2021: things that didn’t quite make the cut

This year we mostly concentrated on the year ending in "1", covering gadgets and technology from 1941, 1951, 1961, 1971, 1981, 1991, 2001 and 2011. It turns out to be a decent last digit for computers, games consoles and cars in particular. But here are some of the things that were also notable that didn't get covered.

2011 saw the launch of two rival handheld gaming platforms that were evolutions of previous devices. The Nintendo 3DS had a dual display capable of displaying glasses-free 3D on an otherwise modest hardware platform, the Sony PlayStation Vita was a more powerful device but also a more traditional gaming console. Both products competed directly against each other, but it was the Nintendo that won out although the Sony did gain a dedicated fanbase.

Nintendo 3DS and Sony PlayStation Vita

A decade earlier, in 2001, the Nintendo GameCube was launched against the Sony PlayStation 2 and the original Microsoft Xbox. In this fight, the GameCube came in third - in quite a bruising result for Nintendo.

Skipping back another decade to 1991 we see the Commodore CDTV, a repackaged Amiga that was meant to compete against the Sega Mega Drive and Nintendo SNES. It was a failure, and helped to accelerate Commodore to its demise a few years later.

Nintendo GameCube and Commodore CDTV

In the early eighties, the best place for video games was the local arcade and 1981 was part of the golden era of arcade machines. We've covered quite a few from this year, but Namco's Galaga and Atari's Tempest were both notable and were very different types of shoot-em-up. And if you fancied something different from endless slaughter, there was Taito's Qix which was more of a puzzle game where the player had to fill the screen with boxes while being chased by a mysterious electric entity.

Galaga, Tempest and Qix

None of this would be possible without the microprocessor, and the first commercially-available device was the Intel 4004 which was launched in 1971. Originally designed for a calculator, the 4004 could be used for a variety of other purposes. A successful line of products followed for Intel, notably the x86 series of processors used in most PCs today.

The same year saw the release of the world's first floppy disks. Originally a huge 8 inches across (and very floppy), these inexpensive and transportable storage media and their 5.25 and 3.5 inch descendants were the standard way of transferring files into the 1990s and beyond.

A decade later, the Intel 8085 and a pair of 5.25" floppies could be found in the ergonomically designed Nokia MikroMikko. Nokia Data had a series of mergers and acquisitions, first with Siemens and then ICL until finally vanishing into Fujitsu.

Intel 4004, 8" floppy disk (with 3.5" for comparison), Nokia MikroMikko

Nokia have made many things over their long history, including car tyres. Today you might find Nokian winter tyres on a Nissan Patrol or Toyota Land Cruiser - both these rugged and practical 4X4s were originally launched in 1951 and were heavily inspired by the wartime-era Willys Jeep.

Nissan Patrol (circa 1958) and Toyota Land Cruiser (circa 1966)

If exploring in your Japanese offroader with your Finnish tyres, you probably want a good system to tell you where you actually were in the world. Today you'd use a GPS system, but that wasn't an option back in 1981 when Honda announced the world's first in-car navigation system, the Electro Gyro-Cator. Instead of using satellites, it used inertial navigation and a set of transparent maps fitted over a screen. It was bulky, expensive and of limited use, but eventually the first in-car GPS system was launched in 1990 by Mazda.

Honda Electro Gyro-Cator

Stretching things out a bit more… if you found yourself off-roading in your big Japanese 4X4 with Finnish tyres in the 1970s or 1980s and you wanted to make a high-quality video recording of your journeys, the choice of professionals was a Sony U-matic recording system which was launched in 1971. Capable of capturing broadcast-quality images, the U-matic was the choice of professionals. Smaller than a traditional film camera, most units were still quite bulky and required a crew of two or three - one for the camera, one for the recorder unit and perhaps one for the microphone boom. Perhaps on your exploration into the wilderness you might want to pack some supplies, and there's a good chance that these might include Heinz Baked Beans, a staple of tinned food since 1901. Luckily the Japanese make some of the best can openers in the world too..

