Nokia E7 (2010)

 Introduced September 2010

Looking back at Nokia, there was a point in its history where it slipped from being the market leader to a market failure. The Nokia E7 sits on the cusp on that change.

Nokia E7

The Nokia E7 was the spiritual successor to Nokia’s long-running range of Communicator devices. Big and often bricklike, the Communicators had bigger screens that almost any other phone combined with a large physical QWERTY keyboard. Oddly, the Communicators often lagged behind in terms of features – the Nokia 9210i lacked GPRS for example when rivals had it, and the Nokia 9500 didn’t have 3G just when it was becoming common. It wasn’t really until the E90 in 2007 when it caught up in communications terms… a bit odd given the “Communicator” name.

Anyway, more than three years had elapsed since the launch of the E90 and in that time Apple had released their third-gen iPhone and Android devices were eating into Nokia’s market share. Many Nokia fans who had bought the E90 had moved on to other smartphone platforms. Nokia needed something special, and it looked like the E7 could be it.

Sleekly designed, the most prominent feature of the E7 at first glance was the huge 4” AMOLED capacitive touchscreen display, bigger than almost anything else on the market at the time. Hidden underneath that was a large keyboard that could be found by sliding the screen. A decent 8 megapixel camera was on the back, and the E7 supported 3.5G data and WiFI. GPS was built-in along with an FM radio and 16GB of internal storage.

Nokia E7

All of this was powered by Symbian^3, Nokia’s latest version of their S60 operating system. This supported all the usual applications plus document editors, comprehensive email support, built-in navigation and excellent multimedia capabilities. It was quite possibly the best Symbian phone that Nokia ever made. But since nobody uses Symbian today, something must have gone wrong..

Nokia had both been very early to the touchscreen smartphone party and very late at the same time. The Nokia 7710 had launched in 2004 – years before the iPhone – but the technology wasn’t quite there and consumers stayed away. Nokia’s next attempt at a mainstream touchscreen smartphones was the 5800 XpressMusic which launched waaay after the iPhone. The 5800 proved popular but it was pushing S60 almost as far as it could go.

Symbian was meant for an earlier era of handheld computing. First appearing in 1989 as Psion’s EPOC operating system (see on the Psion Series 5 for example) it was designed to run smoothly on minimal hardware. The Series 5 for example had a puny 18MHz processor and 4MB of RAM, but by the time the E7 was launched it had a 680MHz processor and 256MB of RAM… hardware which in theory could run something more sophisticated. Rival Apple and Android devices both ran on operating systems descended from Unix which allowed a much richer environment for software developers. Developing for Symbian was harder, but it was worthwhile because even in 2010 Nokia’s OS was the market leader – even if it was beginning to fade.

Nokia E7

It wasn’t as if Nokia lacked an alternative – the 770 Internet Tablet launched in 2005 running Nokia’s own take on a Unix-like OS called Maemo. But it wasn’t a phone and development of the platform was slow, but eventually they came up with a practical if somewhat rough around the edges smartphone in the Nokia N900. It looked likely that whatever would succeed the N900 would be a winner, but instead Nokia decided to merge Maemo with the Intel-led Moblin platform… a decision which completely derailed the strategy to replace the N900.

Stuck with the limitations of Symbian and with no next-gen product on the horizon, Nokia’s future was beginning to look uncertain. Even though sales were strong, it wasn’t clear how they could compete in the long term. But as it happens just a few days before the announcement of the E7, Nokia also announced a new CEO – Stephen Elop.

Elop realised the predicament that they were in and explained it to Nokia employees in the now-infamous “burning platform” memo that was leaked to the press. Ultimately Elop wanted to move Nokia away from Symbian and Maemo/MeeGo towards Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 7 OS. This was a bold move as Microsoft’s platform was very new… and Microsoft themselves had lost market share sharply to Apple. The plan was that Symbian would eventually be discontinued, but Nokia were hoping there would be a gradual transition of customers from Symbian to Windows. But that’s not what happened.

Dubbed shortly afterwards as the “Elop Effect”, the impact on Nokia’s sales were disastrous. Elop had effectively made Symbian a dead-end platform and that killed off pretty much any market appeal to customers. Sales fell through the floor, and worse still Nokia didn’t have a product to replace it (the first Lumia handset launched late in 2011). Far from being a smooth transition from one platform from one platform to another, it simply persuaded Symbian fans to jump ship… mostly to Android.

Less than six months after the announcement of the E7, Symbian was effectively dead. A trickle of new Symbian devices emerged from Nokia with the last mainstream handset launched in October 2011 and the final ever handset being launched in February 2012. None of them sold well. But then neither did the Windows phones that followed.

