Nokia’s 14 Years of Mobile-Phone Supremacy Ended in an Afternoon

In 2005, Nokia sold its billionth mobile phone, a budget-friendly device that went to a customer in Nigeria. By then, the company, based in Espoo, Finland, was making one of every three cellphones globally. But just nine years later, the mobile-device maker offloaded its entire handset division to Microsoft for pennies on the dollar, compared to what it had been worth at its peak. Nokia had risen from obscurity in the 1990s to become a worldwide cultural phenomenon by the turn of the millennium, its signature devices featured in TV shows and movies, announcing their presence with instantly recognizable Nokia ringtones. As Nokia was becoming comfortable in the spotlight, the smartphone era arrived. And what came next was swift and brutal. But, as revealed in Nokia internal documents recently made public and interviews with key Nokia engineers from that era, the company saw it coming. Within 24 hours of Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s iPhone unveiling in 2007, Nokia was already weighing its options. They’d immediately recognized the threat. However, outrunning it was another matter. What follows is Nokia’s story over 14 years, from 1998 to 2012, as the world’s top cellphone maker—how its devices defined their time, how the tech reshaped what phones could be and do, and how the company’s good fortunes in the handset business came to an end. Nokia Was Once Unbeatable The centerpiece Nokia devices, the ones that people probably think of when they see the words “Nokia phone,” were the 3210 and its cousin, the 3310. TechRadar has called the 3310 “the greatest phone of all time.” Nokia’s 3210 phone, released in 1999, was an inexpensive device aimed at younger users. Colin McPherson/Alamy Released in 1999 and 2000, respectively, the two devices sold more than 280 million units worldwide. Their most innovative hardware feature was the internal antenna—the first mass-market phone without even a stub or retractable aerial. “Consumers had the perception that it could not work well without an external antenna,” said Peter Røpke, a former Nokia senior vice president, in a 2016 interview with Slate. The phones shipped with games, including the legendary Snake, one of the most popular pre-smartphone mobile games—in which a pixelated serpent eats and grows with every morsel consumed. Nokia introduced no small portion of the world to texting. At the time of the 3210 and 3310, the prevailing texting standard was SMS (short message service), which allowed up to 160 characters per message. Nokia appended its own Nokia smart-messaging service to SMS, which allowed the sending of small bitmapped images across an otherwise text-only system. A rich-text messaging system that allowed visual images, audio, and video followed in 2002, leading to a multimedia messaging service (MMS) standard that remains in place today. Nokia also enabled users to easily create and share ringtones on their devices. By 2000, Nokia’s custom-ringtone Composer app had popularized a new, short-form musical medium that the ringtone industry, at its peak, would transform into a billion-dollar marketplace in the United States. Nokia introduced its 1100 phone in 2003 and ultimately sold half a billion units, making it the most popular cellphone in history. Paul Chesne/Donaldson Collection/Getty Images A few years later, Nokia reimagined its mobile handsets, releasing the 1100 in 2003. The 1100 sold a half a billion units, more than any cellphone in history. It remains one of the best-selling consumer products ever. Much of the 1100’s success was due to its price tag—in the neighborhood of US $100, making it at the time Nokia’s most affordable device. Also contributing to the 1100’s popularity were features designed for longevity and tough environments, including dust resistance, nonslip sides for better handling in rainy conditions, and a 400-hour standby battery life. The 1100 introduced a flashlight as well, which the user turned on and off by holding down the “C” key. Where most device makers at the time were worried about camera megapixels and color screens, Nokia had leapfrogged its competition with a back-to-basics phone that could survive the rain, endure unreliable power grids, and light the way home. Apple Launched the iPhone, Nokia Scrambled On 9 January 2007, at the Macworld conference in San Francisco, Steve Jobs made a characteristically bold claim. “Today, Apple is reinventing the phone,” he said, soon pulling one of the first iPhones out of his pocket. Apple CEO Steve Jobs famously launched the iPhone at the Macworld Conference in San Francisco on 9 January 2007. Nokia held a rapid-response meeting to the event the following day. Tony Avelar/AFP/Getty Images Rumors of Apple entering the phone market had swirled since the iPod’s debut in 2001, but nobody had really reckoned with what that might mean. “Executive summary: Apple iPhone is a serious high-end contender,” read a slide from a Nokia internal meeting held the day after Jobs

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