Difficult beginnings with touchscreens

It introduced the new product in January 2008 under the name 5800XpressMusic and imagined that it would be a multimedia center for young people. The idea basically worked out, with people clamoring for this phone, but mainly because they trusted Nokia to produce something like this and also because it was significantly cheaper than the iPhone in most markets. In the US, where Nokia did not have good relationships with operators and the purchasing departments of large companies, this model did not even make a dent.

Typing on the Nokia 5800 using a touchscreen? It could be done with a fingernail or stylus, and Nokia believed that the virtual keyboard was clear and comfortable to use. Customers were less convinced.

The iPhone only began to be sold on European markets at the end of 2007, and it was not until mid-2008 that another twenty major markets were added, but in many regions it was still a limited-availability or very expensive phone, subsidized only in the US and some Western European countries. In the Czech Republic, for example, the price of an iPhone was close to CZK 20,000, while the Nokia 5800 was around CZK 10,000 and fell to CZK 5,000 in 2010.

Image: nokia-5800-xpressmusic Caption: The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic did not come without a stylus. Three million units were sold in six months, and it was one of the phones that was labeled an “iPhone killer” when it was launched.

The Nokia 5800 came on the market at a time when iPhone sales were still in their infancy. It had its weaknesses, but it offered an attractive price for European markets.

The problem with the Nokia 5800 was that touch control was significantly “hacked” for the phone; it was not a system-wide feature. For example, Java applications still required the use of hardware keys, as Java was not ready for touch control. Similarly, the phone’s interface merely substituted non-existent hardware keys with their software representation, and the phone was far from the intuitiveness and comfort of the iPhone. The phone came with a stylus. But it sold well, because it was a Nokia phone and no one expected it to be high-end.

The company wanted to enter the high-end class with an innovative version of the Nokia N95 called the N97. Once again, it has a hacked touch control and a pressure touch screen with all the disadvantages of this design, but at least it is a “slider” model with a full QWERTY keyboard, which, among other things, causes confusion among communicator users. Is it a communicator or not when it has a full keyboard that slides out from under the display when pressed?

The phone was announced in December 2008, and because the company wanted to reach the American market, where it was practically invisible, it began selling it in the US in June 2009 and then sent it to European markets at the end of June. And because it learned from the iPhone case, it decided to create a lot of hype around the phone and send it out in large numbers to journalists, analysts, and even bloggers. Nokia is making sure that everyone can see how much it is betting on this phone.

The Nokia N97 looks nice in pictures, but in reality it was a poorly tuned phone. It had little main memory, applications ran slowly, the display was inaccurate, and the social features were more of a nuisance. It was released in four versions, including a “mini” version.

However, it bet on the wrong horse. The phone has little free memory after booting up, so switching between tasks takes time and the system response is slow. The phone’s reception is so poor that Nokia stopped shipping it for a while in the summer until it managed to fix the worst problems and resume deliveries. Although the phone has poor response, it is still selling quite well. But only quite well.

Two years later, Nokia admits that the N97 was the most unsuccessful model in its history and that it backfired on the company: geeks and investors lose faith in the company’s ability to launch an interesting smartphone.

Until the launch of the N8 in November 2010, the company had not introduced a resistive touchscreen—three years after Apple began selling one. Similarly, until the launch of MeeGo on the Nokia N9 in June 2011, the company was unable to offer an environment fully adapted to touch control. And that was something that could not be overlooked.

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Difficult beginnings with touchscreens

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