The E7 marks the point when Nokia’s seemingly invincible empire crumbled. The last high-end Symbian smartphone, the last of the Communicators, the E7 might have been a game changed if it had been launched three years earlier. Today the E7 is quite collectable with prices for decent ones starting at £60 or so with prices into the low hundred for ones in really good condition. 

Image credits: Nokia

Nokia 9500 Communicator and Motorola MPx (2004)

Announced February 2004

We are going back fifteen years this month, a journey to the pre-iPhone era where smartphones were bigger, chunkier and altogether odder looking.

Nokia in particular had been pushing their own vision of what a smartphone should be with the Communicator series since 1996. These high-end devices looked like a normal albeit large mobile phone on the outside, but opened up to reveal a large screen and keyboard on the inside. In February 2004 they announced the Nokia 9500 Communicator.

Nokia 9500 Communicator

The display on the Communicators was like nothing else on the market, on the 9500 it was a 4.5” 640 x 200 pixel panel which was pretty good for rendering web pages, composing emails or writing documents. The keyboard was a little more cramped than the one in the previous 9210i, but it was still very usable. The 9500 was also the first in the range to have a camera, although it was only a pretty basic one.

One major omission was the lack of 3G support – it wasn’t as it they couldn’t fit the components into this massive brick of a phone, they just chose not to. The 9500 did have WiFi though, so get it near a wireless hotspot and it could do a decent job of coping with a web that was still designed for desktop PCs.

Nokia’s Series 80 platform was more capable than the Series 60 found in their other smartphones, and on top of that the 9500 had expandable memory, fax capabilities, a wordprocessor, spreadsheet and presentation application and if anyone tried to steal it you could bash them over the head with it.

It was a reasonably successful device in the days when smartphones were still pretty rare, and over the years the Communicator range acquired a dedicated and rather patient fan base. All Communicator models are highly collectable today.

Rivals Motorola were also eyeing up the QWERTY-equipped smartphone market, but they had a completely different approach. The Motorola MPx300 (later rename--d to just “MPx”) was a Windows clamshell smartphone with stylus-driven touchscreen inside. Unlike the large display in the Nokia, the MPx had a rather more modest 2.8” 240 x 320 pixel unit… this was still pretty good for 2004 though.

Motorola MPx

The stand-out feature with the MPx was the remarkable two-way hinge that meant you could open it up like a standard clamshell or the mini-laptop format of the 9500. In order to support this, the MPx had a really strange keyboard that was QWERTY in one direction and numeric in the other. Although on one level this was a stroke of design genius, it also badly compromised the usability.

In fact, the MPx was slow and had limited memory and there were hardware reliability problems too. Despite being announced in 2004, the MPx only got a limited release in Asia about a year later and by the spring of 2005 the worldwide launch was cancelled.

In the end, neither phone set the pattern for future smartphones which these days are unencumbered by a physical keyboard. For collectors, the Motorola MPx is quite a rare find but surprisingly inexpensive at around £50 or so. The much more common Nokia 9500 is conversely more expensive, with unlocked ones in good condition being around £150 or so.

Image credits: Nokia and Motorola

Nokia E90 Communicator (2007)

Launched February 2007

By the beginning of 2007 the smartphone wars were entering a new phase, ushered in by the original Apple iPhone announced in January. Nokia had its own idea of what should go into a phone, but for some frustrating reason you couldn't have it all in one device. The Nokia E90 Communicator continued this frustrating tradition.

Nokia E90 Communicator

The latest (and indeed last) in the long line of Communicator devices, the E90 was a brick-like beast that was a bit of a monster when it came to specifications.

Outwardly, the E90 looked like an old-fashioned brick phone. Measuring 132 x 57 x 20mm and weighing a stonking 210 grams, it looked like a relic from the past. But as will all Communicator devices, it opened up to reveal a big screen and full QWERTY keyboard  hidden inside. The 4.0" 800 x 352 pixel display thrashed most of the competition when it came to both size and resolution, and the E90's feature list was impressively long including 3.5G support, WiFi, GPS, FM radio, expandable memory, a 3.2 megapixel primary camera and this all ran on Nokia's massively popular S60 platform.

Nokia 9210i, 9500, E90 Communicators

Starting in 1996 with the Nokia 9000 Communicator, it was followed in 1999 by the 9110, then the 9210 in 2000, 9210i in 2002, the 9500 and 9300 in 2004 and the 9300i in 2005. Despite their aspirations, these Communicators were also deeply flawed. The E90 was the first handset in the range to support 3G (despite it being common in smartphones for 5 years), and it took until 2004's 9500 until any type of cellular data (in this case GPRS) was supported. Frustratingly, the E90 didn't have a touchscreen display either.

