The late spring and early summer tend to see a burst of activity
from mobile phone makers before they all go off for their summer
vacations. This is what we saw happening five and ten years ago
this month.
June 2004
Back in 2004 phones came in all shapes and sizes, and despite
the modest features compared to modern devices they were certainly
a lot more interesting to look at.
Ten years ago a "smartphone" was something that you
could download and run native applications on, and the high-anticipated
Motorola MPx220
was a Windows flip phone that combined the popular clamshell design
with this then up-and-coming Microsoft operating system. There's
probably a reason why modern smartphones no longer look this way.
Nokia were king of the smartphone market in 2004, and the chubby-cheeked
Nokia 6630 combined
the Symbian operating system with a 3G device which started to bring
together
the elements that we'd expect to see in a modern smartphone. Another Symbian smartphone was the
Nokia
6260, with a swivelling clamshell design that seemed to be inspired
by the types of handsets coming out of Japan.
Not everything Nokia announced was a smartphone. The Nokia
6170 clamshell was a stainless steel handset which has to be
one of the best looking Nokia devices ever (in our opinion). And
one of the strangest clamshells ever is the Nokia
2650 which looks like some sort of shrunken sunlounger. If all
this dizzying choice was too much for you, the Nokia
2600 was an inexpensive and utterly traditional design.
In our view, the Siemens SL55 is an all-time classic design,
but the replacement Siemens
SL65 didn't manage to stir the same emotions. The Siemens
CXF65 is long-forgotten, but it demonstrated that Siemens had
its own distinctive flair for industrial design.
June 2009
A new iPhone is always big news, but the Apple
iPhone 3GS marked the point where finally all the features came
together. Significantly faster than previous versions, it combined
a touchscreen, 3G support and WiFi, video recording, downloadable
apps and GPS in an elegant design with a slick interface. With this,
the iPhone 3GS became the handset that all other manufacturers would
have to beat.
Out of all of Apple's competitors, it was perhaps HTC who best
understood how the smartphone market was developing. The HTC
Hero was an early Android phone that was highly competitive
with the rest of the market, while being one of the best looking
smartphones around.
The Samsung
Omnia II was Samsung's attempt to come up with a competitive
Windows smartphone, and although on paper it looked like it was
a contender it seemed that customers were not so impressed. The
Samsung
Pixon 12 was a touchscreen feature phone with a high-end camera
on the back which caused quite a stir at the time. A completely
different phone, the Samsung
Crest Solar flirted with solar power, something that never really
caught on.
While all other manufacturers were concentrating on follow Apple's
lead, Nokia was following BlackBerry with the Nokia
E72 messaging device. Nokia did also create a touchscreen device
with the low-end Nokia
5530 XpressMusic which missed out many of the features that
smartphone users were after. Meanwhile, the Nokia
3710 was a clamshell phone that featured 3G data and GPS, a
surprising combination in something so cheap.
Manufacturers were beginning to become aware of the environmental
impact of their phones, and the Sony
Ericsson Naite used recycled plastics, reduced packaging and
tried to minimise the energy it used, but like the Sony
Ericsson T715 also announced the same month it demonstrated
that Sony Ericsson were heading down the wrong track when it came
to competitiveness.
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