's a gorgeous display, 1080p, 6 inch across, And you can use this display, to watch videos in a very, very large size. Actually, there is no phone right now, That is capable of showing 16:9 videos, with this size at the moment. With this Giant Hulk,  I come to the end of the first part of this video... about the Nokia Lumias, and the Windows Phone ecosystem. Right now I'm finishing the second part... of this video, if you hit the subscribe button, and the bell-button, you will get an instant notification, when the second part is ready. Thank you very much for watching, to this first half, and hope to see you again soon!