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0 pointsphire1y ago0 comments

> It could have and should have.

From a technical perspective, yes. You are basically talking about the Nokia N800 but with a cellphone modem and a bit of effort spent shrinking the bezels down.

But from a product design perspective, I suspect it was impossible to make that leap. We are talking about the point when cellphones were at their very smallest. The 1st gen iphone with it's 3.5" display was considered to be large for a phone. Nobody thought mainstream users would be happy pocketing a phone with a "massive" 4.13" display.

And Nokia were only happy excluding the keyboard from the N800 because it was considered to be a content consumption device. At that time, smartphones were regarded as productivity devices (for email) and the physical keyboard was essential, which would have bulked out the device (See N810).

I don't think we could have gotten to today's large smartphones without first creating a viable browsing experience on an iphone sized display.

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bryanlarsen1y ago

Not impossible, it only required a small amount of vision and risk taking. Which Nokia et al obviously lacked.

> Nobody thought mainstream users would be happy pocketing a phone with a "massive" 4.13" display.

Yet it was exceedingly obvious there was a very profitable sizeable niche of users that were willing to do so.

And it shouldn't have taken very much imagination to realize that "web in the pocket" was useful in 2008, and would quickly become much more useful in 2009, 2010 etc as the population of people with the web in their pocket grew and companies started to serve the market.

The big problem was that all of those phone companies were hardware companies. Putting Firefox in a phone was a challenge beyond them. Microsoft could have and should have done it, but they were dysfunctional at the time.