April 2004
2004 was a bit of a low point for
Nokia who couldn't quite
find the right formula with customers despite coming out with some
radical designs. The
Nokia
N-Gage QD was an attempt to revive the ill-fated N-Gage gaming
platform with something a little less clunky, but in the end
the N-Gage only managed to attract a small but quite loyal following
and Nokia never repeated the experiment again. On the other end
of the design scale, the
Nokia
6610i was a nasty and very basic camera phone which simply didn't
meet the standards that customers wanted even ten years ago.
Japanese manufacturer
Sharp had a very close relationship
with Vodafone because of Vodafone's operations in Japan, so it was
unusual to see a Sharp handset with anyone else.. in this case T-Mobile.
The
Sharp TM-100 slider
outclassed most of the competition when it came to specifications,
especially with the screen and camera, although it wasn't the breakthrough
device that Sharp needed.
Samsung promised a
whole
range of interesting devices, but many of them never made it
to market. Out of these, the
Samsung i700 was a notable early
Windows smartphone device which did ship to customers. Conversely,
the curious
Samsung i500 a proposed PalmOS clamshell phone
with a touchscreen never made it to market, neither did the strange
but funky looking
Samsung X900 and indeed many other products
they announced during 2004.
April 2009
The
Samsung
I7500 is the original
Samsung Galaxy smartphone, and
was one of the very first Android devices to market. Although the
I7500 is somewhat unimpressive in hardware terms, it did spawn the
world's best-selling smartphone range which still carries the "Galaxy"
name. Samsung were also years ahead in pioneering dual-SIM phones,
and the
Samsung
B5702 DUOS was a simple and effective way of putting two SIMs
into one device.
8 megapixel phones were very rare in 2009, and the
LG
KC910i Renoir touchscreen phone was about as advanced as they
came, but the Renoir was only a feature phone and ultimately this
made it less appealing to a market had seen what the iPhone could
do.
Nokia were pioneering with
NFC-capable devices, and the
Nokia
6216 Classic was one of a tiny number of NFC devices to
have been announced. Five years on, NFC is still a solution
looking for a problem, and in the end the 6216 itself was cancelled
before release.
The last of the traditional
Sidekick range, the
T-Mobile
Sidekick LX 2009 joined the family of messaging devices
that had proved a massive hit in the US, although they had limited
success elsewhere. Although the Sidekick demonstrated that feature
phones could still sell, a catastrophic data outage later in 2009
effectively killed the range off forever.
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