Sony U-matic in a carry bag and Heinz Baked Beans

Image credits:
Nintendo 3DS: Evan-Amos via Wikimedia Commons - CC0
PlayStation Vita: Evan-Amos via Wikimedia Commons - CC0
Nintedo GameCube: BugWarp via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 4.0
Commodore CDTV: Patric Klöter via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 3.0
Tempest: Russell Davies via Flickr - CC BY-NC 2.0
Galaga: David via Flickr - CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Qix: Joho345 via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 3.0
Intel 4004: Simon Claessen via Flickr - CC BY-SA 2.0
8" floppy disk: Michael Holley via Wikimedia Commons - CC0
Nokia Data MikroMikko: Nokia
Nissan Patrol (1958): Sicnag via Flickr - CC BY 2.0
Toyota Land Cruiser (1966): Sicnag via Flickr - CC BY 2.0
Electro Gyrocator: Honda
Sony U-matic: Joybot via Flickr - CC BY-SA 2.0
Heinz Baked Beans: Ian Kennedy via Flickr - CC BY-NC 2.0

Renault Avantime vs Renault Vel Satis (2001)

Introduced 2001

French cars are cool. That’s a fact. Big French cars are cooler. Quirky big French cars are cooler still. And in 2001, Renault launched not one... but two quirky big French cars for our delight – the Renault Avantime and Renault Vel Satis.

The name “Avantime” is a portmanteau* of the French word “Avant” (“Before”) and the English word “Time”. It wasn’t like anything else on the market at the time – a sort of cross between a grand tourer, MPV, coupé and convertible. These days we’d think of it as a crossover, but twenty years ago customers were baffled.

Is it an MPV? Coupé? Grand Tourer? Convertible? The Avantime is a bit of all of those things.

Like the Vel Satis, the Avantime was designed by Renault’s legendary chief designer Patrick Le Quément. But unlike the Vel Satis, the Avantime was built by Matra who a history in aerospace, defence and motor racing and who somewhere had along the way created the magnificent Matra Rancho.

The Rancho was really just a Simca van converted into the world’s first MPV with the addition of some fibreglass, seats and plastic panels. Although it was a modest success, Matra took the idea further and created arguably the world’s first purpose-built MPV in their P18 prototype which they intended to sell to their long-time partners Chrysler-Simca. Chrysler were interested, but their business was collapsing and they were bought out by PSA (Peugeot Citroën) who weren’t interested in the concept at all.

Matra then sought out a new partner for this radical new car, and in the end Renault agreed to work with them. After some back-and-forth, the Renault Espace was launched in 1984… although the original still had many components from the Simca parts bins. Consumers did not understand the Espace at first – huge, radically shaped and quite different from anything else on European roads. However, once customers “got it” the Espace became a significant success.

Matra was a relatively small company though, and in order to build enough Espaces for Renault they had to drop their sports car line and give 100% of production over the to the new MPV. The Espace II was launched in 1991 with the same basic formula but a more Renault style, followed by the Espace III in 1996 which introduced a radical new interior.

Hundreds of thousands of Espaces were built by Matra, but Matra’s automotive division had just one customer…. Renault. And in 2002 Renault switched the production of the new Espace IV to their own factory in Sandouville. This was potentially very bad news for Matra.

Renault’s solution was to co-design a new car based on the Espace which would utilise Matra’s own engineering skills. Based on the same floorpan as the Espace, the Avantime had just four luxurious seats (squeezing in a fifth person at a pinch), two double-hinged pillarless doors, an almost completely glass roof with the largest production sunroof of the time, a cavernous boot, futuristic yet minimalistic interior all housed in a radical and coherent body based on Matra’s space frame engineering.

Typically this was all powered by a big 3 litre V6 engine and an automatic gearbox, combined with a soft ride for eating up the miles on the autoroute. One interesting feature was the “full air” mode, where at the press of a button all the windows would drop and the sunroof would open to create a sort-of-convertible. The lack of B-pillars helped the illusion of open-ness.
There was nothing else like it, and the Avantime didn’t fit into anybody’s pre-defined notion of what a car should be. Sure, it was a radical design… but so was the Espace and with that it just took a little while for consumers to understand that this was the car they needed.

