2006 was the year of the
Winter
Olympics in Turin, the
FIFA
World Cup in Germany, the start of the
Iran nuclear crisis,
North
Korea's first nuclear test, a series of
bomb
attacks on trains in Mumbai, the
Israel-Hezbollah
War and in this year
Montengro declared independence.
Twitter
was launched in 2006 and the top grossing film in the US was
Pirates
of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest with
Casino
Royale being the top grossing film in the UK. The best selling
album in the US was the
High
School Musical album, in the UK it was Snow Patrol's "
Eyes
Open".
Nokia
Handset manufacturers were still concentrating on traditional designs,
and none more so than Nokia. The
Nokia
6300 is a well-loved, elegant and straightforward midrange phone
that found many fans. At the very top of Nokia's line-up was the
Nokia N95 which
featured a relatively big display, 3.5G data, WiFi, GPS and a 5
megapixel camera, easily beating everything else on the market.
Down at the bottom of Nokia's range, the simple but appealing
Nokia
1110i carried on the legacy of the best-selling Nokia 1100 series.
Nokia continued to expand its N-Series range of premium handsets
and E-Series range of business phones. The
Nokia
N93 is a rare example of a camera phone with an optical zoom,
but rather unsurprisingly it was quite bulky. The
Nokia
N73 followed on the from the popular N70 with a substantially
improved design. Nokia attempted to follow on from the classic 6310i
business phone with the
Nokia
E50, but it was not an attractive handset and many customers
went for the 6300 instead.
Nokia extended their L'Amour fashion phone range with the 3G
Nokia
7390 clamshell phone and the
Nokia
7373 rotator which was a small upgrade to 2005's 7370. The expensive
but desirable 8800 slider was upgraded with the
Nokia
8800 Sirocco Edition.
Nokia was never really big on clamshell phones, but the
Nokia
6131 was one of the most popular they made. The ruggedised
Nokia
5500 was designed for outdoors use and was water and bump resistant.
The
Nokia
5300 was a popular and attractive slider phone with dedicated
music keys.
HTC
2006 was the first year when HTC started selling handsets under
its own name rather than those of carriers and other partners. The
most significant release from HTC was the
HTC
TyTN, a high-end Windows device that proved that the Nokia N95
had some real competition. The
HTC
S620 was an attempt to bring Windows to a BlackBerry-style messaging
phone, and the
HTC
P3300 was a slider phone with integrated GPS.
HTC also tried to bring Windows to some conventional handsets,
and although the
HTC
MTeoR and
HTC
STRTrk are technically smartphones, they are not a format
that we would recognise today. And standing out as one of the ugliest
phones ever, the
HTC
Monet featured a built-in digital DAB TV.. unsurprisingly it
was a massive failure on several different levels.
Motorola
Motorola was becoming stuck in a rut with remixes of the RAZR,
the most elegant of which was the
Motorola
KRZR K1. Showing some redundancy of effort, the
Motorola
RAZR V3xx and
Motorola
RAZR MAXX were both early 3.5G phones with a very similar feature
set.
The first consumer device to feature an electronic ink display,
the
Motorola
FONE F3 is an extremely basic but rather elegant device. In
an attempt to give the moribund ROKR range a boost, the
Motorola
ROKR E6 added a touchscreen and a decent media player, but never
made the breakthrough it needed.
Sony Ericsson
A bumper year for Sony Ericsson handsets, to the extent that
"Walkman" branded phones were beginning to get out of
hand. Customers could choose from the
Sony Ericsson W700 or
Sony
Ericsson W810 monoblocks or the
Sony Ericsson W850 3G slider among
others. The
Sony Ericsson W950 was a "Walkman" smartphone running
Symbian, and was based on the
Sony Ericsson M600 smartphone, a device
that didn't quite manage to follow up the success of earlier Sony
Ericsson Symbian handsets.
Rather more conventional were the lightweight
Sony Ericsson K610
3G phone,
Sony Ericsson K800 "Cybershot" phone,
Sony Ericsson
Z530 clamshell and glossy
Sony Ericsson Z610 3G clamshell.
Samsung
Samsung's current strategy of having a mobile phone in every
conceivable niche was well underway in 2006. The "Samsung Ultra"
range of ultra-thin handsets included the
Samsung D830 clamshell
phone and
Samsung D900 slider.
A couple of "girlie" clamshells, the
Samsung E500 and
Samsung E570 were a bit over-the-top when it came to design, but
were still quite attractive to look at.
Some formats that never quite caught on included the two-sided
Samsung F300 music phone, the
Samsung i310 smartphone with an internal
hard disk, the
Samsung P310 "calculator phone" and the
Samsung X830 "lipstick phone".
LG
One of LG's design icons is the
LG KG800 Chocolate, so called
because it looks a bit like a chocolate bar. Where the Chocolate was elegant, the
LG KG920 must be another
one of
the ugliest handsets ever. LG was still doing well with 3G clamshells,
and the attractive
LG U890 borrowed a few design cues from Motorola's
RAZR.
BlackBerry
BlackBerry was pushing hard to bring full push-email to customers
who wanted a traditional style phone, first with the
BlackBerry
7130 and then with the familiar
BlackBerry Pearl 8100 which was
something of a breakthrough device, however in the long term it
seems that customers did prefer to have a QWERTY keyboard instead.
BenQ / BenQ Siemens
BenQ took over Siemens' handset business in 2005, and despite
a promising start it ended up as a failure with the closure of the
European arm in 2006 and the termination of the brand completely
the following year. Many handsets never made it to market, but of
those that did the
BenQ Siemens E61 music phone was one of the most
popular, the
BenQ Siemens EF61 was one of the most elegant, and
the
BenQ Siemens AL26 "Hello Kitty" phone was definitely
the cutest. Also launching this year, a full two years after it
was originally announced was the
BenQ P50 smartphone.
Palm
Palm was still a challenger in the market, and the
Palm Treo
680 combined the traditional PalmOS platform in a neat little hardware
package that looked nicer than anything BlackBerry had to offer.
The
Palm Treo 750 took a similar design and added 3G, but also replaced
PalmOS with the then-popular Windows Mobile 5.2.
Other manufacturers
The Siemens name found itself applied to another smartphone with
the
Fujitsu Siemens Pocket Loox, a powerful device with a very silly
name. T-Mobile fleshed out its range of messaging feature phones
with the
T-Mobile Sidekick 3. Voice-over-IP was beginning to find
its way into handsets with the
Pirelli Discus Dualphone and
Tovo
T450G, both versions of the same handset.
In 2006, Vodafone sold its Japanese arm which was effectively
the end of Vodafone's interesting range of Japanese 3G phones. One
elegant device that never made it to Europe was the
Sharp 904 with
a swiveling VGA resolution display, but the rather less exciting
Sharp GX40
did make it into some markets instead.
In context
2006 featured many names that no longer exist and many handset
designs such as sliders and clamshells that have largely been consigned
to history. But some of the ideas were definitely ahead of their
time, and perhaps the world would be a little more interesting if
some of those esoteric concepts had been successful.
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