Once upon a time, phones were tiny. The smaller the phone, the better was the mantra in the early noughties. A few years later, smartphones started to become popular… but even the iconic iPhone only had a 3.5” display, which is positively quaint by today’s standards.
Samsung had an idea that bigger was possibly better, and in 2011 they launched the original Samsung Galaxy Note N7000. Bigger than a smartphone and smaller than a tablet, the Note ended up with the rather ugly class of “phablet” being applied to it. And it was a controversial beast. Oh yes.
Samsung Galaxy Note N7000
Sporting a 5.3” 800 x 1280 pixel display, the Note was huge for its day coming in at 170 grams and 147 x 83 x 9.7mm in size. Many critics thought that it was far too big, that a device of this size was going to be unusable for most consumers… that it would simply be too large to even carry around comfortably.
Although it did look like a slightly stretched Samsung Galaxy S II, the Note came with a stylus (the “S-Pen”) which was supported by a few specially written apps for the device. Hardware specs varied according to which regional model you had, but the Note was no slouch with a 1.4 or 1.5GHz dual-core CPU, 1GB of RAM, 16 or 32 GB of storage (plus a microSD card), and for good measure an 8 megapixel camera on the back with a 2 megapixel one on the front. This was high-end stuff.
Consumer reaction was cool, and it was only a moderate sales success. But despite the size of the thing, the Note won converts because the large screen was substantially easier to use. Standard smartphones began to creep up in size, and by 2014 the Samsung Galaxy S5 matched the screen size of the Note, even if it was more pocket-friendly. Today, the Apple iPhone 13 packs a 6.1” display in a form factor not too far from the original Note… so today, the “huge” size of the Note is pretty much what all high-end smartphones look like.
The Note didn’t die out though, the current Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra is still a fair bit larger than a standard smartphone, but it doesn’t feel ridiculous. Somewhere along the line, Samsung screwed up royally and the Galaxy Note 7 could accidentally burn down your house, but the line continued anyway.
These days almost every high-end phone is a similar size to the original Galaxy Note, where the current Note really does sit slightly below a 7” tablet in terms of size. The lasting legacy of the original Note was to show that consumers really wanted much bigger phones with better screens, rather than the pokey little displays of smartphones of the time. Perhaps it is under-rated in this regard, having largely been responsible for the modern phone form factor. Today a little piece of design history like this will probably set you back between £40 to £70.
Here’s a question: what is the most significant Android smartphone ever? Is it the T-Mobile G1 which was the first on the market, or one of the second-gen phones such as the Motorola DROID or Nexus One which were easily as good as the iPhone. Or perhaps it is the Samsung I9000 Galaxy S – a phone with a feature set so rich that it redefined what a smartphone should be.
The Galaxy S had pretty much every feature dialled up to 11. Starting with the huge (for the time) 4” 480 x 800 pixel AMOLED display, 512MB of RAM, a 1GHz CPU, dedicated GPU, 8 or 16GB of RAM plus a microSD slot, a stereo FM radio, 5 megapixel camera plus a secondary camera on the front… plus of course all the expected features such as 3.5G, WiFi, GPS and by then a huge variety of applications to do just about anything. In terms of features, the Galaxy S blew everything else out of the water.
Samsung I9000 Galaxy S
Sure… it was a pretty bland device in design terms and Samsung’s somewhat iPhone-like TouchWiz skin lead to years of lawsuits. It was quite expensive too… daringly so for an Android phone. Despite this, the original Samsung Galaxy S was a huge success – shipping more than 25 million units.
But there wasn’t just one model – when you took into account all the variants there were over two dozen. Some added 4G support, some replaced the FM radio with TV tuners, a couple even had physical QWERTY keyboards. Some variants replaced the 5 megapixel camera with an 8 megapixel one… or a 3 megapixel one. Screen sizes varied between 3.5 and 4.5 inches and LCD screens made a showing alongside AMOLED. Samsung was willing to customise and tweak the phone in any way the carriers wanted, which was something Apple would never do.
The rest is history – the Galaxy S in now in its 11th generation with the Samsung Galaxy S20 (confusingly the previous version was the S10). Although the Galaxy S does come in about half a dozen main variants, these days the more extreme variations come under different parts of the bewilderingly huge Samsung Galaxy range.
