BlackBerry Bold 9700 and Storm2 (2009)

Announced October 2009

Although 2009 had seen the rise and rise of Android and Apple smartphones, it’s easy to forget that they were still only quite small players in that market. When it came to smartphones that were actually used as smartphones – because many of Nokia’s Symbian devices were only used as feature phones by owners – then the company to beat was Research In Motion and their line of BlackBerry devices.

The killer application on the BlackBerry platform was messaging – no other smartphone had quite the capabilities when it came to email or instant message, and for this reason BlackBerry devices were extremely popular. So when RIM announced two significant devices in October 2009 they were at the top of their game.

BlackBerry Bold 9700 and Storm2

The BlackBerry Bold 9700 is one of the best classic BlackBerry devices ever. A useful evolution over the Bold 9000 launched the previous year, the 9700 had everything a smartphone should have, including 3.5G data, WiFi, GPS, a decent camera and good multimedia support. This classic BlackBerry had a physical QWERTY keyboard that fans loved plus the useful addition of a very usable small trackpad which made the whole user experience much better.

Both corporate and private users bought the 9700 in significant quantities, and it did seem that sticking to the classic BlackBerry formula was working well for RIM in the face of their upstart rivals.

Where the Bold 9700 built on success, the BlackBerry Storm2 was a follow-on to failure. The original BlackBerry Storm – released in 2008 – was a disaster. Poorly conceived and implements, the Storm was critically panned and unsurprisingly didn’t sell. The Storm2 fixed many of the problems of the original, including re-engineering the touchscreen display, including WiFi, fixing the software and fitting a better camera. As a result, the Storm2 was at least usable… but the specification was a year out of date when it hit the market and it was only a modest success.

In the end, the success of the Bold 9700 masked the disappointing sales of the Storm2. Although this didn’t look like a bad result, the problem was that RIM didn’t have a next-generation product that could complete with the new generation of smartphones coming out. It would take more than three years to produce a real successor to the classic BlackBerry platform, and that was a catastrophe that made even the original Storm look small in comparison.

Image Credits: RIM / BlackBerry

Videos: BlackBerry Bold 9700 and Storm2

 

Motorola DROID / Milestone (2009)

Motorola DROID

Launched October 2009

By October 2009 the Android operating system had been around for just over a year, and devices were beginning to get more common. However, version one of Android had quite a few rough edges both in terms of the user interface and the hardware it could support.

But Google and Motorola were working on a significant improvement, and the Motorola DROID was the world’s first Android 2.0 handset to market exclusively on the Verizon CDMA network, followed rapidly by a worldwide GSM version called the Motorola Milestone. A huge improvement over every rival Android smartphone, the DROID / Milestone showed the Motorola was a force to be reckoned with.

Compared with the rival iPhone 3GS, the Motorola had a much better screen and camera, turn-by-turn navigation, expandable memory, support for Adobe Flash and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard which was certainly useful but did add to the bulk.

The DROID / Milestone was almost definitely the most capable smartphone of any type on the market at the time. But in terms of sales, the device only made a modest impact. In the US the DROID was exclusive to the Verizon network, and went head-to-head with the iPhone on AT&T… in other words, to use the DROID you either had to be an existing Verizon customer or you had to switch networks.

Elsewhere in the world, Motorola had a more serious problem. Years of decline and unappealing handsets meant that many carriers no longer had a relationship with Motorola to speak of – this meant that Moto had an uphill struggle to get any carriers at all to pick it up. As a result most of the worldwide sales were for SIM-free units – a niche market at best, given a price tag of about €500.

Motorola Milestone

Although it was a major critical and design success, it was only a modest sales success. But it was enough to (just about) save Motorola who just two years previously looked doomed. There would still be turbulent times ahead for Moto.

Today the Motorola Milestone (A853) is a very rare thing to find, the Motorola DROID (A855) is much more common and is very cheap. As far as Motorola smartphones go, this is probably one of the most collectable and technologically it is certainly one of the most significant early Android devices.