So, sales of the Avantime were slow to begin with. Alas they stayed that way, with the model selling just over 8000 units worldwide rather than the 100,000 needed for profitability. Despite being critically acclaimed, it was a sales disaster. Matra’s automotive division went bankrupt, ending 40 years of innovative car designs..

..and yet, Renault consider the Avantime to be a design success even if it wasn’t a commercial one. Twenty years late, the huge bulk of the Avantime is not unlike the majority of other new cars. Even the esoteric two-door layout has found its way into other large cars. Today, the Avantime is recognised as being innovative… but nearly two decade too late to save Matra. This is a car that was ahead of its time in more ways than one.

Part of the problem with the Avantime may well have been the Renault Vel Satis. If you wanted a big, weird Renault then this was another choice you could make. A bit bigger than the Laguna, it was also designed by Patrick Le Quément but with a rather different design philosophy.

A large hatchback designed for executives and dignitaries, the Vel Satis was designed to look imposing. This was a car with presence rather than elegance, while not exactly ugly there was a hint of brutalism in the exterior design. Inside, the was comfortable and more conventional. The odd name - a bit like the Avantime's - was a combination of Velocity and Satisfaction.

Not the prettiest thing perhaps, but the Vel Satis had presence and looked like nothing else in its class.

It lent itself well to those who needed a car that people would notice without it looking too flashy. The President of France had one, which he loaned to Queen Elizabeth II. The French police would use them as unmarked police cars. These were serious motors.

The design never really fitted in with the rest of the Renault range of the time, with the result that it didn’t date in the same way. Although the Vel Satis is a rare site, especially in the UK, it still looks fresh.

A revision in 2005 kept the car going until 2009, although it wasn’t sold in the UK. About 64,000 were built, although just 1200 made it to the UK… even so, that was 8 times the number of Avantimes worldwide.

Both cars are uncommon these days, but it you are in the market for a big weird car with 20-year-old French electrics, then prices do vary depending on condition. The Avantime is probably the most collectable, with some prices going as high as £10,000 but mostly much cheaper. The Vel Satis can typically be picked up for a few thousand pounds, but it’s not as well-loved as the Avantime and numbers are dwindling fast.

Lovers of big weird French cars in the UK don’t have much choice. Although the fifth-gen Espace is pleasingly individual, it isn’t available in the UK. Other most other big French cars don’t have the character, with most big Renaults originating from Korea and Citroen and Peugeot producing badge-engineered Stellantis models you would be hard pushed to find anything quirky.

* literally meaning “coathanger”, a word created by merging two other words.
 

Image credits:
Vauxford via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 4.0
Rudolf Stricker via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 3.0

Microsoft Xbox (2001)

Launched November 2001

Microsoft is a software company. It’s right there in the name. On the uncommon occasions that Microsoft has ventured into hardware, the results have been decidedly mixed from the failure of the Zune and KIN devices to the slow-burn success of the Surface to the best goddam computer mice ever made and I will die on that hill.

The Xbox line is certainly one of Microsoft’s more successful products, with a history spanning 20 years. But why does it even exist?

Original Microsoft Xbox (2001)

Back in 2001 there were three major players duking it out in the games console market. Sony’s PlayStation 2 was the boss… fighting against it was the Sege Dreamcast and Nintendo GameCube. These companies had been fighting it out for years, and although Sega had the head start with these sixth-gen consoles, it was Sony who was taking the biggest share of the market. The PS2 was more than just a simple games console, crucially it was a low-cost way of playing DVDs and music and the hardware was extremely capable. The Sega and Nintendo rivals were similarly versatile.

For Microsoft the concern was that this new generation of games console might start to compete with PCs for home users. The hardware was as good as or much better than contemporary Windows boxes, and prices in the $200 to $300 dollar range made them financially competitive too. Sure, Windows-based PCs were a popular platform for games as well, but you couldn’t always guarantee that your PC would be able to play the latest and greatest games if it was a few years old.

