Apple III (1980)

Introduced November 1980

The legendary Apple II series was one of the most successful computers ever, selling millions of units in a 16 year run from 1977 to 1993. But despite that success, Apple repeatedly tried to kill off the Apple II and replace it with something better. The Apple III was the first attempt… and one of the most disastrous.

Apple III with Profile Hard Disk

It was released to the market in November 1980, and on paper it looked like it should succeed – based on the 6502 processor like its predecessor, it had 128Kb of RAM included, supported lowercase characters (unlike the Apple II), built-in colour graphics and 80 column text and a new operating system called Apple SOS. A floppy disk was included as standard, and the Apple III also had sound.

Despite the similarity in hardware, the Apple III wasn’t compatible with the Apple II in normal operations, but it did have a special emulation mode it could be booted into. But this was one of the Apple III’s many poor design decisions – the Apple III could only emulate an Apple II with 48Kb of memory when a lot of software demanded the full 64Kb. There wasn’t any good technical reason for this either, it was purely a marketing decision. Similar access to other advanced parts of the Apple III hardware (such as the 80 column display and lowercase letters) were deliberately blocked too, but the memory limitations meant that the Apple III did not make a very good Apple II.

Unfortunately the problems ran much deeper. The physical design of the Apple III had been determined by the marketing team, not the engineering team. So when it came to squeezing all the bits in, the engineers couldn’t make it all fit. To get round this, the Apple III motherboard was designed with very narrow tracks and a large number of soldered-on components to save space. However, the quality of the manufacturing process was not up to such precise work and a large proportion of Apple IIIs were faulty out of the box.

Overheating was a major problem too – in order to keep noise and size to a minimum, the III had no fans but instead was meant to dissipate heat into the aluminium casing. Heating would lead to system crashes and according to legend, chips would pop out of their sockets and disks could melt. Other hardware problems included a faulty real-time clock which would eventually fail and be difficult to replace.

A chronic lack of software was combined with a lack of documentation, making it had for independent developers to create new software and hardware. Compared to this, the Apple II had a huge software library and the system was well-documents and easy to work with.

The launch was a complete disaster, and it soon became clear that Apple hadn’t done any real testing on this unit and the product was unfit for purpose. Sales were quickly suspended and all the sold units recalled for re-engineering. A redesigned circuit board (and the removal of the troublesome clock) fixed most of the issues and the Apple III was re-introduced to market a year later, in November 1981.

Apple III Plus

Consumers were not keen on the revised model at all, because the reputation of the early ones was so bad that it tainted the newer and more reliable models.  A lightly revised Apple III Plus launched in December 1983 did not turn around sales either and in April 1984 the entire product line was permanently cancelled.

In three and a half years of on-off sales, the Apple III had only shipped about 120,000 units – and many of these were to replace faulty ones. The entire project lost tens of millions of dollars, but fortunately for Apple it survived because of buoyant sales of the Apple II. Apple’s next main product launch following the Apple III was the Apple Lisa, which was also a high-profile commercial failure.

It took more than a decade to kill of the Apple II – the Mac LC from 1990 helped – by which time the Apple III had been long forgotten. Today, Apple III systems are rare but usually only cost a few hundred dollars for one in working order.

Image credits:
Adam Jenkins via Flickr - CC BY 2.0
Tellegee via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 4.0

3Com Audrey (2000)

Introduced October 2000

These days we are glued to our mobile devices, wanting to access the web and applications wherever we are. For many the idea of having to sit and the computer to use the internet seems old-fashioned. Smartphones, tablets… and yes, maybe a laptop if it’s something serious.

Twenty years ago however, the internet was not a mobile experience. Cables, dial-up modems and old-fashioned PCs were the way to go. If you wanted to access the web while you were in – say – the kitchen, you’d be out of luck.

3Com had an idea. One of the stars of the dot com boom, they created a device that could enable you to access the internet from almost any room you wanted. Using cutting-edge technology and undoubtedly with an eye to the future, they introduced the 3Com Ergo Audrey (or just the “3Com Audrey”). 3Com weren’t into consumer computing, except for their Palm subsidiary, so this was a new market for them.