Image credits: Motorola and Retromobe

Motorola DROID video

Motorola CLIQ / DEXT (2009)

Motorola CLIQ / DEXT

Announced September 2009

September 2009 marked the first anniversary of the launch of the first consumer Android phone, the T-Mobile G1 also known as the HTC Dream. The following 12 months had seen a handful of other devices from HTC and Samsung but there still wasn’t much choice on this supposedly open platform.

Motorola’s entry into the Android arena had been long anticipated. The struggling mobile maker had bet the barn on Google’s new operating system and had cancelled all the other varied smartphone platforms it was involved in.

As with some other early Android devices, the Motorola CLIQ or DEXT (depending on market) had a slide-out QWERTY keyboard but the relatively small 3.1” 320 x 480 pixel display was unimpressive compared to better-equipped rivals.

Android had improved a lot over the previous year, and Motorola had loaded a whole bunch of their MOTOBLUR social networking applications on top. It looked pretty decent overall, but it was also something of a red herring as Nokia also had the significantly better Motorola DROID under wraps which would be announced the following month.

It wasn’t a massive success, but the CLIQ / DEXT was the point where Motorola just about saved itself from oblivion. There were still going to be turbulent times ahead, but Motorola ended up raising the bar significantly in early Android phones. This isn’t a particularly collectable device, but it is quite rare with prices being around £40 or so.

Image credit: Motorola

Video: Motorola CLIQ / DEXT

Nokia Booklet 3G (2009)

Nokia Booklet 3G

Launched August 2009

By the summer of 2009 the technology used in smartphones was racing ahead. The third generation iPhone offered a beautifully seamless experience, Google's Android platform was catching up fast, Nokia’s market-leading Symbian OS had made a successful leap to touchscreens and the Linux-based Nokia N900 had been announced too and showed plenty of promise.

Great although these device were, they were all a bit small. Generally speaking, if you wanted something bigger then you’d be looking at a full-blown laptop or perhaps a smaller and cheaper netbook. And although a netbook was a practical thing with a variety of uses, they were very fiddly to use while out and about and lacked the “work anywhere” capabilities of a smartphone.

Nokia’s solution to this was the Booklet 3G, a high-quality lightweight device in an elegant aluminium case and with a high-resolution 10.1 inch screen. Powered by a 1.6GHz Intel Atom CPU with 1GB of RAM and a 120 GB hard disk, the Booklet 3G was designed to run Microsoft’s new Windows 7 OS.

In addition to WiFi, the Booklet 3G also came with a SIM card slot (as you might guess by the name) providing the potential for always-on connectivity through its 3.5G HSPA connection. Assuming you had a decent data plan, you could use the Booklet 3G seamlessly almost anywhere.

Nokia certainly showed everybody else how this sort of device should be done, but of course you might notice that we’re not all sitting around using Nokia Booklet 5Gs today. The problem was that just a few months after Nokia announced the Booklet 3G, Apple came out with the iPad. With a similar-sized screen to the Nokia, the iPad essentially upscaled the iPhone. And in this particular battle, it was the iPad that won.

Nokia had access to pretty much the same technology and resources as Apple, but Apple but it all together in a different and much more compelling way. Nokia didn’t make a direct successor to the Booklet 3G, however they did venture into a similar market with the excellent but ultimately unsuccessful Nokia Lumia 2520 in 2013. Meanwhile, Apple have a 38.1% share of the tablet market, but interestingly that market has been in decline for a while now.

Today, the Nokia Booklet 3G is a pretty uncommon find for collectors, with prices for decent examples being £150 or so. The problem with the Booklet is that Windows 7 goes end-of-life in January 2020, and although it does seem technically possible to install Windows 10 it does not seem to be a straightforward proposition. Still, for collectors of esoteric Nokia products the Booklet does seem tempting.

Image credits: Nokia

Nokia N900 (2009)

Nokia N900

Launched August 2009

Ten years ago this month, Nokia had the opportunity to bend the high-end smartphone market to its own will with the launch of the Nokia N900. Instead it failed to make the impact it needed, and it set off a chain of events that would smash Nokia’s dominance of the industry and nearly wipe its handsets out of existence altogether.