Perhaps the most important legacy is screen size – although tiny for a modern smartphone the 4” display of the original Galaxy S was huge compared with smartphones of the time. Manufacturers proceeded somewhat cautiously, but every time they made the panel bigger it seemed that customers approved. The current S20 has a 6.2” screen on a bezel-less display and the phone one third bigger overall than the original one.
Perhaps because of the bland styling, the Samsung Galaxy S doesn’t seem like a particularly collectable device despite its importance in the evolution of modern smartphones. There are plenty of decent examples for less than £40 and unofficial ports of the more modern Lineage and Replicant OSes exist if you want to tinker.
Android devices had only been around for less than a year and a half by the time Mobile World Congress came around in 2010, but during that time the platform had evolved rapidly from somewhat ropey beginnings.
Riding the crest of this particular wave was the HTC Desire – an Android 2.1 smartphone with a 3.7” SVGA display, 1GHz CPU and a 5 megapixel camera and… wait… yes, it might well seem familiar because the Desire was very closely related to the Google Nexus One launched the previous month.
The differences were minor – the Desire ditched the Nexus One’s trackball and had a much more usable optical trackpad, but conversely the Desire had physical function buttons instead of touch-sensitive ones. The Desire also had an FM radio (included in the Nexus hardware but disabled) and it used the HTC Sense UI on top of the underlying OS rather than the stock Android of the Nexus.
This whole combination of features was very appealing to potential customers, and because HTC already had an established relationship with mobile phone carriers it was simple enough to get your hands on a subsidised Desire on contract, where at launch the Nexus One was a rather expensive SIM-free affair.
The Desire was well-designed, the user experience was great and it was easy to get one. And although this combination doesn’t always guarantee success in this case it did, and the HTC Desire became the first Android phone for many people wanting to dip their toe in the smartphone world.
It had its problems – notably the original AMOLED display lacked sharpness which was fixed by a switch to S-LCD and over-the-air software updates dried up after just 18 months. Nonetheless it established HTC as the Android manufacturer to beat… however rivals Samsung had something up their sleeves when it came to that.
The “Desire” name stuck around – even if (like a lot of otherHTChandsets) – it sounds a bit like a brand of condom. The most recent phone to bear the name is the HTC Desire 19s, launched in late 2019. Original HTC Desires (model HTC A8181) are commonly available for not very much money should you want to own a little slice of Android history.
By the start of 2010 the Android platform had been around for fifteen months but some cracks were beginning to appear in Google’s strategy to revolutionise the smartphone industry. Part of the problem was that manufacturers were trying to customise the OS rather too much which was leading to fragmentation, they were also very poor at providing software updates and prices for higher-end devices were quite expensive.
Microsoft had suffered a similar problem with their Windows phones – weakness in the user interface with that operating system had resulting in different manufacturers reskinning the OS to make it more appealing. This meant that your experience with a Windows phone from HTC would very different to one made from Samsung or Motorola. This was a problem that rivals Apple and Nokia didn’t have because they completely controlled both the OS and the hardware.
Google’s response to this was the Google Nexus One, a device made for them by HTC. Competing in part with the iPhone 3GS, the Nokia 5800 and a multitude of Android and Windows phones, the Nexus One beat most of them when it came to both hardware and software. The 3.7” 480 x 800 pixel AMOLED display beat almost everything else in its class, the 5 megapixel camera was pretty good and the whole package looked attractive even if the styling betrayed that it was an HTC underneath.
Initially the idea was that Google would sell the Nexus One to consumers at $530 or €370, which was good value for a high-end SIM-free smartphone at the time. However back in 2010 customers were cool on the idea, preferring to get their phones subsidised with a contract.
Despite the attractions of the device, sales were slow. Google shifted away from direct sales in mid-2010 and tried to attract carriers to the device, with only a moderate amount of success. Customers were unhappy with the quality of the OLED screen to begin with, the Nexus One was modified for a more traditional Super LCD display a few months in (although this was mostly down to manufacturing issues). There wasn’t much in the way of marketing either, so while mobile phone fans might have known about it... many others didn’t.