It looks like a dangerous environment but loads of us are working from home in worse

In some ways the Audrey was like a modern tablet – an 8” VGA-resolution touchscreen display was complemented by a compact design, a wireless keyboard and USB expansion ports. The beating heart of the Audrey was the QNX operating system, a Unix-like platform designed to run on small devices. The Audrey could access the web, email, personal information management tools and a variety of push content that could be selected by a rather retro knob. You could sync it with up to two Palm PDAs (back in the days when a Palm Pilot was still a big deal). For added quirkiness, the stylus plugged into the top of the unit and it lit up when you received an email. It sounded great, but there were some drawbacks.

Internet access was via a dial-up modem, although you could plug an Ethernet adapter into a USB port if you had Ethernet at home. Also, you had to power it from a wall socket, so it was tied to both the mains and a phone or network port. At $499 it was quite pricey, and it didn’t have the power of a contemporary laptop. And – probably mostly – people just didn’t have the need to do internet all the time from anywhere.

3Com envisaged the Audrey (named after Audrey Hepburn) as being the lead device in their new “Ergo” sub-brand, including a “Mannix” device for the living room and presumably an “Andrex” device for the toilet. Presumably then you’d need a phone line in every room, which would be a pest. Wireless networking was technically a thing back in 2000, but it wasn’t widespread.

Is the kitchen the natural environment for the Audrey? Or the box it came in?

Still, this was pretty exciting stuff and of course 3Com hadn’t seen the iPad which was still a decade away, so it all sort of made sense. If you hadn’t seen the iPad. Which they hadn’t. Which was a problem really, because in hindsight it was the iPad that consumers really went for, followed by ridiculously oversized smartphones. Consumers wanted a cheese soufflé, 3Com offered them a soggy omelette instead.

It was a moderate success, but the dot com crash sent investors running away from tech shares and 3Com cancelled the Audrey and all the other Ergo devices in the summer of 2001. Some of the unsold inventory ended up in the hands of hackers who discovered how to jailbreak QNX and do their own things with it, turning these remaindered devices into something like a prototype Raspberry Pi.

Twenty years on and the Audrey is largely forgotten, along with 3Com who eventually vanished without trace into HP (along with their one-type subsidiary Palm). QNX was bought by RIM and turned up in the catastrophic BlackBerry Z10 in 2013, but despite that it still successfully soldiers on in embedded systems. As for the Audrey, you can pick one up for a few tens of dollars from sellers in the US but if exporting it you’ll need to watch the voltage on the power supply.

Image credits:
Andrew Turner via Flickr - CC BY 2.0
Alessandra Cimatti via Flickr - CC BY 2.0

Going nowhere: Windows 7, Bada, Symbian, BlackBerry OS and WebOS (2010)

Announced October 2010

It’s October 2020 and if you have a smartphone in your pocket it’s almost certainly going to be one of two things: an Apple iPhone or an Android device. It seems like it has been that way for ever, but ten years ago this month rival platforms were duking it out as if they had some sort of chance.

The big news ten years ago was Windows Phone 7. Microsoft had been haemorrhaging market share ever since the iPhone was launched. Earlier versions of Windows Mobile (as it was then called) had been capable enough, but the user interface was a frankly horrific relic from an earlier age. Stung by failure, Microsoft decided to redesign the product entirely and came up with something entirely different.

Windows Phone 7 was a huge critical success in interface design. Clean, responsive, informative and intuitive at the same time, it made Android and iOS look old-fashioned. iOS in particular was wedded to the skeuomorphic design that had been an Apple hallmark for decades, but by contrast Windows looked utterly modern.

Microsoft made the decision to base Windows Phone 7 on the same underlying Windows CE platform that had powered previous generations, rather than the more modern Windows NT platform that could have delivered the same power as Android and iOS. The next-generation of Windows Phone – version 8 – would change the platform while retaining the UI… but that is another story.