We’ve examined the failure of the N900 before, on the fifth anniversary of the launch of the device. Half a decade on has – if anything – made it more obvious that Nokia’s failed strategy left a huge smartphone-shape crater in the landscape.

It wasn’t a bad device, not at all. Nokia’s fourth-generation device running the Linux-based Maemo OS was mature and certainly capable enough to compete with Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android. A big screen and decent overall specs made this an attractive device, and of course Nokia had a lot of market goodwill. It should have been a success, yet it wasn’t.

Although it was probably better than the first-generation Android devices it was up against, the N900 certainly lacked the sleekness and polish of the iPhone. With the slide-out keyboard it was physically bulky, the resistive touchscreen was significantly less capable than Apple’s and the user interface lacked the elegance of iOS even though it was more capable. Not quite a killer device, but somewhere close.

But perhaps crucially, Nokia kept referring to the N900 as stage “4 of 5” of the development of the Maemo platform. While this would forgive the feeling that the N900 was something of a work-in-progress, it left customers with the impression that an even better device was in the works. Given that the N900 wasn’t cheap, waiting for stage “5 of 5” seemed like a decent option.

But Nokia never launched another Maemo device. There was no stage “5 of 5” around the corner. Nokia partly sabotaged their own product launch, and then failed to improve on it. Instead, Nokia’s highly anticipated announcement about the future of Maemo in February 2010 turned out not to be a new handset, but an announcement of the eventually disastrous merger with Intel’s Moblin OS to create a new platform called MeeGo.

MeeGo did eventually bear fruit with the excellent Nokia N9, but by mid-2011 – nearly two years after the launch of the N900 – it was an irrelevance and had already effectively been cancelled.

Bad planning, a lack of resources and a basic absence of common business sense killed off the product line, and it was such an important product line for Nokia too. CEO Stephen Elop ditched both MeeGo and the popular Symbian OS and bet everything on Windows. It failed.

Nokia also declined to get involved with Android which was the operating system that would eventually eat Nokia’s market share. A short-lived dalliance with Android in 2014 was shuttered when Microsoft bought Nokia’s handset business – and that too was closed down with the remnants spun off into a new venture called HMD Global who make Nokia-branded Android phones. HMD have been moderately successful in terms of sales, but perhaps more importantly they demonstrated that Nokia could perhaps have succeeded in the crowd of Android manufacturers that sprung up.

These days the N900 is a quite collectable handset, with prices for good and unlocked models being about £200 or so. Oddly enough that’s a lot more than the highly successful iPhone 3GS from the same era.

Image credits: Nokia

Samsung S9110 (2009)

Samsung S9110

Introduced July 2009

The Samsung S9110 looks like a smartwatch, but instead it came several years before what we’d think of as a modern smartwatch, and it instead a complete feature phone shrunk down to the size of a wearable.

The most obvious feature of the phone itself was a 1.76” 176 x220 pixel touchscreen mounted on the front, the S9110 also supported Bluetooth, had an MP3 player and voice recognition and even a web browser. Internal memory was just 40MB and wasn’t expandable, and the S9110 took an old-fashioned mini-SIM car which must have taken up a fair amount of its internal space. A 630 mAh battery was quoted as giving 300 hours of use and the whole thing weighed 91 grams.

It was all very clever and this sophisticated gadget was a bit like something out of a James Bond movie. But it was also pretty useless… and it didn’t really need to be a phone at all, it might well have been better as a Bluetooth add-on to a more normal phone instead. As you might have guessed, the S9110 wasn’t a big seller and neither were the rival devices launched at the same time.

Ultimately the watch phone was a failure, and the modern smartwatch has fared little better.
It did have its fans though, and in those pre-smartwatch days it was one of the best ways of fulfilling that particular gadget need, with second hand ones selling for hundreds of pounds. Today you’d be lucky to find one at any price.

