Announced
November 2004
At first glance, the specifications of the Nokia
7710 look very contemporary. A Nokia smartphone with
a large 3.5" 640 x 320 pixel touchscreen display, a completely
new version of the Symbian operating system plus strong multimedia
support, it doesn't sound a million miles away from the new Nokia
N8. But this is November 2004, not November 2010.. and the Nokia
7710 is one of Nokia's most notable failures.
This was Nokia's first
production touchscreen phone.. and basically the last
touchscreen device they made for four years until the Nokia
5800 was released. The 7710 also came two years before
the iPhone brought
Apple's take on the same idea to market.. and ultimately it was
the iPhone and not the 7710 that redefined the smartphone market.
When you look a bit more deeply at the 7710, the reasons for
its lack of success are perhaps more obvious. This was a GSM-only
device, supporting GPRS and EDGE data with no 3G or WiFi connectivity.
Practically, it meant that most customers were
limited to download speeds of just 48 Kbps, less than the speed
of a dial-up modem. Nokia had introduced their first 3G handset
(the Nokia 6600) the
previous year, and the Nokia
9500 (also announced in 2004) featured WiFi support. So,
it's not as if Nokia couldn't do 3G and WiFi.. they just didn't
do it with the 7710, a move that effectively crippled it.
There were other problems as well. The 7710 was hampered by a
slow 168MHz processor, fairly typical for the time but really quite
underpowered for a big screen smartphone like this. The 7710 also
had limited internal memory, but again the technological limitations
of handsets from this era really made that inevitable, and Moore's
Law usually helps to fix most performance problems. One
of the big differences between the 7710 and the original iPhone
is that the iPhone had access to much more modern componentry, especially
a significantly faster processor.
The price tag of €500 before tax and subsidy also made this an
expensive phone, combined with quite a few rough edges on the Series
90 operating system and a not terribly good display, the 7710 pretty
much bombed in sales terms. A number of 7710s were retro-fitted
with DVB-H receivers to pilot free-to-air mobile TV, but other than
that the handset virtually vanished.
Given
that there was obviously real consumer demand for a phone like this,
at the time being met by the likes of the HTC
Blue Angel and the Sony
Ericsson P910i, then you would expect that Nokia would pick
themselves up, dust themselves down.. and come up with something
better. But in fact, Nokia cancelled the entire project and operating
system and didn't return to the touchscreen market for another four
years.
The repercussions of the 7710's cancellation are still being
felt today. Although some of the work done on this phone was folded
back into mainstream S60 devices and carried forward into Maemo
(eventually leading to the N900),
Nokia effectively wasted the chance to be the market leader in touchscreen
smartphones.
These days the Nokia 7710 is quite collectable due to its
rarity and unusual design for the period, typically selling for
€200 or so in good condition.. although given its flawed design
it is unlikely that anybody still uses one as their everyday phone!
No comments:
Post a Comment