There was certainly some buzz about Windows Phone 7 though, and a lot of manufacturers had lined up behind Microsoft to push this new platform. HTC were the keenest with several new devices – the HTC 7 Pro, HTC 7 Trophy, HTC 7 Mozart, HTC Surround and the high-end HTC HD7. Samsung resurrected the Omnia sub-brand to come up with the Samsung Omnia 7, where rivals LG had the LG Optimus 7 and LG Optimus 7Q. Even Dell got in on the act with the Dell Venue Pro.

A trio of doomed Windows Phone 7 devices

The operating system was sleek, the phones were pretty good and competitively priced. But of course Windows Phone failed, mostly because it lacked the apps that Android and iOS had. And perhaps partly because… who actually needed another mobile phone OS anyway?

But Windows Phone 7 wasn’t the only doomed platform being touted this month. Samsung had also developed the Unix-like Bada operating system for use in smartphones. The Samsung Wave II was the company’s flagship Bada phone… again it was a sleek operating sytem, competitively priced with excellent hardware. Samsung had tried hard to get apps for the platform and had done reasonably well. But still… it wasn’t Android or iOS. But it did at least feature the somewhat infamous Rick Stivens.

Samsung Wave Goodbye might have been a better name

Bada didn’t last long, being folded into Tizen in 2012. Tizen itself was the effective successor OS to a medley of other Unix-like platforms: Maemo, Moblin, MeeGo and LiMo. Tizen found itself ported to a wide range of smartwatches and the Samsung Z range of smartphones up to 2017 when eventually they fizzled out. But Tizen didn’t die, instead becoming the most popular operating system in Smart TVs instead.

Another relatively new kid on the block was Palm’s webOS platform found in the Palm Pre 2. Stop me if you’ve heard this before… but the phone had a combination of good hardware, a great OS, competitive pricing and a reasonable set of apps which sadly couldn’t compete with the market leaders. The Pre 2 was the last smartphone to be launched under the Palm name (apart from the peculiar Palm Palm). But less than a year after the Pre 2 the entire webOS product line was cancelled by Palm’s owners, HP.

Palm Pray might also have been a better name

The excellent webOS operating system lingered on, with HP attempting to open source it. Eventually it was picked up by LG who applied it to smart TVs and smartwatches, in a directly parallel to Samsung and Tizen.

Three doomed platforms is surely enough? Not quite.

The Nokia C5-03 was a nice enough, low-cost Symbian touchscreen smartphone. Unlike the others, this had a really good library of apps, it was attractively priced and designed and also Symbian had been around for donkey’s years there had been a process of continual improvement and an established base of fans. But Nokia were on the verge of a spectacular collapse, and Symbian would effectively be dead within a year.

Inexpensive but doomed smartphone fun with the Nokia C5-03.

Windows Phone 7, Bada, webOs and even the aging Symbian were all modern platforms that could deliver the sort of experience that customers might want. In comparison, the BlackBerry OS on the Bold 9780 was not. BlackBerry’s efforts at repeatedly warming over an OS that was nearly a decade old had created a device that was pretty good at email and absolutely appalling for web browsing or any other of the meagre collection of apps that were available.

BlackBerry missed the memo about what a 2010 smartphone should be

It sold pretty well into corporations that had standardised on BlackBerry, but users hated it – instead choosing to use their own iOS and Android devices which they expected their companies to support, leading in turn to the idea of BYOD (“bring your own device”). BlackBerry did eventually come up with a vaguely competitive smartphone… in 2013, a full six years after the iPhone was announced.

Today, if you want a smartphone without Android or iOS then the pickings are fairly slim. But Huawei – currently the world’s number two smartphone manufacturer – is working on the Linux-based Harmony OS to replace Android. This move is mostly due to trade sanctions from the US, but Harmony is also available as open source, or alternatively Huawei will licence their closed-source version to other manufacturers. Who knows, perhaps this rival OS will be a success?

Image credits: HTC, LG, Samsung, BlackBerry, Dell, HP, Nokia.

Amstrad GX4000 (1990)

Introduced September 1990

During the late 1980s Amstrad had been on a roll. The Amstrad CPC range had taken a respectable share of the home computing market, the cheap all-in-one PCW wordprocessor had been a remarkable success for small businesses and home users, the PC-compatible PC1512 and PC1640 had sold in huge quantities and Amstrad had bought out arch-rival Sinclair to produce their own take on the iconic ZX Spectrum micro.

