A few days ago we saw Apple’s annual launch event of new iPhones with the XS, XS Max and cheaper XR devices. The XR is designed to bring iPhone features in at a lower price point by replacing some of the more expensive features with something a bit cheaper. This isn’t the first time that Apple have tried a marketing approach like this. Five years ago this month they launched the iPhone 5S annd iPhone 5C at the same time, with mixed results.
As with the XS, the iPhone 5S was an upgrade of the previous year’s model – the iPhone 5. Keeping the same smallish 5” display of the 5, the 5S added a fingerprint scanner and had a more powerful 64-bit processor, housed in a variety of high-end metallic-and-glass cases.
The iPhone 5C was the cheaper model, similar in concept to the new XR. The 5C was essentially a reskin of the old 5, replacing the case with a brightly-coloured polycarbonate affair. This was essentially copying Nokia who had won praise for the cheerful design of their Windows-powered Nokia Lumia range. It wasn’t just the hardware that look a bit like Nokia, the new version of the operating system – iOS 7 – introduced a simpler, flatter interface which was a little more like Windows than the skeuomorphic feel with older versions of iOS.
The new design of iOS was well-received, shipping with both the 5S and the 5C and pushed out over-the-air to everything back to the iPhone 4. On top of that, the iPhone 5S sold very well – as most new iPhones do – but the 5C was more of a problem.
Apple iPhone 5C. Cheapskate.
Ever since Apple had launched their second iPhone, there was always a lower-cost option available… the previous year’s model (or in some cases the model before that too). Cheaper they may have been, but it wasn’t obvious that the owner had got something out of the bargain bin. The 5C was different – it wasn’t just priced more cheaply, it was constructed out of cheaper materials and because it looked very different from other iPhones it was immediately obvious that the owner had gone for the cheaper option. That might have been acceptable if the 5C really was cheap, but in reality the 5S didn’t cost a lot more. So, buy a 5C you might look like a skinflint even though you’d forked out a substantial wad of cash.
Sales of the 5C were nowhere near the levels that Apple was expecting, and the 5S outsold it three-to-one. This led to a shortage of 5S devices in the supply chain and a surplus of 5Cs. It seemed clear that consumers preferred the premium product to the better value proposition, which was probably not lost on Apple when they launched their top-of-the-range grand-and-a-half iPhone XS Max this week.
The iPhone 5S is still supported by Apple and is due to have the new iOS 12 OS available for it, support for the 5C ended in mid-2017. Yes, you could have saved $100 by buying the 5C instead of the 5S, but it wouldn’t have had the life-span. And everyone would have thought you were a cheapskate.
Let’s say that you are one of the world’s most famous brands, and you make a smartphone which easily has the best camera that any smartphone in the world has ever had, and then you add all the modern features that all the rivals have on top of it. Sounds like a recipe for success, yes? Well, in the case of the Nokia Lumia 1020… it wasn’t.
The headline feature of the Lumia 1020 was definitely the camera. Featuring a stonking 41 megapixels combined with optical image stabilisation (OIS) and a large sensor, this smartphone’s camera completely stomped on its rivals.
This remarkable “PureView” camera had first been seen in the Nokia 808 – Nokia’s very last Symbian smartphone – a bit over a year earlier. The clever folk at Nokia had tweaked it a bit in the meantime, and crucially had added OIS to make pictures even sharper. By default, the 1020 actually took 5 megapixel cameras that were vivid and sharp by using oversampling, but you could also use a Pro Camera app that could save both a 5 megapixel picture and one up to 38 megapixels at the same time. If you wanted to edit the photo and zoom into some detail later, then the higher resolution was probably for you. The Lumia 1020 could also effectively emulate an optical zoom by providing 4X near-lossless zoom with the huge megapixel count.
The rest of the hardware was no slouch either – a 4.5” 768 x 1280 pixel display, 1.5 GHz dual-core CPU, 2GB of RAM, 32 or 64GB of internal storage, NFC, 4G support and even an FM radio plus all the things that every other smartphone had. The camera could also take 1080p HD video and there was a 1.2 megapixel selfie camera on the front too. It was a bit of a big beast and it certainly wasn’t cheap, but what was there not to like?
