With the year coming to an end we tend to see a last flurry of
announcements, usually trying to get products in the shops in time
for Christmas.
November 2004
The
Nokia 7710
was Nokia's first production touchscreen smartphone, easily beating
the iPhone to market. Despite Nokia's efforts the technology of
2004 wasn't quite up to it, but instead of sticking with the concept
and improving it, Nokia made the fateful decision to abandon touchscreen
phones altogether.
Ten years ago the whole concept of 3G was failing to get off
the ground too, and pioneering network Hutchison 3 was instead concentrating
on being cheaper than the competition. To this extent, the underwhelming
but cheap
NEC E338
and a trio of
LG handsets
actually succeeded in driving customers looking for a bargain to
the network.
For a long time we had been hoping for a replacement for Nokia's
iconic 6310i handset, and the
Nokia
6020 promised a lot on paper but it failed to live up to expectations.
The
Nokia 3230 looked
like a promising music phone too, but it also
turned
out to be a disappointment.
Sitting somewhere in the range of over 200 Samsung clamshell
phones is the
Samsung
E610, a device that tried to be fashionably thin but which just
ended up looking squashed. Samsung have produced nearly 200
slider phones too, and the
Samsung
E850 stands out because of the unusual pop-out rotating camera.
November 2009
The worldwide version of the DROID launched the previous month,
the
Motorola
Milestone was the first Android 2.0 device in Europe with a
slide-out QWERTY keyboard and a high-end feature set that should
have made it sell rather better. Competing against this was the
Sony
Ericsson Xperia X10 which only ran Android 1.6 out of the box
(but Android 2.0 arrived shortly afterward) in a very pleasing package
that sold rather well. Also competing in the Android market was
the
Dell Mini
3 range which failed to make an impact.
Even five years ago, coming up with a completely new smartphone
platform was a very risky thing to do, but the
Emblaze
First Else attempted to bring a radically different user interface
and some cool hardware to market, but unfortunately it never really
got off the ground.
Nokia announced several devices this month, but the most interesting
ones were the
Nokia
6700 Slide which was a Symbian smartphone that came in a variety
of bright colours, the
Nokia
5330 Mobile TV Edition which was part of a brief trend of putting
digital TV tuners into mobile phones. Also, the
Nokia
1280 was a €20 phone which was the cheapest Nokia handset ever,
and the
Nokia
2690 was a smart-looking and very inexpensive feature phone.