With the Xbox, Microsoft had the idea of taking the technologies and components that Windows already used. Underneath, the Xbox used a heavily modified version of Windows 2000 (the somewhat forgotten predecessor to Windows XP) and utilised the DirectX technology that Microsoft had built into Windows for gaming – DirectX giving the console the “X” in “Xbox”. Inside was a standard PC-style DVD drive and hard disk plus a customised version of the 733 MHz Intel Pentium III processor and an Nvidia GPU for graphics, combined with what seems today like a very modest 64MB of RAM.

The Intel CPU was a bit of a surprise for AMD who had originally been engaged to come up with a processor. In fact AMD would have to wait for the 3rd-gen Xbox – the Xbox One – before they supplied both the CPU and GPU, which they still do. The hardware overall was competitive, but the system itself was bulky because of the non-bespoke components. Even the original Xbox game controllers looked bulky and clumsy compared to the competition.

When launched, it was something of a success, helped a lot by the availability of HALO to play on it. The Xbox was also much stronger in terms on online gaming than rivals, coming in at a time when always-on broadband connections were starting to become popular. In the Microsoft-Sony-Sega-Nintendo race, the Xbox eventually came in second place in sales terms… way behind the PlayStation 2 and a little ahead of the GameCube.

Standard PC components added to the bulk

Although it was a successful platform, Microsoft failed to make any money on the hardware – in the end they lost billions – but this was part of a bigger strategy including selling many of the games themselves and providing subscription services. In the end, games consoles didn’t take over from PCs… but to a large extent smartphones did. Probably in the end, Microsoft’s foray into gaming was unnecessary, but today’s ninth-generation consoles essentially leave just Sony and Microsoft standing.

Although obsolete by today’s standards, special edition Xboxes or ones with a large selection of games can sell for hundreds of pounds. There’s also a healthy modding scene for those who want to get more out of the hardware. Even twenty years on, the original Xbox has its fans.

Image credits:
Evan-Amos via Wikimedia Commons - CC0
Swaaya via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 3.0

Nokia 7650 (2001)

Launched November 2001

It’s easy to think that smartphones didn’t exist before the original 2007 iPhone, but they most certainly did. Nokia had launched a hybrid PDA/phone as early as 1996 with the Nokia 9000 Communicator, or there was the Ericsson R380 from 1999… or going even further back was the IBM Simon from 1994. But these were all scaled-down computers, bulky and complex. But in 2001, Nokia released the 7650 which took the form factor of a phone and squeezed as much as possible into it.

Nokia 7650

This was a much more pocket-friendly device than some of those that had gone before. A slider phone weighing 154 grams and measuring a comfortable 114 x 56 x 26mm, it felt like a normal phone… one noticeable thing was the larger-than-normal 2.1” 176 x 208 pixel display which was much bigger than the type 1.5” 128 x 128 pixel screens that other early colour phones had.

It was also Nokia’s first phone with a built-in camera, a modest (by today’s standards) 640 x 480 pixel resolution, and photos could be sent to others using MMS or email. The 7650 supported GPRS data, had a WAP browser plus a somewhat limited Bluetooth implementation. Inside was a relatively powerful 194 MHz ARM processor with 4MB of storage, modest by today’s standards but much more powerful than a standard “dumb” phone.

The heart of the phone though was the Symbian Series 60 OS, which allowed the user to install – and if they wanted, even write – native applications directly onto the phone. In fact, the 7650 was the first Nokia Symbian smartphone to market, followed by a long line of others. Symbian itself was derived from Psion’s EPOC OS which was originally designed for the PDAs that the 7650 strove to replace.

Not a bad looking device by 2001 standards

This being the golden age of smartphone design, Nokia felt free to innovate. With the slider closed, the minimalist design seemed to make the screen dominate the handset  -although in reality it was only about a quarter of the size of the footprint of the phone. The minimalist buttons were also a precursor of what was to come. Nokia didn’t stick with the slider for the successor though, instead they went for a pair of weird monoblock designs with the 6600 and the whacky 3650.

