A few months ago we looked at what we considered
to be the ten
biggest handset disasters of all time. Well, there's no shortage
of devices that failed in the market, either because they were ill-conceived,
weird or just too far ahead of their time.
Nokia's one-and-only commercially available MeeGo
handset, the Nokia
N9 is actually a pretty desirable bit of kit
with a well-regarded operating system and a highly influential
hardware design that was copied by Nokia's Lumia range
and helped to popularise brightly-coloured plastics.
Also available to developers only was the Nokia
N950, a handset that is quite rare and is highly
sought-after. |
Nokia's first attempt at a touchscreen for was the
Nokia 7700 which
was a strikingly designed device, but it was far too
big to be practical and features Nokia's infamous "side
talking" system where you had to speak into side
of the phone rather than the front. The 7700 was also
crippled by a lack of memory, so that particular device
was cancelled and replaced with the slimmed down and
slightly upgraded Nokia
7710. |
A handheld gaming console from Nokia, the Nokia
N-Gage should have been a winner. But Nokia
got it badly wrong - it was too bulky to use as a phone,
too limited to be used for games - so it was never very
popular. An attempt to improve the platform with the
2004 N-Gage
QD wasn't much of a success either. |
The lack of success for the N-Gage meant that there
were no other high-profile phone/games console hybrids
until 2011, with the launch of the Sony
Ericsson Xperia Play. Where the N-Gage was underpowered,
the Xperia Play was much more powerful (although hardly
high-end). Despite this, the Xperia Play wasn't a success
and no attempt was made to revive the format. |
Sony Ericsson's Symbian swansong, the Sony
Ericsson Vivaz featured a pretty unpleasant
resistive touchscreen when almost everything else had
moved to superior capacitive displays. The handset might
have done better in 2008 than 2010. |
Sony Ericsson was a pioneer with Symbian touchscreen
devices, but the Sony
Ericsson P1i represented a step in the wrong
direction for their P-Series of smartphones. |
In 2008 Symbian was by far the best-selling smartphone
platform around, even though the iPhone was coming into
its second generation. In order to try to get a slice
of the pie that was dominated by Nokia, Samsung released the
Samsung
i8510 (also known as the INNOV8). |
It should have been a winner - a touchscreen phone
like the Nokia 5800 combined with a QWERTY keyboard
like the Nokia Communicator, and a feature set that
looked great on paper. But the Nokia
N97 was slow, buggy and had several design
flaws that made consumers unhappy. Most of these were
fixed with the rather better N97
Mini launched later in the year. But keyboards
were on the way out anyway, and in retrospect the entire
concept was not likely to be a winner. |
Symbian had already been given its death sentence
by the time the Nokia
X7 was announced which led to a speedy collapse
of that product line. The coffin-like design of the
X7 didn't help either, although as with all late
Symbian devices it is actually a pretty good phone.
Consumers don't like buying into a dead end product,
and the X7 was certainly one of those. |
With a product number like this, you would expect
the Nokia
5000 to be something special. A good-looking
and inexpensive device, one of the key features was
that it had an MP3 player. But with no expandable memory
and just 12MB of internal storage, you could probably
only fit in about three tracks which was a bit useless.
And you also had to be careful about how many photos
you took with the 1.3 megapixel camera too. Adding a
microSD slot would have transformed the product, as
it was it was almost completely useless. |