Not everything had been a success. The deeply strange portable PCs – the PPC 512 and PPC 640 – proved to be a high-profile flop. Worse still, the next-generation PC2000 series which had been launched to great acclaim ended up as a disaster with a batch of faulty hard drives significantly damaging Amstrad’s reputation.

Amstrad’s success had been built on offering quality devices at bargain prices, typically by exploring ways to drive down costs. The CPC computers were a good example, a home computer, monitor and storage device starting at £399, all inclusive. Amstrad leveraged their relationships with makes of TV tubes and cassette players to give them a price advantage, the inclusion of the cheap-but-capable Z80 processor drove down costs further. Amstrad chose to use the CPC platform for their next venture.

Amstrad GX4000

The Amstrad GX4000 was essentially a games console version of the CPC. Stripped of the cassette drive, TV and keyboard, the GX4000 used cartridges and hooked up to a domestic TV. Still running a Z80 with 64Kb of RAM the console was modestly specified even by 1990’s standards… but at just £99 it was really cheap.

It was an elegantly packaged device, with two slightly creaky games controllers attached and video output via RF, SCART or and Amstrad DIN connector for a CPC monitor. You could add a light gun or an analogue joystick took, but expansion options were pretty limited. Still, it was pretty capable for an 8-bit platform and the related CPC had a huge variety of good quality games available for it. So, it should have been a success? Not exactly.

By 1990 the 8-bit era that had dominated the 1980s was at an end. 32-bit home computers such as the Commodore Amiga had been established for some time, and the games console market itself was in the process of moving to 16-bit platforms such as the Sega Megadrive. But technological obsolescence had never been a problem for Amstrad - a company that shipped CP/M computers well into the 1990s – where instead they were interested in value-for-money. And the GX4000 certainly seemed to have that.

But the GX4000 was a massive failure, and perhaps the key problem was games. CPC games on cassette cost a few pounds where a GX4000 cartridge for the same game cost £25 (a quarter of the price of the console). Only a couple of games were available at launch, and a combination of manufacturing delays and high costs means that just 27 games of varying quality were launched. The 8-bit CPC platform that the GX4000 ran on wasn’t something that gamers could be excited about either.

Perhaps if the GX4000 had been released a few years earlier with more (and cheaper) games plus better designed hardware, it might have been a success. As it was, the GX4000 was discontinued in 1991 having sold just 15,000 units. Of course, that makes this console quite collectable today with prices for ones in good condition going for up to £200 which would be a lot more than was paid for it in the first place..

Image credit:
Evan-Amos via Wikimedia Commons - Public Domain

Squarial (1990)

A Squarial on display

Available March 1990

Direct-to-customer satellite television started in the late 1970s, but back in the early days it required a big and expensive dish to receive the broadcasts which had the effect of turning your back garden into something that looked like Jodrell Bank.

Although technology improved during the 1980s, by the end of the decade a typical satellite dish for Sky in the UK could still measure 90 centimetres across. Typically painted white, the dishes were regarded as an eyesore and when there were lots of them in an area – for example with blocks of flats and terraced houses – it made the place look like a KGB listening post.

Although Sky was popular in the UK, it gained a reputation for being rather lowbrow. A mix of imported US TV series and cheaply-made shows had a certain appeal, but neighbours might judge you harshly if you attached a massive dish to the side of your house to watch American wrestling.

It became obvious in the 1980s that the market could do with some competition, and through a complex mix of government legislation and business deals the idea of creating a company knows British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB) was born.

After some delays, BSB eventually started broadcasting in March 1990. It attempted to offer a more highbrow mix of shows including original content, high-quality imports and repeats of popular BBC shows... not to mention a bit of science fiction slash soap opera.

Low-level class warfare is a thing in the UK, and indeed the BBC TV show “Keeping Up Appearances” first broadcast in 1990 satirises just that. And for many middle-class people, the idea of sticking up a huge Sky satellite dish seemed frightful. But how could you differentiate that you were a middle-class BSB customer? BSB thought it had a secret weapon… the Squarial.

