In recent years the CES show in Las Vegas has provided rich pickings
every January, but it wasn't always the case. This a look at what
was grabbing our attention five and ten years ago this month.
January 2004
In our opinion the
Sony
Ericsson T630 is one of the nicest looking handsets ever which
combined clean Nordic design with Japanese know-how, although it
had a hard job replacing the even more iconic T610. Also competing
for the same customers was the
Sagem
MyX-7, something that never quite captured the public imagination.
If the Sagem and Sony Ericsson were too expensive for you, then
the ultra-basic
Motorola
V150 clamshell phone might have been a device to consider. It
might surprise some people to know that ten years ago you could
get a 3G touchscreen smartphone with GPS, but then the
Motorola
A925 was a chunky, clunky thing that is quite unlike the smartphones
of today.
January 2009
Five years ago the struggling Palm company reinvented itself
with the Palm Pre,
a smartphone that was arguably better than anything else on the
market, but Palm couldn't get the market share it needed to survive.
In the end, Palm ended up being bought by HP and then shut down,
however the WebOS operating system on the Pre lives on.. in LG smart
TVs.
This month in 2009, Nokia announced the China-only Nokia
6208c feature phone with a touchscreen, joining the N97 and
5800 smartphones as the only touchscreens in Nokia's range. Nokia
always had an eye for elegant design, and the Nokia
2700 Classic and Nokia
6700 Classic are two good examples of devices that were unmistakably
Nokias.
Back in 2009, Motorola was another company trying to come up
with an answer to the iPhone, and the Motorola
MOTOSURF A3100 was one such attempt.. but in hindsight it isn't
hard to see why it didn't succeed. Although most mobile phone companies
have made efforts to reduce their environmental impact in recent
years, the Motorola
W233 Renew was unusual at the time for the use of recycled plastics.
The rugged Motorola
Tundra VA76r combined a clamshell device with handheld satnav
in a phone that looks quite alien to us five years later. The
Tundra wasn't the only chunky-looking phone to be announced
this month, with the odd-looking Telstra
T165i which was designed to bring 3G coverage to rural Australian
customers.
With a name that could only have been thought up by a marketing
department after a particularly convivial lunch the HTC
Touch Cruise 09 (also called the HTC Iolite) sold itself on
its geolocation abilities. T-Mobile didn't do much better when they
rebranded the HTC Touch Viva as the T-Mobile
MDA Basic, although we suspect that their lunch consisted
of undercooked potatoes and grey rubbery schnitzel.
It looked for a while that Hyundai
Mobile would become a player in the UK market with some cheap
but quite interesting phones including a watch phone, but when Hyundai's
marketing partner collapsed the plans were cancelled. For some reason
back in 2009 and for several years afterwards there was a feeling
that putting a projector into a phone was a good idea, and the Logic
Bolt was an early product that tried to bring these features
to market - although in retrospect it was a feature that almost
nobody wanted.
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