The 7650 was relatively successful… not Nokia 1100 successful, but it sold well amongst gadget fans who were impressed enough for Nokia to persist with the smartphone idea. In one form or other, Symbian dominated the smartphone market with relatively few challengers until the first iPhone and Android devices appeared. Today the 7650 is quite collectable, with prices for good ones being in excess of £100.

Image credits: Nokia

Nokia 5510 (2001)

Launched October 2001

At the same time that Apple launched their groundbreaking iPod digital music player, Nokia were going for the same market with their equally groundbreaking Nokia 5510. Of course, today people remember the original the original classic iPod… but the 5510 hides in obscurity filed under W for weird.

A weird-looking Nokia 5510

The two devices were both trying to do the same thing, but both Apple and Nokia started from different origins. Where the iPod had a 5GB internal hard disk and was strictly a music-only device, the 5510 had 64MB of internal flash memory and also a full QWERTY keyboard, WAP browser, email client and of course it was a phone too.

This was Nokia’s first music capable phone, but it required a Windows PC to encode MP3s in a copy-protected format, and the 64MB of memory was about for about one album’s worth of songs (compared to the 1000 or so on the iPod). This was slow and cumbersome, and the 5510 didn’t support memory cards so you were stuck with this 64MB limit. However, the 5510 did include an FM radio which was quite a useful feature for its day.

Nokia wanted it to be more than just a music phone, so the inbuilt email client and the built-in QWERTY keyboard should have been a good match. Except of course that looking at it now, the keyboard takes up most of the device with a relatively tiny screen. But RIM hadn’t yet come up with their iconic 6230 design which was frankly a lot more usable, and which was much-copied in the years that followed its release.

Doubly weird, two Nokia 5510s

Flawed as a music player, and flawed as a messaging device… the 5510 nonetheless foreshadowed technologies that were to come. You can’t attach any blame to Nokia for seeing what consumers wanted, giving it a go and getting it wrong. But Nokia got it wrong rather too often, whereas the iPod was right first time.

Weird Nokia phones are quite collectable, and the 5510 easily falls into this category with good examples going for about £70 or so. You might only get limited use out of it, but certainly on looks along it still has the wow factor…

Image credits:
Nokia

Apple iPod (2001)

Introduced October 2001

Last time we looked at Apple’s offerings in October 1991 with the Mac Quadra and PowerBook machines. Although they were decent systems, Apple went into decline during the 1990s and by 1997 it was a hairs breadth away from bankruptcy. But a change in leadership, including the return of Steve Jobs and fresh engineering and design talent started to turn the company around. 1998’s iMac wowed consumers, but the company wasn’t going to rely just on the Mac this time around.

By 2001, Apple had an eye on the portable music player market – devices that were tricky to use and either very limited in what they could store or were huge. But Apple didn’t have enough engineers with the rights skills to make such a device, so Apple’s head of engineering – Jon Rubinstein – contracted the work out to a former Philips engineer named Tony Fadell who had made a couple of practical if commercially unsuccessful PDAs and then formed his own company. Fadell recruited other engineers from Philips and his own firm, and then added to this was Apple engineer Michael Dhuey and Apple design Jonathan Ive. Further work on the UI was outsourced to a company called Pixo (eventually acquired by Sun Microsystems), and a deal was struck with Toshiba to supply their compact 5GB hard drive which would form the heart of the whole thing.

This music player became the Apple iPod, developed in less than a year and quite unlike anything on the market. Capable of storing 1000 songs, it came with a prominent scroll wheel, a decently sized screen with easy-to-use options all in a compact and elegantly designed case. Although it wasn’t cheap, retailing at $399, it was easily better than almost anything else on the market and was a huge hit.

Apple iPods and a Mac G5

The original iPod had a 5GB drive, but a 10GB one followed. One major drawback was this it could only be used with a Mac. The second-generation iPod was launched less than a year later, had more space and a touch-sensitive scroll wheel… and it could be used with a PC. Less than a year after than, the inbuilt FireWire port was supplemented with a USB for greater compatibility and these incremental improvements kept on happening, with the original-style iPods forming the “Classic” range and more company “Mini”, tiny “Nano” and display-less “Shuffle” devices following. After the launch of the original iPhone, a “Touch” range became available which was essentially an iPhone minus the Phone.