A Squarial in its natural habitat

The Squarial looked quite unlike other satellite receivers. Just 38 centimetres across, the Squarial was completely flat and inside was a phased array antenna made up of a large number of tiny individual antennae working together. This different technological approach was possible because BSB’s twin Marcopolo satellites had a higher power output than the Astra 1A satellite used by Sky.

It became something of a design icon, and created a significant buzz around BSB’s launch. Squarials started to appear on hundreds of thousands of homes. It looked like a success. But it wasn’t.

The problem that both Sky and BSB were losing huge amounts of money, a staggering $1.5 billion dollars between them (equivalent to about £2.5 billion today). Subscriber numbers were nowhere near the figures that either company needed to be sustainable. So in November 1990 Sky and BSB dropped a bombshell – these two bitter rivals would merge to become British Sky Broadcasting (BskyB).

Although on paper it was a 50/50 merger, in reality Sky was the dominant partner. And although costs could be saved by rationalising the TV channels, in the end it was inevitable that BSkyB would want only one broadcasting system – and that meant using the Astra satellite and not Marcopolo.

By 1992 BSkyB shuttered the service on the Marcopolo satellites, leaving both the Squarial and attached satellite set top boxes obsolete as they were incompatible with the Astra system. Essentially, for all but the most die-hard tinkerers the Squarial and all the rather expensive equipment that came with it ended up as junk. For owners it was like being on the wrong side of the VHS-Betamax war.

But the Squarials lingered – because of the fact that they were mounted in difficult-to-access places it meant that you’d have to pay somebody to take it down. So they lingered and lingered, a testament to making the wrong technological choice and a reminder of high-profile failure. Even today it is still possible to find a forgotten Squarial on the side of a house. For a few tens of pounds you could even acquire one yourself, and see if it really is “smart to be square”.

Image credits: Alex Liivet via Flickr
CC BY 2.0
pauldriscoll via Flickr
CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 

Nokia N900 (2009)

Nokia N900

Launched August 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image credits: Nokia

Kogan Agora and Agora Pro (2008)

Announced December 2008

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.

Other manufacturers tried a similar format, the Samsung Galaxy Pro and HTC ChaCha being examples. None of these have been particular popular, although BlackBerry persists with physical keyboards today.

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.

BlackBerry Storm 9500 (2008)

Launched November 2008

By late 2008 it was nearly two years after the launch of the original iPhone, but there was still everything to play for in the newly popular smartphone market. Nokia had launched the 5800 XpressMusic, Google had partnered with HTC to make the T-Mobile G1 and even Windows phones were showing some useful developments. But nothing could quite manage the polish and attention to detail that Apple had.

So when RIM started working on a touchscreen device there was much anticipation that their expertise would come up with something class leading. When the BlackBerry Storm 9500 was announced in a blaze of publicity and it was dubbed an “iPhone Killer”.

On paper it looked pretty good. The screen was a bit smaller than the iPhone but had a higher resolution, the camera looked promising, it had GPS support, a removable battery and expandable memory but for some baffling reason there was no WiFi. Expectations about the software were very high, RIM having gained a reputation for making an effective platform for both businesses and consumers.

In reality the BlackBerry Storm was a disaster. One of the main problems was the screen – instead of making a simple touchscreen, RIM had tried to reproduce the feel of a traditional keypad using a system called SurePress, which simulated having to press down on the screen to do something. It was awful, in particular when used with the virtual keyboard. But it didn’t stop there, the entire user interface was a badly-implemented rehash of traditional BlackBerries and it lacked the ease-of-use that Apple was offering. Despite the proven strengths of RIM’s software offerings, the user experience was pretty abysmal.

But there was more – the camera should have been better than the iPhone but really only produced fuzzy approximations of real life, the lack of WiFi turned out to be a big deal, it was slow and had limited memory, and it was much chunkier than the iPhone to carry about.

In short, it was a disaster. Famously, Stephen Fry gave it a withering review while at the same time praising the BlackBerry Bold 9000, concluding that “the Storm could teach an industrial vacuum pump how to suck”. While other reviewers were perhaps less eloquent, the feelings were very widespread. And although initial sales were not bad, word quickly got around and it was widely recognised for the lemon it was.