But still, the Nexus One was meant to set an example to other manufacturers about how to do it and to some extent sales were not important. The other thing that Google wanted to do was show that software updates could be done quickly, rather than dragging on more months with other manufacturers (especially handsets tied to carriers). And Google were as good as their word, updates hit the Nexus One very quickly and everyone was happy… right up until the point that Google announced that the Nexus One wouldn’t be getting an upgrade to Android Ice Cream Sandwich in October 2011 because the hardware was “too old”. This was for a phone that was less than two years old and was now effectively on the scrapheap – and just as a comparison, the contemporary Apple iPhone 3GS ended up with software updates for five years.
Despite all of these woes, Google stuck with the Nexus project with a variety of partners such as Samsung, ASUS, Motorola and HTC (again), LG - with the final Nexus model being built by Huawei in 2015. After that, Google dropped the Nexus devices and instead brought out a more expensive range called the Google Pixel to somewhat mixed reviews and moderate success.
Google’s involvement in Android got more complicated when they bought Motorola’s mobile phone businesses a year after the launch of the Nexus One, only to asset strip it of patents and sell the desiccated husk to Lenovo in 2014. In 2018 Google bought part of HTC but as yet haven't turned this fading company around. Overall, Google’s foray into producing its own handsets was probably not the decisive influence that Google wanted it to be. Would it have made any real difference if they hadn't bothered?
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.
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.
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.
Launched April 2014
Five years after the launch of the first generation of Android phones we saw Samsung firmly established as the market leader, with the Samsung Galaxy S5 being the one to beat. Challengers such as HTC were putting up a good fight, and overall the technological features that were on offer with these high-end devices were really impressive. But the problem was that they came at quite a price.
If you wanted a SIM-free Galaxy S5 then you would be looking at shelling out £600 or more. Five years ago that was a lot of money (although you can easily spend even more today). But was it really necessary to charge that much?
Chinese startup OnePlus didn’t think so and set out to make a flagship device that could challenge the market leaders, but make it much cheaper. With the OnePlus One - announced in April 2014 – they succeeded.
OnePlus was set up as part of the giant BBK Electronics in China, who already had the OPPO smartphone brand. While OPPO phones were mostly sold in Asia, the idea with OnePlus was to come up with a different sort of product that could be sold worldwide. But it’s difficult to set up a new brand from scratch, and there’s always the risk that it could crash and burn… taking a huge pile of cash with it.
The OnePlus One itself was impressive. A 5.5” 1080p display, 13 megapixel camera, quad core CPU, 3GB of RAM and 16 or 64GB of internal memory. LTE and NFC support were included. The operating system was interesting: Cyanogen OS was a commercial version of the Android-based CyanogenMod and it was a clean, responsive and elegant platform that won fans in its own right. The packaging showed real attention to detail, and you could customise your One with all sorts of unusual materials including wood and fabric backs.
The price for all this? It was half the price of the Samsung, for arguably a better specification.
So, you might reasonably get excited by all this and want to rush out and buy one.
Not so fast.
You couldn’t actually just go and buy one of the things, you had to be invited to buy one. Because OnePlus didn’t want to build loads of these only to find out that they couldn’t sell them, the invite system allowed them to ramp up production in a steady way. And to begin with, getting an invite involved jumping through all sorts of hoops including following OnePlus on social media… just to join the waiting list for an invite. Eventually invites got more and more common, and OnePlus One owners could send them out to their friends.
OnePlus One optional covers
This turned out to be marketing genius. One way to make a product desirable is to restrict availability, and either deliberately or accidentally this helped build up the hype. When customers finally did receive their OnePlus One devices, they were beautifully packaged and just as good and they’d hoped.
There were a few problems, notably an issue with the displays turning yellow at the bottom due to a rushed manufacturing process. Customer service wasn’t brilliant. The Cyanogen OS eventually crashed and burned, leaving the One pretty much orphaned. Still, even flagship phones costing more than twice as much can have worse problems and the One was certainly good enough for OnePlus to get a significant fan base.
The (mostly) improved OnePlus 2 was launched the following year, still using the invite system. But this was eventually dropped and successive OnePlus devices launched every six months or so keep improving the line-up… but as the company has matured, the price of the products has also risen considerably.
Prices vary, but a OnePlus One in excellent condition can be around £100 or so. Tinkerers can update the built-in OS to the latest version of Android using LineageOS – a descendant of the Cyanogen OS the One originally shipped with. It seems there’s plenty of life left in the One yet.