In the end, dedicated music players started to become a bit redundant. Smartphones were just as capable and the last Classic iPod (the sixth generation) went off sale in 2014. The iPod Touch remains, with the 7th generation launched in 2019 which is closely related to the iPhone 7. Although it is a bit of a niche market now, along the way Apple sold hundreds of millions of iPods making it the best-selling device of its type in the world.

The iPod also demonstrated that Apple could succeed outside of the microcomputer market. The next logical target was phones, and Apple’s long-anticipated entry into the market… well, actually the first attempt was a disaster because they made too many compromises. But eventually we’d get the iPhone (and iPad) which redefined their respective marketplaces. Although the iPod is a much less important product today, it helped to make Apple almost ubiquitous.
 
Image credits:
Matthew Pearce via Flickr – CC BY 2.0

Ericsson T68 (2001)

Introduced July 2001

By the middle of 2001 the golden age of mobile phone design was beginning. New features were added to phones rapidly, and every handset managed to look very different from rivals. The next few years would see a wave of innovation – but for Ericsson, 2001 was also its swansong as a mobile phone brand.

Ericsson had produced a range of successful (and mostly very compact) phones but was losing money on the operation in a big way. Despite this, Ericsson continued to launch great new products and the Ericsson T68m (usually referred to as just the “T68”) was one of them. A diminutive 84 gram device, it packed in more features than rivals to create a very desirable handset.

This Ericsson T68m has seen better days

One of the main selling points was Bluetooth – one of the first phones to feature this technology. It also had a colour screen, tri-band GSM, GPRS packet data, a WAP browser, predictive text, a bitmap editor and a bunch of included games. A camera – the MCA-25 CommuniCam – was available as a clip-on extra, again making it one of the first phones to feature that particular technology.

Not long after the launch of the T68, Ericsson merged their mobile phone business with Sony to create Sony Ericsson. The T68 received a slight cosmetic makeover and had a software update to become the Sony Ericsson T68i, the first phone to carry that branding. Eventually the camera add-on became a standard accessory, helping to popularise the idea of cameraphones.

Sony Ericsson T68i with Communicam

When it eventually arrived, the replacement for the T68 was the stylish T610 and there was a successful run of handsets after that. Today, used prices for the T68i and T68m are pretty healthy with really good ones selling for £100 or more, although sub-£50 is more common. The Communicam camera add-on is available as new old stock from £50 or more, all pretty healthy for a 20 year old feature phone..

Image credits:
The Norwegian Telecom Musuem via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 4.0
Science Museum Group - CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Nintendo Game Boy Advance (2001)

Introduced March 2001

Nintendo had popularised handheld gaming, first with the simple but fun Game & Watch in 1980, then then Game Boy in 1990 and the Game Boy Color in 1998. By the early noughties, the technology for handheld devices was improving at a rapid rate – and it was into this market that the Game Boy Advance (or “GBA” for short) was born.

The original series of Game Boy devices used a weird Sharp CPU – the LR35902, which was a sort of cross between an Intel 8080 and a Zilog Z80. The new Game Boy Advance used a 32-bit ARM processor of the type that was eventually to become ubiquitous in handheld devices. The weird Sharp CPU was still there though, providing backwards compatibility with earlier Game Boy generations.

Game Boy Advance

Unlike earlier versions, the control buttons were on either side of the 2.9” colour display. But it was the display itself that was divisive – it didn’t have a backlight and was difficult to see in a lot of lighting conditions. Although 2001-era displays weren’t as good as they are today, the Game Boy Advance was a disappointment. However, power requirements were low and the unit would run for up to 15 hours on two AA batteries.

Limitations aside, it was a very successful device with a wide variety of games, including all those written for earlier Game Boy devices plus a large number of others written just for this console. The GBA also came in a wide variety of colours and special editions to tempt people to buy more than one. Less commonly used were adapters and link cables for playing multiplayer games and watching videos.