RIM took on board the criticisms and fixed at least some of the problems with the Storm2 launched a year later. The Storm2 added WiFi and improved the user interface and tricky SurePress display, but the Storm’s reputation preceded it, and because the Storm2 was basically a bugfix the specifications were looking rather out-of-date in late 2009.

In 2010, BlackBerry tried again with the Torch which combined both the touchscreen and a slide-out physical keyboard. It was a moderate success, and quite popular with existing BlackBerry customers but it didn’t win anyone else over. In 2013, RIM tried again with the all-touch BlackBerry Z10 which ended up as an even bigger disaster than the Bold. Overall, you could say that RIM didn’t have much luck with touchscreen devices.

If you like to collect high-profile failures, the BlackBerry Storm is easy to come by and inexpensive with prices starting at £30 or so for good ones, and up to £90 for “new old stock” with the marginally more useful Storm2 coming in at a little more.


Image credits: RIM / BlackBerry

Dial W for Weird: The Strange First Days of 3

Back in the early days of 3G handsets, it seemed that nobody really knew what the next-generation of mobile phones would look like. Companies such as Siemens came up with some wild-looking concepts which never made it to production. We take a look back to some of the early phones available on the fledgling 3 network in the UK, when handsets were scarce and phones were... weird.

Motorola A920 and A925

Motorola A920 and A925

Motorola was also a key player in early 3G handsets, with the A920 and A925 perhaps being somewhat recognisable precursors of today’s smartphones. In addition to 3G support, the A920 and A925 had a 2.8” touchscreen display, ran the Symbian operating system with the UIQ touch interface, and had GPS support and the single swivelling camera could be used for basic photography and video calling. Although the screen was relatively large for its day, the huge bulk of the handset dwarfed it and made it look relatively small.

The differences between the A920 and A925 are mostly cosmetic – the A920 launched first with all the design charm of 1960s East German tractor factory. After working frantically together, Motorola and 3 came up with the A925 which had the design charm of a 1980s East German tractor factory. This was progress of sorts.

NEC E808

Perhaps the most striking phone in 3’s early line-up was the NEC E808, which was one of those visionary devices that demonstrated that neither carriers nor manufacturers really knew what consumers wanted.

Rather beautifully engineered in black and chrome, the E808 had a full QWERTY keyboard and a relatively large 2.8” display along with both front and rear-facing cameras. It looked like a tiny laptop computer, but the reality was a bit disappointing. The large display only had a resolution of 162 x 132 pixels, and because 3 had a “walled garden” approach to the internet in most regions, you couldn’t actually browse the web. You could use the keyboard for text messages and emails, but the phone was too limited to do much else. You could make video calls on it though – this was a big thing for 3G networks – but in reality, hardly anybody did.

NEC E808 and E808Y

It didn’t take too long for NEC to come out with a more sober version of the E808 called the E808Y which transformed the elegant but enormous clamshell into something that looked rather more BlackBerryesque. Essentially though the hardware was unchanged other than its looks, and again it promised rather more than it could deliver.

Nokia 7600

But if you thought that the E808 misjudged the market... there was Nokia. Their mainstream 3G phone was the batshit-crazy Nokia 7600 which so fundamentally missed the needs of potential customers that it ended up being a high-profile disaster. The insane keyboard, tiny screen and lack of video calling just made it rather pointless.

Nokia 7600

Customers of that era would obviously want a Nokia, but they didn’t want THIS Nokia. There was another 3G Nokia handset available, the 6650. But you couldn’t have that. Oh no, that would be TOO easy. Even with heavy discounting, consumers stayed away from the 7600 in droves.

NEC E616 / E616V

NEC E616

Admittedly these weren’t the only phones, but the NEC E606 and Motorola A830 were like the last kids to be picked for the team, and they were never going to win 3 any medals. By late 2003 there was finally a less awful handset in 3’s line-up, the NEC E616.

