October 2004
The
Samsung D500
was the first Samsung phone to feature Bluetooth, something that
other manufacturers had done for a long time. A good all-round slider
phone, the D500 was also very successful and helped expand Samsung's
small but growing market share.
Palm more-or-less created the PDA (personal digital assistant)
market in the 1990s, but for some reason it didn't make the logical
step to creating a smartphone for a long time. The
PalmOne
Treo 650 was the first smartphone that they designed in house,
based in a large part on technology acquired from a firm called
Handspring. Palm could never quite crack the market, however.
Motorola were firmly entrenched in clamshell phones in 2004,
launching
a whole
range of them. The most notable was the
Motorola
V620 at the higher end of the scale, along with several devices
from the Motorola parts bin such as the
Motorola
V535.
By the end of 2004 Panasonic were floundering badly. The
Panasonic
Z800 was meant to be a reasonably equipped and somewhat compact
3G phone, but it is quite probable that this phone never existed
in anything other than prototype form.
If you were looking for a budget phone a decade ago, then you
may well have looked at the attractive and relatively cheap
Sagem
myC5-2 clamshell phone.. although you can buy a smartphone these
days for the price you would have to pay for a prepay phone a decade
ago.
October 2009
Motorola had only announced their first Android phone the previous
month, but the
Motorola
DROID easily trumped that. It was the world's first Android
2.0 smartphone, and it came with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and
a high-resolution screen and fast processor. Although the DROID
was a CDMA handset, a worldwide GSM version soon followed called
the
Motorola
Milestone.
Samsung have produced literally hundreds of different Galaxy
smartphones and tablets in the past five years, but the
Samsung
Galaxy Spica (or Galaxy Lite) was one of the first, and was
designed to be a bit cheaper than the original Samsung Galaxy.
A couple of more esoteric Samsung devices announced this month,
the
Samsung
Blue Earth finally started to ship after a long wait, featuring
a large solar panel on the back, but it was not a success. The
Samsung
SCH-W880 was an early example of merging a proper digital camera
with a touchscreen phone, but this gadget was heading for Korea
only.
Samsung were still pushing Windows phones very hard, but the
Samsung
Giorgio Armani smartphone was something out of the ordinary,
with lots of bling and a price tag to match. Five years ago many
manufacturers thought that BlackBerry was the company to beat, and
the
Samsung
Omnia Pro was a BlackBerry-style Windows phone with a little
QWERTY keyboard.
The most impressive phone launched this month in terms of hardware
was the
HTC HD2, which featured a then massive 4.3" WVGA display
and had pretty much all the bells and whistles you can think of.
BlackBerry meanwhile was attempting (and failing) to challenge
the full-touch market with the
BlackBerry Storm2, a revision of
the problem-prone original Storm model. Rather more successful was
the
BlackBerry Bold 9700 which appealed to BlackBerry fans by not
messing with the formula too much.