The catch was… this was a Windows phone. Nokia had been punting Windows devices for a year and a half, and despite being critically acclaimed it turned out that consumers weren’t really that interested. The Windows 8 OS shipped with the Lumia 1020 was elegant and complemented the hardware precisely, but it simply did have whatever it needed to have to steal customers from Android and iOS. The seamless support for Office 365 did appeal to corporate customers though, and quite a few did start to migrate from BlackBerry to Windows. But it wasn’t enough.
Nokia did start on the path to produce a successor – the Lumia 1030. But by then Microsoft were in charge and they tried to drive Windows Phone sales by pursuing the value end of the market instead. Although 2015’s Lumia 950 did revisit the PureView camera with a decent enough 20 megapixel unit, Windows Phone was largely irrelevant by that point.
Today an unlocked Lumia 1020 in good condition can cost you less than £40, where the earlier Nokia 808 will cost you several times more. Today, Android devices such as the Huawei P20 Pro come close in terms of camera specifications, but no mainstream camera phone to date has topped the Lumia 1020’s 41 megapixel camera.
Image credit: Nokia
Nokia Lumia 1020: Video
Check out some more shots of this epic cameraphone in the video we made to cover its launch five years ago.
A brief history lesson – back in May 2005 Nokia announced their Linux-based 770 Internet Tablet, running an operating system called Maemo. This had most of the ingredients of the modern smartphone apart from the actual phone, and it went through several revisions such as the N800 and N810 before being turned into a pretty capable smartphone in 2009 with the N900. But then a disastrous attempt to merge Maemo with Intel’s Moblin OS to create a new OS called MeeGo caused the project to stall and at a key part of the smartphone wars, Nokia found itself without a competitive product. The follow-up to the N900, the Nokia N9 was launched 2 years afterwards, but by this time Nokia had already given up on MeeGo and had decided to base future smartphones on Windows.
The N9 caused quite a stir, but Nokia deliberately restricted its launch to smaller markets, presumably to meet a contractual obligation rather than just cancelling it. The N9 was the phone that Nokia didn’t want you to buy, and yet people did and they found that this latest incarnation of the Maemo / MeeGo operating system was rather elegant and had potential.
Sailfish OS screenshot
Nokia’s cancellation of the N9 was a death-knell for MeeGo, and that operating system was eventually merged with another Linux-based OS called LiMo to become Tizen which eventually found a niche as an embedded systems OS, especially with Samsung.
To some, the effectively cancellation of MeeGo seemed to be a squandering of something valuable. So, a group of engineering (most former Nokia employees) created a company called Jolla to develop the MeeGo-derived Sailfish OS. And in May 2013 they announced the Jolla smartphone (just called "Jolla" and pronounced "Yo-La")).
The Jolla shared a similar design philosophy to the N9, with simple and clean lines and a brightly coloured back. The operating system was as powerful as anything else on the market, but with a swipe-based user interface that made it stand out from Android and iOS offerings. The Jolla smartphone appealed to Nokia and Linux fans in particular, and it ended up being a niche success.
An attempt to launch a Jolla Tablet nearly ended in disaster when the company couldn’t bring it to market in time and had to offer refunds to customers who had crowdfunded it. However the company persisted and the Sailfish OS continues to be ported to other devices, and is still around 5 years later.
Jolla and Sailfish haven’t quite had the breakthrough success that they need, however the Sailfish OS is finding its way into devices for emerging markets and more specialist applications such as the highly secure Turing Phone. It seems that seven years after Nokia abandoned this particular platform, it is still going strong.
In 2013 HTC was firmly established as a leading maker of Android smartphones. At the same time, Facebook was experience a huge surge in popularity, signing up its billionth user a few months previously. Creating a product that combined a good quality Android handset with an unrivalled social networking experience should have been a huge success, but instead it ended up as a huge disaster.
The device in question was the HTC First, a decent and inexpensive midrange handset with an excellent 4.3” display and a rather pleasing minimalist design (or you might just call it “boring”). The software that made it different from other Androids was Facebook Home which replaced pretty much the entire Android experience with Facebook instead.
Facebook Home’s lock screen displayed notifications from the owner’s Facebook feed, and opening the phone would lead to an advanced Facebook app rather than Android. More immersive than the standard Facebook app, Home included features such as “Chat Heads” which meant that you could talk to a friend while using another app.
There were a few disadvantages – one of which was that Home relegated the usual Android interface and apps to a back burner. The HTC First also suffered from a poor camera and limited non-expandable internal memory. But overall the package looked like it would appeal to those consumers who were glued to Facebook all the time. More to the point, HTC had previously had a minor success with a couple of other Facebook-y phones, so it wasn’t a complete shot in the dark.
The HTC First and Facebook Home launched amid much publicity in April 2013. The plan was that AT&T in the US would get the device first, followed by selected other carriers worldwide. AT&T offered the first at $99.99 with a two-year contract, which was pretty decent value. Everybody seemed to be expecting the First to sell well. It didn’t.
AT&T found that the handset wasn’t shifting, so they dropped the price to 99 cents after a few weeks. But then it still didn’t shift, and after selling reportedly less than 15,000 units despite the price drop it was dropped by AT&T. Despite Facebook and HTC claiming that the worldwide rollout was “delayed”, the device was cancelled amid much blood-letting and both HTC and Facebook.
In short, the HTC First and Facebook Home were a disaster. What seemed like a good idea at the time just didn’t appeal to consumers, who even five years ago were worried about the privacy implications of a device running Facebook all the time. Even for die-hard Facebook fans the interface was just too much Facebook, too much of the time.
The First lasted for about a month, Facebook Home limped on until January 2014 when Facebook stopped updating it. In the long run the fiasco didn’t do Facebook a lot of harm, but it didn’t provide the turnaround in fortunes that HTC needed and in 2018 HTC divested part of its smartphone business to Google – but ask Motorola how Google’s previous adventure in that field turned out.
Product tour
You might guess that we're not monster fans of Facebook by the following product tour we made at the HTC First's launch.
After three years and four versions, Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S range had become firmly established as the Android device that all other manufacturers had to beat. Launched in March 2013, the Samsung Galaxy S4 is perhaps as close as you can get to an archetypical Samsung smartphone.
Launched in March 2013, the hardware was first class and was easily better than the rival iPhone 5 in every respect. The Galaxy S4 a 5” full HD display, 13 megapixel primary camera, quad or octa-core CPU with 2GB of RAM, expandable memory, 4G LTE support, wireless charging and a whole raft of sensors including a barometer and humidity sensor. Nothing else came close, and the iPhone 5 looked like it was a couple of generations behind.
The operating system was Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean) out of the box, but Samsung did their usual thing of adding a whole bunch of their own software on top, not all of which was terribly useful. This “bloatware” was annoying to many customers at the time, and it is still annoying for Samsung customers five years later.
So the hardware was good, the software bloat was bad… but there was an ugly side to the Galaxy S4 too. No, not its conservative slab-like design (also a feature of Samsung smartphones) but its apparent propensity for catching fire, made worse by apparent attempts to cover the problem up. These problems didn’t go away either, eventually leading to the catastrophic launch of the Galaxy Note 7 in 2016.
In terms of industrial design the Galaxy S4 has all the charm of a microwave oven, but even five years on the hardware is still pretty powerful. Smartphone tinkerers can pick up a decent used one for about €100 and then upgrade it to the more modern LineageOS 14.1 (based on Android 7.1.2)
Video
We made a video when the Galaxy S4 launched exploring some more of its features and comparing it to the previous models, if you want a further trip down memory lane.
It’s one of the stand-out phone in the history of handset disasters – announced five years ago this month the BlackBerry Z10 was a catastrophic failure that very nearly killed its maker. Sitting squarely on the downward slope of BlackBerry’s status of a darling of the technology industry to a company that people are surprised is still in business, the Z10 and companion Q10 deserve to be looked at once more.