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.
When Android was launched in 2007 there was great anticipation about what the first handset would look like, and in September 2008 we saw the launch of the world’s first Android smartphone – the T-Mobile G1.
Although the G1 was OK, you needed to be a T-Mobile customer to get it in most regions and it lacked the polish and elegance of the iPhone 3G. There was a lot of excitement over what Android phone would come next, but it nobody expected it to come from Kogan.
If you don’t live in Australia there is a good chance you haven’t heard of Kogan. Founded in 2006 but twenty-something entrepreneur Ruslan Kogan, the company at first was involved in selling electronics such as TV sets. Over the years Kogan’s retail offerings have expanded and started to include financial products, travel services and it became an internet service provider. All of this expansion was no doubt made a little easier by the absence of Amazon until November 2017, allowing Kogan to grow massively. But back in 2008 while a relatively small company, it decided to branch out into the smartphone market.
Unlike most electronics retailers, Kogan worked closely with the east Asian manufacturers of their products to come up with new products. To this end they announced the closely related Kogan Agora and Agora Pro Android smartphones in December 2008.
Kogan Agora Pro. A camera! WiFi! GPS!
The standard Agora had a 2.5” 320 x 240 pixel touchscreen display, 3.5G support and… errr… well, not much more it turns out because the Agora was strictly a misery-spec smartphone, but then it did only cost AU$299 or about £175. If you wanted essentials such as WiFi, GPS and a camera you’d need to fork out AU$399.
The BlackBerryesque design of the Agora didn’t seem that odd back in 2008, both because of the prevalence of BlackBerry handsets themselves, and the fact that there had only been one Android handset to date – the G1 – and that too had a physical keyboard. In truth though the need for a physical keyboard was a limitation of early versions of Android, as Google’s prototype (and touchscreen-less) Sooner handset demonstrated.
It might seem obvious to us today that the Agora wasn’t going to have the appeal that the big-screen G1 did, and indeed Kogan got cold feet shortly before the launch and effectively cancelled the product. There was an outcry at the time and accusations that it had all been a publicity stunt, but the Agora does seem to be under-powered in retrospect.
The Agora never made it to be the second Android phone to market, instead it was a keyboardless version of the G1 known as the HTC Magic. A few months later though, Samsung debuted the I7500 Galaxy which brought forth an enormous family of hundreds of other Galaxy handsets. The flop with the Agora didn’t do Kogan much harm in the end either, and they use the Agora name today for their current crop of smartphones.
Ten years ago we saw a significant shift in the mobile phone market. The “golden age” of traditional mobile phones was ending, where every phone had a different design and features and in its place the era of the modern smartphone was beginning, ushered in with the feature-rich Nokia N95 in 2006, the ground-breaking Apple iPhone touchscreen device in 2007 and finally the HTC Dream in 2008, mostly found under the name “T-Mobile G1”.
The G1 was the world’s first consumer Android handset, manufactured by smartphone pioneers HTC who had previously been a major partner in developing high-end Windows phones. T-Mobile and HTC had a long partnership with the MDA series of smart devices, and it was a natural extension of this to come up this.
Where the iPhone was sleek and with a minimum of control buttons, the G1 had a whole bunch of them, including a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. In addition to the 3.2” HVGA touchscreen there was a little trackball, plus buttons for call control, the home screen and the menu.
The QWERTY keyboard was completely necessary because originally Android did not support on-screen keyboards at all (a feature that was added more than half a year after the G1 was launched). Indeed the whole device was very much a “version 1.0” smartphone at launch, and although it featured full integration with Google’s suite of applications including Gmail and Google Maps a lot of the software features were clunky and not very feature-rich. Rivals Apple had already moved on to their second-generation iPhone and the G1 did not seem as accomplished.
On the back was a 3.2 megapixel camera (capable of taking videos, unlike the iPhone), the G1 supported HSPA 3.5G data, WiFi, GPS, microSD expandable memory and pretty much all the features you would expect from a modern smartphone with the notable omission of a front-facing camera.
HTC Dream
The first Android phone had been keenly anticipated, with the official launch of the project in later 2007 (although it had leaked out earlier that year). The G1 gathered masses of press coverage too, but consumer reactions were rather cooler to begin with, especially because in most regions you would have to be a T-Mobile customer to get your hands on one.