Image credit: Samsung

HTC Hero (2009)

Announced June 2009

By the middle of 2009, Apple was hitting its stride with the seriously good third-generation iPhone 3GS. However, the rival Android platform was still in its first generation with devices such as the Samsung I7500 Galaxy and T-Mobile G1 which didn’t quite have the same level of polish.

However, HTC was pushing things forward and their third Android smartphone was the elegant-looking HTC Hero. In technical terms, this wasn’t a million miles away from HTC’s earlier Magic handset, but it had a better camera and a much sharper design.

HTC Hero

Unlike the somewhat retro G1 and Magic, the HTC Hero looked very modern. At the bottom of the handset was a distinctive kick or chin, which bent out from the handset. Unusually, the Hero had a little trackball mounted in the kick, something that lingered in HTC devices for a while, an addition to a set of physical buttons that the iPhone lacked. This was also the first HTC with a 3.5mm jack plug for headphones.

The sharper design wasn’t just in terms of hardware. The Hero ran Android 1.5, a fledgling version of this now ubiquitous OS. Early versions of Android were rather rough around the edges, so HTC added their “Sense UI” interface on top of it to make it nicer to use. HTC were pretty good at this sort of thing, having reskinned Windows Mobile on their other smartphones for some time.

It did pretty well in terms of sales, but problems getting carriers to roll out updates to Android 2.1 left some customers annoyed and for most customers there would be no official updates beyond that. In comparison, Apple fully supported the 3GS for four years. Even a decade after the launch of the Hero, the short support lifespan of certain Android phones is an issue.

Image credit: HTC

Apple iPhone 3GS (2009)

Apple iPhone 3GS (2009)

Launched June 2009

The Apple iPhone 3GS is – possibly – the best smartphone ever at the time it was launched. A bold claim perhaps for a product line that had been around for two years, but there's a saying the third time's a charm and perhaps it applies here.

Earlier generations of the iPhone were well-received, but fundamentally flawed and displayed the lack of maturity of the product. Two years in and the 3GS finally fixed many of these faults. One of the main ones was that the 3GS was the first iPhone that could record video. Almost unbelievably, the first two generations couldn’t do these even when it was a standard feature on just about every other phone on the market. The camera on the back was improved from 2 to 3 megapixels for stills photos, which while still pretty good in terms of quality still lagged behind the competition in terms of pixel count.

The 3GS also added MMS support, a digital compass, copy-and-paste, a landscape keyboard and 16GB or 32GB of internal storage. It was also twice as fast as the iPhone 3G, which was a key selling point.

There were still a few features lacking – the 320 x 480 pixel display was beginning to look a bit dated, and there was no front-facing camera… but video calling still wasn’t really a thing a decade ago. Overall though, no excuses needed making for this generation of the iPhone, unlike the first two.

Reportedly, Apple shifted a million units in the first weekend and then around 30 million over the life of the device, far more than the previous two generations added together. The iPhone was supported by Apple until September 2013, giving over four years of software updates and setting a standard that still puts most rivals to shame.

Although it’s an important device, it’s not a particularly collectible one and unlocked models can be had for a few tens of pounds.


Image credit: Apple

T-Mobile Sidekick LX 2009 (2009)

T-Mobile Sidekick LX 2009

Launched April 2009

For the best part of the decade one of the most popular smartphones in the US was the T-Mobile Sidekick range. A versatile and easy-to-use platform, the Sidekick appealed especially to younger users… but it also turned out to be a great messaging device for hearing-impaired customers too.

The Sidekick was actually a T-Mobile branded Danger Hiptop device. Originally launched in 2002, the platform evolved over the years to become the catchily-named T-Mobile Sidekick LX 2009.

Like most other Sidekicks, this had a decently-sized display that slid back to reveal a relatively large QWERTY keyboard underneath. The LX 2009 was the first one in the range with 3G support and GPS, on top of which it had Bluetooth and a 3.2 megapixel camera.

But what the Sidekick really excelled at was apps, in particular messaging. If combined with a data-only plan, it was possible for users to keep in touch with their friends either through the built-in messaging app or the integrated social networking support. This also appealed to deaf users because of its convenience, ease-of-use and relatively low cost. All data was backed up to what we would call a “cloud” today, so it didn’t matter if you lost your device… you could simply get another one.

The Sidekick wasn’t just limited to the US, T-Mobile carried it in other countries too and other carriers branded variants of the Danger Hiptop devices with their own names. But the US was the biggest market, and T-Mobile was the exclusive carrier there.

It looked like the Sidekick had carved out an important market niche, and even upcoming smartphones such as the iPhone and Androids didn’t really look like they compete with what the Sidekick excelled at.

But there was trouble brewing. In 2008, Danger was bought by Microsoft who then promptly started to leach people and resources out of the company to work on Microsoft’s own projects. A catastrophic failure of Danger’s own servers in late 2009 led to an embarrassing data loss which it took months to recover from, and even then it didn’t get back everything. It was a devastating blow for T-Mobile Sidekick brand.

T-Mobile dropped the Sidekick platform in 2010, and although it laboured on with different carriers for a while, by 2011 the service was discontinued completely.

And what did Microsoft do with all the employees they took from Danger? They developed the Microsoft KIN, which turned into one of the biggest handset disasters of all time. Two catastrophes for the price of one.

In mid-2011, T-Mobile tried to revive the Sidekick concept with a Samsung-designed Android phone. Although it was a decent facsimile of what a Sidekick could be, T-Mobile were really trying to flog a dead horse and it was not a success.

Today there are quite a few Sidekicks about on the second-hand market, mostly from the US. Because Danger’s cloud service shut down long ago, they are not really very useful for much except as an example of what might have been had Danger not messed up.

Image credit: T-Mobile

Samsung I7500 Galaxy (2009)

Samsung I7500 Galaxy

Announced March 2009

Pretty much anyone who has been interested in consumer technology for 12 years or more will remember the launch of the original iPhone. A hugely significant device, it shifted the market and it started Apple’s impressive dynasty of smart devices.

A little over two years later another smartphone was launched by a rival company, perhaps one that was just as influential or arguably even more so. That company was Samsung, and the smartphone was the Samsung I7500 Galaxy.

This is the original Galaxy smartphone. No letters or numbers after its name, the “Galaxy” tag seemed a bit of an afterthought after the “I7500”. There was some excitement over the launch of the I7500, mostly because Android handsets were a bit thin on the ground with a couple of handsets from HTC and nothing else.

It was hardly an iconic design, with the 3.2” QVGA screen taking up less than half the front and with some buttons seemingly from some Samsung feature phone being quite prominent underneath. But it was what it could *do* rather than the way it looked that attracted attention. With 3.5G data support, WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, expandable memory and of course a whole bunch of applications you could download, the I7500 was a capable modern smartphone.

Crucially, both Apple and HTC had entered into carrier-exclusive deals in many markets, meaning that you might have to swap your mobile phone company to get one. The I7500 was much more widely available and it was instrumental in bringing this new generation of technology to a wider audience.

It also launched the Galaxy range, including the range-topping Galaxy S a year later. According to GSMArena, in the space of a decade there have been 442 devices launched under the “Samsung Galaxy” name, twenty times the number of Apple iPhone models. There’s no doubt that despite the odd hiccup, the Galaxy range has been a huge success.

The I7500 isn’t particularly common today with prices appearing to be £100 and upwards. Despite its rather un-iconic styling, it might just be important enough to add to your collection.

Image credits: Samsung

Video: Samsung I7500 Galaxy

TAG Heuer MERIDIIST (2009)

TAG Heuer MERIDIIST

Launched March 2009

A luxury watch can easily cost thousands of pounds, but a good quality luxury watch is a bit of an investment – with a bit of care it should last for decades and be every bit as useful as it was the day you bought it.

Alternatively, you could spend that sort of money on something else. And a decade ago, luxury watchmaker TAG Heuer came up with the idea that you might want to spend a similar amount of cash on a mobile. And because TAG Heuer can also make a pretty decent watch, they decided to use some of that expertise to come up with a phone.

So, starting at about £5600 in today’s money and going up to the equivalent of about £30,000 you could buy yourself a TAG Heuer MERIDIIST. A beautifully engineered and very striking device that also had the unfortunate problem that it was a pile of crap.

OK, we are probably being harsh. It was a beautiful pile of crap. Even a diamond-and-leather encrusted pile of crap. It was, in effect, an exquisitely designed device that gave about as much functionality as a £100 feature phone.

Even for a decade ago, the MERIDIIST looked obsolete. For a fraction of the cost you could have bought an iPhone 3G. With the money you saved... well, you could buy yourself a nice watch. A really nice watch.

Despite it being almost entirely useless, the MERIDIIST did seem to find a market with people who perhaps had more money than sense. These days you can pick one up second-hand for about £600 or so, which is still an expensive way to get hold of a pretty basic feature phone.

Image credits: TAG Heuer

Samsung Blue Earth S7550 (2009)

Announced February 2009

Ten years ago, phone manufacturers were experimenting with more environmentally-friendly designs. While much of this revolved around packaging and recycled plastics, there was also a move to look at adding solar panels to phones so that they could be charged from the sun.

Samsung Blue Earth

You might at this point realise that modern phones don’t have solar panels, and that this concept was not successful. And you would be right, but it’s an interesting side-note in the history of phone design.

The Samsung Blue Earth was first announced at MWC in February 2009 along with some solar devices from other manufacturers. The Blue Earth was one of the stars of the show though, with a touchscreen display and an attractive design to go with it. But it wasn’t until October that they actually revealed the specifications of the phone which started shipping the same month.

Despite the touchscreen, this was a feature phone rather than a smartphone. It came with a number of “eco-friendly” apps such as a pedometer which worked out how much CO2 you were saving by walking. The specs overall were competitive for the time and the overall response was pretty positive.

So why didn’t it catch on? At about €300 the device was fairly expensive, and then there was the panel itself. Yes, it certainly charged the phone but only relatively slowly. Even by Samsung’s own figures, you’d have to leave your expensive device sitting around in sunlight for an hour to get ten minute’s talktime.

The fundamental problem was the size of the panel that could fit on the phone – to be really useful, it would need to be much bigger than the phone itself. And of course there was no need for TARDIS-like trickery, you could simply attach a bigger panel by plugging one in. Even 10 years ago, you could get a decently-sized solar panel with USB outputs for £50 or so.

Today battery life is probably even more of a problem than ten years ago, but there’s an even simpler solution than wandering around the place with solar panels sticking out of you and that’s to carry a power bank with a large battery. And if you have solar panels on your house, you can even charge it with renewable energy too. Although it you really want one, you can currently buy a solar-powered iPhone of questionable taste.

Image credit: Samsung

Palm Pre (2009)

Launched January 2009

When Palm launched their Palm Pre smartphone half a decade ago, we were quite excited. Perhaps this was the phone that would have wowed consumers and changed the market forever. If it had been launched two years previously, that is.

Today, we still think the same. The Palm Pre was a brilliantly unique smartphone, which despite a few rough edges gave a user experience that was superior to anything else at the time. Designed from the ground up to be an easy-to-use multitasking operating system, the Pre’s webOS environment ran different apps as “cards” that users could swipe between easily. Comprehensive email support (which was important at the time), a decent web browser and even a reasonably large selection of apps were all available, combined with a cute curved design which made the Pre look very different from the rival iPhone. And it had wireless charging too, which was certainly a novelty for the time, and a physical keyboard set it apart from Apple's offering too.

Palm had been a pioneer – perhaps the pioneer – in early handheld computing. The Palm Pilot (launched in 1996) dominated that market segment, to the extent that the phrase “Palm Pilot” was sometimes applied to any PDA. But the rise of early smartphones such as the Sony Ericsson P900 effectively killed off standalone PDAs, and it took a while for Palm to respond with its range of PalmOS-based Treo smartphones that it acquired from rival firm Handspring.

A move into Windows phones hadn’t provided the boost that Palm was looking for, so they started to develop a completely new operating system called webOS. When it was launched in January 2009 along with the Pre, Palm still had enough market presence to have the phone dubbed an “iPhone killer” by the press (spoiler alert: it wasn’t).

Although the software environment was promising, the hardware was pretty shoddy. Palm fans who decided to be loyal to the brand were rewarded with brittle screens and cases, and keys and control sliders that would break or malfunction. This did not help sales.

The competition was also getting serious – the iPhone was in its second generation with the much improved 3GS on the way, HTC had already kick-started the Android market and Samsung was on the verge of releasing its first Galaxy smartphone. And if you didn’t want either of those, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic was a pretty accomplished alternative. And all of those rivals had more apps to choose from than the Pre.

As good as it was – and even with the goodwill of Palm fans – the Pre was neither a success nor a failure. The Palm Pre 2 (launched nearly 2 years later) fixed many of those faults, but it was really just the product that Palm should have launched four years earlier. Even with the weight of new owners HP behind it, the entire line was heading for extinction.

WebOS eventually ended up with LG, who use it in smart TVs and other appliances, and the Palm name lives under today with the peculiar Palm Palm, made under licence by TCL who also build BlackBerry and Alcatel smartphones. Collectors of esoteric devices might be interested to know that the various generations of Pre can be picked up for between £10 to £50.

Image credits: Palm, Inc.

Retro 5|10: December 2004 and 2009

December is usually a quiet month as manufacturers concentrate on shipping already-announced products to the shops in time for Christmas, but there were a handful of announcements five and ten years ago.

December 2004

Ten years ago, Sharp was leading the pack when it came to screen and camera resolution, but most devices were exclusive to Vodafone. The Sharp TM200 was only the second two-megapixel camera on the UK market, and the other one was the Sharp 902. Despite this, Sharp didn't really capture the public imagination, which seemed to be a curse facing the Japanese mobile manufacturers.

Sharp TM200

Another Japanese handset this month was the Sanyo S750, a capable enough device but in a slabby and unattractive package which must have lacked shelf appeal in the shops. Sanyo didn't stick around in the market for long.

Sanyo S750

Motorola on the other hand kept pumping out variations of the same clamshell, and the Motorola V330 was yet another example of this. Despite a lack of imagination, Motorola sold quite a lot of these attractive but somewhat unfriendly devices.

Motorola V330

December 2009

The original Nokia 6700 Classic was a tasteful feature phone.. until Nokia covered it in some sort of yellow metal and called in the Nokia 6700 Classic Gold Edition. It was either a must-have fashion accessory or deeply tacky, depending on your point of view. We will let you make your own mind up.

Nokia 6700 Classic Gold Edition

Rather less garish was the Nokia 2710 Navigation Edition which was a GPS-equipped Series 40 feature phone, bringing budget satnav capabilities at just over €100. Of course, it was never going to be as easy to use as a dedicated navigation device or modern smartphone.

Nokia 2710 Navigation Edition

Two phones that attempted to be more environmentally friendly than average, the Sony Ericsson Elm and Hazel came with reduced packaging and a higher level of recycled plastics, but they didn't really address all the problems and met with a cool reception from consumers.

Sony Ericsson Elm

Sony Ericsson Hazel

Retro 5|10: November 2004 and 2009

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.

Nokia 7710

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.

NEC E338

LG U8100 Series

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.

Nokia 6020

Nokia 3230

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.

Samsung E610

Samsung E850

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.

Motorola Milestone

Sony Ericsson Xperia X10

Dell Mini 3

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.

Emblaze First Else

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.

Nokia 6700 Slide

Nokia 5330 Mobile TV Edition

Nokia 1280

Nokia 2690

Retro 5|10: October 2004 and 2009

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.

Samsung D500

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.

PalmOne Treo 650

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.

Motorola V620

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.

Panasonic Z800

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.

Sagem myC5-2

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.

Motorola DROID

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.

Samsung Galaxy Spica

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 Blue Earth

Samsung SCH-W880

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.

Samsung Giorgio Armani Smartphone

Samsung Omia Pro

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.

HTC HD2

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.

BlackBerry Storm2

BlackBerry Bold 9700