We take a look back at some of the handsets that were making
the headlines five and ten years ago in October 2003 and October
2008.
October 2003
Nokia noticed that people like to play games on their
mobile phones - so it would seem logical to make a handset for the
job, and the
Nokia N-Gage
was a memorable but ultimately doomed attempt at a handheld gaming
device. The
Nokia 3660
was an early Symbian smartphone, replacing the 3650 which had a
weird rotary-style keypad, but it still retained the unusual and
somewhat bulky shape of its predecessor.
Sendo were a British manufacturer that are best remembered
these days for cheap and cheerful pay-as-you-go phones. However,
they were also involved in smartphones and the
Sendo
X was an attractive Symbian device which made Nokia rivals look
rather basic. But Sendo never intended to go into the Symbian market
at all as they did some pioneering work with Windows, however a
massive row with Microsoft alleging the leak of trade secrets to
HTC killed that project off. HTC got to market before Sendo, and
HTC's second Windows smartphone was called the
HTC Himalaya,
sold in the UK as the
O2
XDA II. The Himalaya was a touchscreen device with a specification
not a million miles away from the original iPhone that hit the market
four years later.
Early Windows phones were not all touchscreen devices, and the
Motorola MPx200
was an attempt to put Windows Phone into a traditional clamshell
design, something that seems rather quaint and pointless today.
Motorola had a reputation for making attractive (but hard-to-use)
clamshell phones, and the
Motorola
V300 was an attractive low-cost phone that was quite popular
with consumers.
NEC were one of the early leaders in 3G phones, and the
NEC E616 was a very popular
early handset on the Hutchison 3 network. But most owners were only
really interested because the 3 network was very cheap, rather than
being interested in the capabilities of the phone itself. The
Samsung
E700 was an attractive and sleek clamshell phone, and is arguably
one of the few
Samsung phones that is actually memorable
for its design. Nokia weren't the only company that could come out
with a striking design..
Siemens could too. And the
Siemens
MC60 is one example of a manufacturer that could come up with
something rather more interesting than a traditional brick.
October 2008
Nokia had been an early pioneer in touchscreen phones
but had given up because of consumer indifference. But the launch
of the iPhone had made Nokia's devices look rather old-fashioned,
so the Nokia
5800 XpressMusic was created which managed to please a lot of
Nokia fans, but it didn't quite offer the elegant user experience
as the Apple did. The Nokia
N85 was a two-way slider which was an early adopter of OLED
screen technology, and shared several design characteristics with
the then-popular Nokia N95. The Nokia
N79 wasn't radically different from the sort of Symbian smartphones
that Nokia were making five years before. It seems obvious to us
that this type of device was dying in favour of touchscreen devices,
but it didn't seem that way at the time.
This is what happens when Motorola engineers have too
much time on their hands.. the beautiful but completely bonkers
Motorola AURA
combined precise engineering with novel features such as a circular
display, and came with a price tag that was sure to make it a very
exclusive device. And this is what happens when a company loses
its way.. the Motorola
KRAVE appears to have been created by a team that has vaguely
heard of the iPhone but has never seen one. It took Motorola nearly
a whole year after this to come up with an Android device instead.
HTC were still a Windows-only manufacturer back in 2008,
and the HTC
Touch 3G showed that it was possible to make a Microsoft-based
phone that actually looked nice. Symbian was still the leading
smartphone OS at the time, and the Samsung
i7110 was a pretty rare non-Nokia Symbian device. Although Samsung
had proven several times that it was possible to build a better
Nokia than Nokia, it wasn't enough to get Nokia fans to switch.
LG pioneered the black slabby look with the original PRADA
touchscreen phone, and the LG
PRADA II added a keyboard. But as other manufacturers have found,
collaborating with a fashion house does not necessarily lead to
a device that consumers will buy.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment