Remember the Download? In 2010, the smartphone world was at a tipping point. Apple’s App Store was maturing, Android Market (now Google Play) was expanding rapidly, and in Espoo, Finland, Nokia released a beast of a device: the Nokia N8 .

And when the app finally opened—whether it was the crisp viewfinder of that 12MP camera or the satisfying thwack of a Angry Birds slingshot—you knew the wait was worth it.

It boasted a 12-megapixel camera with a xenon flash—a sensor so good that videographers still use it today for short films. It had an anodized aluminum unibody. It was, by all accounts, a hardware masterpiece. But a smartphone lives or dies by its software. And for the Nokia N8, "downloading an app" was an adventure in itself. Before Microsoft, before the ill-fated transition to Windows Phone, Nokia had Ovi (the Finnish word for "door"). The Nokia N8 ran Symbian^3, and its gateway to software was the Ovi Store .

Today, we take high-speed LTE and auto-updates for granted. In the N8 era, you prayed for a stable 3G connection. Opening the Ovi Store app felt like entering a digital bazaar. It was clunky, it was slow, but it was ours .