Too many buttons

Nokia is preparing its own worthy response to the iPhone. The Nokia N81 is the best the company can offer the market. The essence of Nokia. Introduced in August 2007, it is a phone packed with features, but significantly cheaper than the N95. Nokia is convinced that the problem with the N95 was its price, and at this point, it cannot tell from the sales results that price was not the main issue.

Image: nokia-n81

Caption: The Nokia N81 is still non-touchscreen and requires 16 special buttons to operate. Not counting the phone’s keypad, of course.

The Nokia N81 is a typical Symbian Nokia with a slide-out design, and it’s a phone that squeezes 16 keys into the small space below the keyboard, where the iPhone manages with just one. The display is not touch-sensitive, and why should it be? The new phone is supposed to outshine its competitor, the iPhone, with its multimedia features and support for the N-Gage gaming platform, which the company decided to distill from its originally separate branch of gaming console phones into its smarter phones. As it later turned out, this was unsuccessful, and later the entire N-Gage concept was partially written off and partially integrated into Symbian.

Although the Nokia N81 was not a commercial failure, it was mainly the company’s functioning sales network and the conservative approach of many users in key markets that kept the company afloat against the iPhone. After all, the iPhone only began to be sold in Europe in the fall of 2007, with China and Asia only being considered, so things were not so heated yet.

Nokia realized the problem with the design of touchscreen phones when it decided to develop a phone that could compete with the iPhone. For the reason mentioned above, it couldn’t use resistive touchscreens, so it had to resort to pressure-sensitive ones, which hadn’t been very successful even in phones with WM6.

The context of this story

Too many buttons

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