The T-Mobile G1 wasn’t only the first Android phone to market, for a long time it was the ONLY Android phone on the market. A few months later Australian retail electronics giant Kogan announced the Agora smartphone which was subsequently cancelled. In early 2009 HTC came out with a keyboardless version of the Dream known as the HTC Magic, but it took until April 2009 for the launch of the original Samsung Galaxy which was the first true rival to HTC.
A little more than a year later, Motorola launched the world’s first Android 2.0 handset – the Motorola DROID (sold internationally as the Milestone). This offered a significantly better user experience, and sales of Android devices skyrocketed – at the expense of Nokia’s Symbian range. Today Android holds almost 80% of the share of the smartphone market, with Apple’s handsets accounting for almost everything else.
A modern Android phone bears only a passing resemblance to the G1 – apart from BlackBerry, nobody makes an Android with a physical keyboard. But it’s still an important device, and unusual enough to be collectable. Typical prices for an unlocked G1 or Dream seem to be in the region of £150 or so.
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..
A long time ago, phones used to have a really great battery life. Then powerful big-screen smartphones took over, and suddenly you had to charge your phone more than once a day. A lot of that problem was down to the screen itself, and as screens got bigger and bigger the problem became more acute.
Not every type of display is a power hog though, and electronic ink displays such as those found on e-readers offer much better battery life. But while displays such as that are good for reading text, for a lot of other applications they are not usable because of their slow refresh rate. So you can’t really fix the power drain problem of smartphones with electronic ink displays.
Russian company Yota had different ideas, and their approach was rather radical – give the phone TWO displays. The YotaPhone had a traditional 4.3” LCD panel on one side, and on the other a 4.3” 360 x 640 pixel capacitive touchscreen electronic ink display. The secondary display was designed for things like notifications, email, calendars and other reasonably static displays. Some clever software trickery was required to do this, but otherwise the YotaPhone was a pretty standard Android smartphone.
Although it was announced in December 2012, it took nearly a whole year to get to market, finally shipping in November 2013. The €499 price tag was somewhat expensive, but it found a market niche and its own fan base. In February 2014 the YotaPhone 2 was launched with some much needed improvements and in 2017 the YotaPhone 3 followed.
The YotaPhone concept lives in that no-man’s land where products that neither fail nor succeed live. Perhaps if the YotaPhone had a better-known name on it, it might have been more of a success. But perhaps the YotaPhone is simply ahead of its time, and in another five years we’ll all have dual-screen smartphone like this…
January 2007 saw the launch of that smartphone from Apple, but while that was helping to usher in a new epoch of smartphone the competition wasn’t exactly sitting around doing nothing. Partly in response to Apple, and partly seeing an opportunity to grab a slice of the smartphone ecosystem itself, Google and its partners announced the Open Handset Alliance and the Android operating system in November 2007.
Although Android is a Unix-like operating system just like Apple’s iOS, it is designed to be more open and less tightly controlled. Any manufacturer with a compatible device can be loaded with a free open-source version of Android, with additional features that can be licensed from Google. Applications can be downloaded from Google Play or indeed any other application store, and applications are permitted on Android that simply are not allowed by Apple (for example, programming languages).
Philosophically, Android had a similar approach to Symbian (led by Nokia), which could also run on a variety of different devices with no restrictions on the types of applications available. In the end, Android proved that it could do it better, and since Nokia didn’t pursue Android at the time it ended up being side-lined.
T-Mobile G1 (2008)
Today, Android has a market share of around 85% for new handset sales, with Apple accounting for almost all the rest. This has come at the cost of fragmentation though, and while Apple have made only about 40 different iOS devices over ten years, Samsung on its own has made nearly 400 different devices which are all different (and often have limited support). On top of that, different manufacturers like to put different add-ons on top which can make it confusing to move from phone to phone.
It took a long time for the Open Handset Alliance to bear fruit, with the first Android device being the T-Mobile G1 (also known as the HTC Dream) in September 2008. The first Samsung Galaxy handset was launched nearly a year and a half later.
Despite millions of handsets being sold, the website of the Open Handset Alliance has not been updated since 2011. Android however has gone from strength to strength despite its problems. Ten years ago Symbian was the biggest selling OS… will Android still be the biggest in another ten years time?