The E616 looked rather nice, although like all 3G phones at the time it was a bit large. Two separate front and back facing cameras delivered on the promise of video calling without having to swivel a camera around, there was expandable memory and a decent media player and the 2.2” screen may not have been very good but the 176 x 240 pixel resolution was better than most. The E616 did have a pretty rubbish main camera though at just 352 x 240 pixels, but this was rapidly replaced with the E616V which boasted 640 x 480 pixels.

It took a long time for 3G phones to be the standard – a big problem for 3G-only networks such as 3. The market took about 5 years to fundamentally shift away from 2G with the rise of the Android platform helping to drive high-speed data use. Today most these curious relics of early 3G telephony are still fairly easy to find and not expensive.

Image credits: NEC, Motorola, Symbian, Nokia, TimSE via Wikimedia Commons, Conrad Longmore via Wikipedia, Retromobe

HTC First (2013)

HTC Worst.. err, First

Launched April 2013

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.

BlackBerry Z10 and Q10 (2013)

BlackBerry Q10 and Z10 (2013)

Announced January 2013

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..

Futureretro: Samsung Galaxy Note 7 (2016)

Released September 2016

Product failures are often the collectible phones of the future, devices that failed spectacularly despite high hopes often come with a cautionary tale about how the the thing crashed and burned when it came to market. For most failed devices we can use the word "burned" in a strictly metaphorical sense. But with the Samsung Galaxy Note 7, we also mean "burned" in a strictly literal sense too.

The original Galaxy Note was launched five years ago, with a then huge 5.3" display that seemed more like a small tablet than a smartphone, plus the addition of a stylus. It was a bit of a gamble by Samsung, but consumers really took to it and it was an unexpected hit.

Despite the name, the Galaxy Note 7 is actually the sixth generation Note device, launched in September 2016 (the version number brings it into line with the popular Galaxy S). But so far the launch has been a complete disaster, with reports of the handset catching fire as soon as it was launched. A product recall then followed with replacement devices being sent out, but some of those also caught fire.

Airlines have been banning them from flights, and postal services and couriers are refusing to ship them back for returns because of the potential danger. To counter this, Samsung are shipping special flame resistant packaging and gloves so that units can be returned. Which is a bit humiliating.

In many places you can't even return your Note 7 because of the fire risk, and you probably don't want to keep it in the house with its combustible reputation. You can't easily take the battery out. So what is the solution? Bury it in the garden? Probably not the safest idea in the long run..

So here's a product release that maybe goes down in the record books along with Dasani launch in the UK as being one of the most disastrous ever. So under normal circumstances this would make the Galaxy Note 7 an interesting Futureretro device... but who would want to keep an exploding phone in their collection?

If you want to risk a potentially exploding model, they are still available for around €1000. Or you can get a much safer dummy model for about €20. The latter option is probably the safest. We give the Galaxy Note 7 a Futureretro score of 7/10, assuming you want to take the risk.
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Image credits: Samsung Mobile

Virgin Lobster 700TV / HTC Monet S320 (2006)

Virgin Lobster 700TV (HTC Monet S320)

Announced September 2006

Sometimes you have to wonder how a product ever got to market, without being put out of its misery first. The HTC Monet (also known as the S320) which was sold in the UK as the Virgin Lobster 700TV is one of those examples. Surely somebody somewhere should have taken a look at the Monet and decided for the good of humanity that it should die. Sadly, they didn't.

Take a look. It's a big, thick and plasticky monoblock phone with a large a inexplicable lump stuck on the on the side. There's a clue as to the purpose of this bulge with a button labelled "TV" stuck onto it. Here was the handset's unique selling proposition.. you could watch TV on it. If you dared to take it out of your pocket that is.

Several handset manufacturers had tried to squeeze digital TV into their handsets at this point, notably Nokia with the N92. But almost all of these use the DVB-H standard (Digital Video Broadcasting - Handheld), derived from DVB-T (the "T" is for terrestrial) which is what you'll find in a normal digital TV. The HTC Monet used a variation of DAB, as used in digital radios, with a digital video stream piggy-backed onto the signal. This was called DAB IP. The advantage was meant to be that DAB was very widely available in 2006, where DVB-H certainly wasn't.