A brief history lesson – BlackBerry was called Research in Motion (RIM) when it was founded in 1984. During the 1980s and early 1990s, RIM explored markets in communications and point-of-sale devices. In the later 1990s, RIM diversified into two-way pagers which led to the BlackBerry 850 in 1999, followed by email-enabled smartphones such as the BlackBerry 6230 in the early 2000s.
What started out life as a product appealing to large corporations ended up – somewhat by chance – as being an enormous consumer hit, fuelled in part by devices such as the BlackBerry Pearl smartphone. Even the launch of the iPhone in 2007 couldn’t stop RIM’s growth, and in 2011 it had sales of an astonishing $19.9 billion, compared to just $595 million in 2004.
BlackBerry 850, 6230, Pearl 8100
But although BlackBerry devices were always superlative when it came to email, they were pretty terrible when it came to other things – especially web browsing. As the impact of iOS and Android smartphones began to change the way people used the web, the clunky interface of BlackBerry devices was off-putting.
Sure, BlackBerry had tried to improve things but by 2011 had pushed their old platform as far as it could go with the BlackBerry Bold Touch 9900. But too many elements of the operating system were unchanged from the 6230 nearly a decade earlier. RIM had tried an all-touch device as early as 2008 with the BlackBerry Storm 9500 which turned out to be catastrophically awful and very buggy. Despite RIM’s best efforts to put lipstick on a pig, consumers could still tell that it was a pig.
BlackBerry Storm 9500, Bold Touch 9900
RIM had been aware that their products were becoming increasingly uncompetitive and by 2010 they embarked on a project to adapt the Unix-like QNX operating system into a mobile OS good enough to fight back against Apple and Google. QNX was designed to be a real-time operating system, and had (and indeed still has) a reputation for stability and reliability – and best of all as far as RIM were concerned, they already owned QNX.
The first QNX-based product to be announced was the BlackBerry Playbook. Despite initial promise, the Playbook was deeply flawed and full of bugs. Customers stayed away in their droves, but it did at least show that QNX had the right potential.
BlackBerry continued to work in turning QNX into the BlackBerry 10 operating system that their next-generation phones would need, but it took over two years after the launch of the Playbook to finally announce their new BlackBerry Z10 and Q10 smartphones, which they did in January 2013.
To put this in context – the original Apple iPhone had been launched six years previously in January 2007 (a line that had progressed all the way to the iPhone 5) and Android devices had been selling in increasingly large numbers for four years. RIM (who changed their name at this point to BlackBerry) were very, very late entrants into this market, and the Z10 and Q10 would need to be something special.
Black BlackBerry Z10
Although both products were announced at the same time, the Z10 and Q10 would not ship at the same time. The Z10 was a conventional-looking touchscreen smartphone with a decent hardware specification. The Q10 on the other hand was much more BlackBerry-like with a QWERTY keyboard, but it still featured a touchscreen and the new BlackBerry 10 operating system.
BlackBerry 10 was a radical departure from most smartphone operating systems when it came to the user interface. Lacking any button the whole things was based on a series of different swipes (rather like the modern iPhone X). It was a steep learning curve for BlackBerry users, and it wasn’t a surprise to find out that it had some serious bugs at launch. There were also only a small number of native applications for it, which was hardly going to tempt people away from other platforms.
The fact that the Z10 was released months before the Q10 was the result of huge infighting at RIM, with management divided over whether to launch the all-screen one first, or the one with a more traditional design. This process reportedly pushed back the launch of either device by a full year. And history pretty much proved that the Z10 was the wrong decision, because BlackBerry customers who wanted something like that had long ago defected to rivals, and the Z10 failed to appeal to traditionalists who wanted a physical QWERTY keyboard.
The Z10 bombed. It didn’t appeal to either existing or new customers, and it turns out that BlackBerry had built a lot of them in order to meet demand that never materialised, leading to a billion-dollar write off of inventory. Sales continued to collapse, losses began to mount and the stock price cratered. Senior management were thrown out, to be replaced by managers who would also eventually be thrown out. Most industry observers agreed that BlackBerry was doomed.