Smartphone cameras can be fantastic, making it easy to fix images on the fly, edit or filter them and then share them with others. The one thing that they really can't do well is zoom. Sure, you can zoom in on something digitally but the results tend to be poor and grainy... and smartphones tend to have pretty poor flash capabilities too. On the other hand, digital cameras can do a lot of clever things with zoom lenses and usually have bigger sensors leading to better images, but the software tends to be limited and often rather difficult to use.
So instead of trying to choose… why not have both? The Samsung Galaxy Camera (announced in August 2012) tried to do just that. Essentially, one side was a Samsung Galaxy S III and the other side was a compact Samsung digital camera with a 16 megapixel camera with a 21X zoom lens with a big 23mm aperture on it, all designed to give superior pictures over a smartphone.
Surely Samsung would be on to a winner with this? Well, there were a couple of problems. Firstly, this was a bulky device at more than 300 grams in weight and about 35mm thick where the lens was. So, a bit big for a phone… but apparently it was a bit so-so as a camera as well.
Despite the unique charms of the device, it never really sold well. However, Samsung stuck with the idea and launched the smaller Galaxy S4 Zoom and the high-end Galaxy NX in 2013, and both the Galaxy Camera 2 (without any cellular connectivity) and the phone-based Galaxy K Zoom in 2014. Other manufacturers tried the same thing, for example the Panasonic Lumix Smart Camera CM1. All met with similarly cool responses from consumers.
If you don’t mind being stuck with Android 4 then you can pick one of these interesting devices up for a typical price of around €160. There’s not currently anything quite like it on the market, so if you are prepared to put up with its limitations then it could still be fun.
By 2012, the Samsung Galaxy S range had been around for two years and each new generation seemed to help it grow in popularity. The third generation device, imaginatively named the "Samsung Galaxy S III" firmly established this range as the one that other Android manufacturers had to beat..
Breaking from the slabby design of the previous two generations, the S III was more curved around the edges, and it was eventually available in seven colours. The screen size had continued to grow over previous generations and was now a 4.8" 720 x 1280 pixel panel. Inside was a multicore 1.4GHz CPU with 1GB of RAM and a dedicated GPU. On the back was an 8 megapixel camera. Being a Galaxy S device it also came with every other feature you could think of including an FM radio, NFC and optionally LTE support.
Out of the box the Galaxy S III range Android 4.0.4, upgradable to 4.3. Android was beginning to get rather good, and overall this was a very powerful and usable device. It
was a massive sales success, shipping a staggering 50 millions units in less than a year. Announcing a new device every year has made the new generations of the Galaxy S the most anticipated smartphone in the world after the iPhone.
Today the Galaxy S III is commonly available with prices ranging from about 50 euro or so up to several hundred euro depending on condition. There's probably very little point buying one for everyday use as although the hardware is still pretty decent, the version of Android available is badly out of date. However, due to its popularity the Galaxy S III is a good device to experiment with custom ROMs, such as the Lineage OS.
Just over ten years ago, Apple announced the first iPhone. But shortly after that rumours started to swirl that Google was working on a platform of its own. The then managing director of Google Iberia laid out plans to Spanish news site Noticias which presumably were meant to be a secret.
The general manager of Google Spain confirms that the company is working on the development of a mobile phone
Speculation about Google's possible entry into the area of mobile phone design and sales came after the company recently posted a job advertisement seeking engineers and analysts in the telecommunications industry. In that same claim, Google specified that it is undergoing experimentation with various wireless communications systems.
In a conference on the integration of the Internet into business strategy, organized by the Association for the Progress of Mediterranean Area Management, Isabel Aguilera explained to Noticias.com that while 70% of engineers' time is spent "To develop our core business, that is, search and advertising," and 20% to develop "products that have enough to do with this core," it is true that 10% of that time is focused on development Of products "that at some point could have to do with our business."
Within this last area, Aguilera has indicated that "it has been investigated" in a mobile phone through which you can "access information", as well as "how to extend the information society in less developed economies ". In this sense, the Director General of Google in Spain and Portugal has pointed out that although "there may be products that may seem strange, they are all part of our innovation process."
At the moment, the search engine has 36 products and "18 others that are in the laboratory" and, therefore, undergoing experimentation, among which would be the mobile phone.