The E90 also upset fans by ditching the capable Series 80 version of Symbian found in previous models and replacing it with Symbian S60 which was found in every other Nokia smartphone. Although this brought the E90 into line with other Nokias, it wasn't quite as suited to this type of devices as the older OS.

Despite its potential brilliance, the E90 also underlined the flaw in Nokia's strategy. Their consumer smartphone was the brilliant N95, but if you wanted to actually type stuff and work with documents then the E90 was the offering you wanted. Each different smartphone product (and there were many) catered for a particular niche. Apple didn't bother with that approach... one single device was designed to do absolutely everything, and of course it was this approach that prevailed.

Nokia never made another Communicator device after this, although the Nokia E7-00 launched in 2010 did adopt the QWERTY keyboard of the Communicator series of devices. Today typical prices for an unlocked E90 in good condition range from between €100 and €200 or so. Although the E90 is of limited use in the modern age, it is certainly an antidote to the endless parade of slabby touchscreen devices that we see today.

Nokia E90 Communicator

 Image sources: Nokia, Retromobe / Mobile Gazette

Nokia 9000 Communicator (1996)

Launched March 1996

Everybody knows what a smartphone is, right? A slabby thing which is basically a screen and maybe a couple of buttons on one side, and nothing much on the back other than a camera. But the vision of manufacturers twenty years ago was somewhat different, and the Nokia 9000 Communicator was an example of just how different these things were.

Originally announced in March 1996, the 9000 was a massive device even by the standards of the late 1990s. Weighing a shade under 400 grams or 14 ounces, the Communicator looked like an oversized conventional phone from the outside, but it opened up to reveal a 4.5" 640 x 200 pixel grayscale display and a full QWERTY keyboard. All the Communicator series phones had a tendency to be on the large size, giving them a nickname of "The Brick".

Underneath, the 9000 is even more strange to modern eyes. Inside is a 24MHz i386 processor with 8MB of flash storage, running the GEOS operating system. Despite being called a "Communicator", the options were strictly limited as it lacked any kind of packet data and had to rely on dial-up networking for email or very basic web browsing. There was a Telnet client and some personal information management tools, and one useful feature for any 1990s executive was the fact that the 9000 could send and receive faxes.

Various versions of the 9000 rolled out out in the next two years, making it a niche success against more mainstream rivals such as the Motorola StarTAC. In 1998, Nokia announced the much more compact 9110 Communicator and continued a line of phones that ended in 2007 with the Nokia E90.

Launched more than a decade before the iPhone defined the modern idea of a smartphone, the Communicator series was ultimately a dead end.. but it did show industry watchers that a mobile phone could offer features that rivalled full-blown computers. Thankfully though, we don't have to lug around a 400 gram brick these days..

Image Credits, Nokia and Wikimedia Commons

Nokia 9300i (2005)

Announced November 2005

Ten years ago, the eccentric Nokia 9300i and its predecessor the Nokia 9300 became something of a surprise hit in the consumer market. At first glance, the 9300i was an ugly looking handset which was about the same size as the popular Nokia 6310i.. but there was literally more to the 9300i than met the eye.

The Nokia 9300i opened up to reveal a large QWERTY keyboard and a 4 inch 640 x 200 pixel display on the inside. Built-in was a web browser and email client, but you could also do wordprocessing and even spreadsheet work with it. And because this ran a version of Symbian, you could add other application to it.

The 9300i was an upgrade to the previous year’s 9300 – and that upgrade was basically the addition of WiFi support to the 2G-only device. Peculiarly, Nokia chose not to add 3G to the 9300 or even its bigger sibling, the Nokia 9500 Communicator – a decision that was possibly more about Nokia’s internal politics than being anything technical.

As with the BlackBerry 8700 launched at the same time, the Nokia 9300i was a business handset that crossed over into the consumer market. As a result it had a few idiosyncrasies, one of which was that it didn’t have a camera.

One other key drawback was that although this was a Symbian handset, it ran the Series 80 software platform rather than the more common Series 60, meaning that there was less software available for it than for other Nokia smartphones of the time.

Series 80 was discontinued after the 9300i was launched, making this arguably the last true “Communicator” device from Nokia. It was eventually followed by the Series 60-based Nokia E90, which didn’t really have the same capabilities.

The 9300i is still quite a usable device today, although the built-in Opera web browser will struggle with a lot of modern websites. If you want to add one of these to your collection, budget to spend around €50 or so.