It didn't help when BlackBerry "brand ambassador" Alicia Keys was caught Tweeting from her Apple device either.
BlackBerry? Alcatel? TCL?
Lost among this was the Q10 which now had become toxic because of the failure of the Z10. Customers were buying phones from BlackBerry, but they were just the Curves and Bolds that they had been buying for years.
BlackBerry seemed doomed, but its enormous cash pile and a stubbornness to die means that it is still is business today, but with a very different business model. Handset production is licensed to TCL who base current BlackBerry devices on designs they sell under the Alcatel brand (oddly enough, licensed from Nokia) and who also bought the Palm brand from HP. Current BlackBerry devices run Android with a BlackBerry software stack on top… which is probably what BlackBerry should have done all along.
Had either the Z10 or Q10 hit the market three or four years earlier then they might have made the impact that BlackBerry needed. In the end, they were so late to the party that there was really no point in turning up at all.
Z10s are currently widely available for less than €100, and BlackBerry are committed to supporting the handset until 2020 and the software these days is *much* better (and you can load Android apps). The Q10 is a bit cheaper. If you like collecting heroic failures, then perhaps either (or both) devices are for you.
Image credits: RIM / BlackBerry
Video
If you really want more of the Z10 and Q10, here are a pair of videos we prepared much earlier..
As smartphones have progressed they seem to have become more and more fragile, with the highly advanced iPhone X being dubbed "the most breakable phone ever". But not everyone wants a device that will break every time it is dropped, and for ten years Samsung have been catering to that market.
Although they're not the only maker of rugged smartphones, Samsung have been in that business longer than most with a variety of devices that you can actually use, starting with the Samsung M110 ten years ago.
Samsung M110 (January 2008)
People were still happy with 2G feature phones back in 2008, and the Samsung M110 (also known as the Samsung Solid) was just that. A 128 x 128 pixel 1.5" display with a VGA resolution camera with a flash that doubled as a torch, an FM radio and Bluetooth, the M110 had just enough technical features to be useful. And as with most phones of that generation, you could talk for hours on it and the battery would last for days.
However, the IP54 rated toughened body meant that it was splash-proof and resistant to being dropped, and the chunky black or olive green casing was rather nice to look at. Weighing just 90 grams, it was a lot lighter than the rival Sonim XP1.
The M110 was successful enough for Samsung to follow it up with several other products, evolving over time. Five years and several handsets later, this led to the..
Samsung Xcover 2 (January 2013)
The Xcover 2 was Samsung's second toughened Android smartphone, and the thick rubber casing shares many features with the M110 from almost exactly half a decade earlier. Rated IP67, the Xcover 2 was fully waterproof and dust-proof but this time the 4" WVGA display and 5 megapixel primary camera, 3.5G support, WiFi, GPS and all the usual Android smartphone features meant that this could be used in the real world plus it retained the FM radio.
It wasn't the world's most advanced smartphone, with features near the bottom of the Samsung range, and all the toughening made it quite big and heavy. But very few smartphones at the time could compete in terms of ruggedness, and the hardware and software would prove familiar to anyone who already had a Samsung Galaxy. The Xcover 2 was successful enough to spawn a couple more sequels.
Never really cutting-edge, Samsung has been coming out with a new Xcover every couple of years leading to the current Xcover 4 announced in March 2017. Now sporting a 5" 720p display, a 13 megapixel primary camera, 4G support plus al the typical features of a contemporary lower-end smartphone while still retaining that FM radio that has always featured in these devices.
Bigger and even heavier than its predecessors, the Xcover 4 is even more water resistant with an IP68 rating. Although certainly not unbreakable (big screens are always vulnerable to being dropped on pointy things) it would certainly last a lot long that an iPhone X in any demanding environment.
So feel free to raise a glass to ten years of rugged Samsungs. And if you own one, it won't matter if you spill some drink on your phone either.