At the time we speculated over the possible features of a Google phone, and concluded that it would probably be a Linux-based phone with applications tightly integrated into Google services such as Gmail, Maps and Calendar once the user had logged in with their Google account. This seamless connectivity seemed pretty advanced for the time, but it is essentially what Google delivered.
We also speculated about possible partners, and in the end we thought the Nokia was the most likely.. but in the end they were one of the few major manufacturers not on board. It took another eight months for an official announcements to come out, naming the operating system as Android and the first handset (the T-Mobile G1) appeared in September 2008, a year and a half after the first rumours.
Almost immediately after Android came to market, it began to fragment with manufacturers doing their own thing. Google responded to this problem in 2010 with the first of a series of "Nexus" devices made with various partners, and in 2016 it went the whole way and launched a phone in it's own right, the Google Pixel.
T-Mobile G1 (2008)
In 2017 around nine out of ten new smartphones run Android, and almost all the rest are iPhones. Windows, BlackBerry and other platforms have been squeezed out almost completely, and profit margins have been squeezed too. Apple seems to be the only company consistently making any money, but as far as consumers are concerned Android has brought a huge variety of choice for people on all sorts of budgets and has helped to transform mobile computing completely.
Half a decade after the introduction of the original iPhone, manufacturers were still trying to get a handle on how to make their products more appealing than the latest Apple product that everyone was talking about. Unfortunately, not all of these attempts were successful, and these examples from Mobile World Congress (MWC) in February 2012 are some prime examples.
Nokia tried to upscale the coolly-received Lumia 800 Windows smartphone by stretching the 3.7" display to 4.3" with the Lumia 900.. but keeping the same 480 x 800 resolution. The result was a phone with pixels big enough to be seen from space, but for a while it was a modest success because it was also very inexpensive and actually rather nice to use, even if it had hardly any apps.
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Nokia Lumia 900
Samsung meanwhile had decided to make an Android phone with a built-in projector with the Galaxy Beam, despite two previous attempts being failures. Here's a tip.. if you think that projectors in phones are a good idea then you probably need to read up about Miracast, DLNA or UPnP. Or just stick an MHL cable on it. It didn't take a genius to work out what the writing on the wall for this particular device was.
Samsung Galaxy Beam
LG also hadn't learned from past failures, and the LG Optimus 3D Max followed on from previous attempts to make 3D phones that almost nobody wanted. The 3D technology in both the screen and camera was clever, and LG weren't the only company going down this path, but consumers really couldn't see the point and with rare exceptions this technology has been rejected by consumers.
LG Optimus 3D Max
Another idea from LG was the Optimus Vu, a 5" smartphone with a 4:3 aspect display. Most rival smartphones emulated the ratio of a domestic TV with 16:9 ratios or something similar, but the Optimus Vu was quite a bit wider and shorter than the rival Samsung Galaxy Note and was bit odd-looking as a result. The mark of it's lack of success is that the follow-up Optimus Vu II scheduled for launch in 2013 was cancelled. But big-screen phones are now the norm, and the Vu did at least help to pioneer that idea.
LG Optimus Vu
ASUS had another brilliant but futile idea - the PadFone. Correctly identifying that people would like to retain the same settings and data whether they were using a tablet or a smartphone, ASUS came up with the idea of creating a smartphone that could slot into a tablet, or even a small notebook chassis. Technically brilliant, the idea really became obsolete with ubiquitous cloud computing that could do the same thing in software. ASUS made a whole range of PadFones over the next couple of years, but could never convince the market that they were a good idea.
ASUS PadFone
Panasonic returned to the worldwide market, six years after dropping out having made some of the most awful phones imaginable. The Panasonic Eluga was a competent and waterproof Android phone that also failed to set the world on fire. Competition in the Android marketplace was becoming fierce by 2012, and there was very little to set the Eluga apart from the competition. A high-profile failure, Panasonic briefly quit the market again only to return 18 months later with a range of mostly run-of-the-mill Android phones.
Panasonic Eluga
Of course there were other devices launched at MWC in 2012... but very few made an impact. Although remains a vital event even today, companies such as Apple don't bother with it and it isn't the force it once was. Will MWC in 2017 introduce some breakthrough products? We will have to see..
Image sources: Nokia, Samsung, LG, Pansasonic, ASUS