Game Boy Advance SP

Although it was a fundamentally good console, the poor screen held it back. In 2003 Nintendo launched the Game Boy Advance SP in a clamshell design with a front-light which improved matters, but a later revision in 2005 (the AGS-101) included a backlight and it finally made the GBA playable in all environments. The Nintendo DS effectively replaced the GBA and was compatible with most of its games, originally launched alongside the SP it eventually took over. Between all different models of the GBA, total sales were in excess of 80 million. If you want one today, prices vary significantly but an AGS-101 in good condition will start at around £150 but rarer variants can be much more expensive.
 

Image credits:
Evan-Amos via Wikimedia Commons – CC BY-SA 3.0
Evan-Amos via Wikimedia Commons – CC 0

Nokia 8310 (2001)

Launched March 2001

Twenty years ago mobile phones were becoming very popular, no longer the plaything of yuppies or sales reps the early 2000s saw the beginning of a golden age of handset design. Although primitive by today’s standards, phones of this era were developing rapidly and the space of just a few years saw colour screens, cameras, Bluetooth, multimedia and packet data.

One feature that was highly prized was size – but unlike today when bigger phones are considered better, two decade ago the race was to make things smaller. Into this market came the Nokia 8310, an exquisitely designed but very tiny device that formed part of Nokia’s “perfect” 8000 series of high-end mobile phones.

Nokia 8310

Weighing just 84 grams, the 8310 had a brightly-lit monochrome display, but surprisingly it also packed in an FM radio and was the first Nokia phone to feature GPRS. One key feature was the swappable Xpress-on covers which allowed to customise your phone with whatever style you wanted. Some built-in games such as the popular Snake II and the must-have early noughties infra-red port rounded off the feature set. The thing would run for days on a single charge, as would most phones of the time.

It wasn’t cheap, retailing at £400 or so in the UK. This of course just made it rather more exclusive and more desirable, and it ended up being one of Nokia’s iconic designs of the time. These days they are pretty common, and if you want a no-frills retro 2G phone then you can get a good one for about £30 or so. 

Image credit: Nokia

Nokia 8310 (2001)

Probably one of the cutest handsets ever made, the Nokia 8310 was launched in 2001 at roughly the same time as the Nokia 6310. But the key thing with this phone was that it was an 8000-series device, and as today that indicates an expensive and very desirable mobile phone.

What the Nokia 8310 had going for it was its relatively small size at just 97 x 43 x 19mm and 84 grams in weight. Contemporary phones (such as the 6310) were significantly bigger and heavier. It was not just size that set the 8310 apart, it also had interchangeable translucent covers and special lighting effects that marked it out as a high-fashion item.

At launch, the 8310 was very expensive - coming in at the equivalent of €600 or £400 for a SIM-free phone. Even for 2001, the 8310's specifications were a bit basic, with an 84 x 48 pixel monochrome display, no Bluetooth or camera and only monophonic ringtones.. although the 8310 was a very early phone to feature a built-in FM radio, voice commands and predictive text messaging. It was also one of the first phones to come with GPRS, although exactly what you were meant to do with it on such a basic handset is unclear.

The striking physical design gave the phone plenty of "wow factor", and the 8310 was notable enough to be a newsworthy handset, and it was even seen in movies and TV shows as a suitably impressive accessory.

The Nokia 8310 is quite a collectable phone today - a good reconditioned handset can cost €100 or so. Strangely, Nokia never really came up with a follow-up to the 8310 - a high end ultra-compact version of this would be interesting to see seven years after the original. Perhaps it is time that Nokia came up with something worthy to succeed it?

Nokia 8310 at a glance
Available:	2001
Network:	GSM 900 / 1800
Data:	GPRS
Screen:	84 x 48 pixels, monochrome
Camera:	No
Size:	Compact monoblock 97 x 43 x 19mm / 84 grans
Bluetooth:	No
Memory card:	No
Infra-red:	Yes
Polyphonic:	No
Java:	No
GPS:	No
Battery life:	2-4 hours talk / 4-16 days standby