Last week, many of us followed the tweets of Guardian writer Charles Arthur as flew over to Finland to visit Nokia. His interview with their Exec VP of Design Marko Ahtisaari. The subject of course was the new Windows Phone, and both the software and hardware design cues in the handset.

There's a lot of good content and smartphone trivia in here, including where the design and styling of the Nokia Lumia 800 range comes from - and it goes further back than the Meego powered N9:

One commentator, I say, described the Lumia 800 as like the negative of the iPhone 4: it's rounded where that is square, square where that is rounded, curved where that is flat. And it feels really nice in the hand. So was the Lumia/N9 thought of as a negative of the iPhone?

There's a long pause. It's like waiting for Finland's winter sun to rise.

"We at no point thought about it," Ahtisaari eventually says firmly. "But we didn't start from that. Our aim was to start and make the most beautiful phone, where we took away every unnecessary element. In the N8, we had the extruded form. And looked to rapidly evolve it, with better materials. To build something that looks advanced but feels very human. We tried hundreds of variants. This aesthetic follows what way this is manufactured. Two pieces of polycarbonate, which is then just finished using material finishing technique for the speaker holes. And the display, which is laminated so it folds into the surface of the product."

Definitely worth reading, both for the history that has brought Nokia to this point, but also for some hints to future design direction on the next smartphone hardware choices to be made by Ahtisaari and his team.