In the UK there was some basic content available from the main terrestrial broadcasters, but not a lot of choice. And the Monet displayed all of this on a tiny 2.2" QVGA display. In portrait. Assuming you could receive anything at all. On one of the ugliest phones ever made. You can see that the unique selling proposition was looking a bit.. well, weak.

The thing was.. it could have been so much better. Essentially the Monet was a Windows smartphone with some extra circuitry and software, so even by 2006 standards it could have been so much more. HTC had pioneered Windows touchscreen phones and a bigger display would certainly have been nice, but since the video was restricted to 240p resolution then it would never have been great.

You won't be surprised to learn that the Monet was a flop, in the UK the Virgin handset ran on the BT Movio system which was canned in 2007. But it was more than a failure of a single product, the entire idea of watching broadcast TV on your phone was a failure too. DVB-H was trialled in many countries but never got any further and was switched off, DAB-based systems performed almost as badly although there was some success in South Korea. It's not that consumers were uninterested, but they wanted better phones, more choice and greater flexibility.

Because it was never popular, this odd little phone is very rare today. Apparently it did make a very good DAB radio, although quite how well it functions with contemporary networks is questionable. If you are lucky.. or possibly unluky depending on your point of view, you might find one of these quirky devices for sale second hand.. if you look hard enough.

Image credits: Virgin Mobile

HP TouchPad, Pre 3 and Veer: Palm’s last throw of the dice

Announced February 2011

The history of Palm is a long and complex one, starting in the early 1990s and then going through a series of splits and mergers over the years, cumulating in HP’s takeover of the company in 2010. Palm fans hoped that HP’s resources would save the struggling company and its innovative webOS operating system, and hopes were buoyed by a launch of three related products in February 2011.

These three devices had dropped the “Palm” name, but they were still true to their roots. The HP TouchPad tablet, plus the HP Pre 3 and compact HP Veer smartphones added a significant layer of polish to preview webOS devices, and fans were encouraged by these new developments, especially the TouchPad.

HP TouchPad

The TouchPad had a 9.7” 768 x 1028 pixel display,  a dual-core 1.2GHz processor with 1GB of RAM and 16 or 32GB of storage. There was single front-facing 1.3 megapixel camera for video calling. Initially it was a WiFi-only device with a 4G version promised.

The Pre 3 had a 3.6” 480 x 800 pixel touchscreen and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, plus a 5 megapixel primary camera, 0.3 megapixel secondary one plus 8GB of storage and 512MB of RAM. The last of the trio was the Veer, which was pretty similar to the Pres 3 but with a 2.6” 320 x 400 pixel screen instead and a somewhat lesser feature set.

The Veer hit US retailers in May, the TouchPad hit the stores in July at a rather pricey $600 for the 32GB version and the Pre 3 was launched in the UK on 17th August 2011. But what happened next shocked both fans and observers alike.

It was always likely that the TouchPad would not sell as well as the iPad 2, but in fact sales were disastrous with only a few thousand units shipping in the first month. HP’s response was brutal. The day after the Pre 3 was launched in the UK, HP announced the cancellation of the entire line of webOS devices... forever. At this point, the TouchPad had been on the market for just 49 days and the Pre 3 had never even made it to the US.


HP immediately announced a fire sale of HP devices, slashing around 80% from the retail price. The result was that stock sold out almost immediately everywhere, any many retailers found their websites falling over under the sheet weight of traffic.

HP Veer and Pre 3

A strange situation developed – the TouchPad had become hugely popular device and to give HP credit, they supported it very well for several years. A decent range of applications were available and many people who were just looking for a cheap tablet found themselves very impressed by the elegant design of the webOS environment.

It didn’t take long for enthusiasts such as the crowd at Cyanogenmod to look at ways of porting Android to the TouchPad and it’s very high-quality hardware platform. As support for webOS began to wane, the only viable option was the sometimes complex process of installing a new operating system. But even today, these tablets are still viable devices if installed with a recent version of Android.

It was a dramatic end for Palm, and it was also a disaster for HP who had to write off the billion-dollar acquisition of Palm plus a loss of hundreds of dollars on each tablet and smartphone sold off at rock-bottom prices.

However, the story does quite end there. HP wondered what it could do with webOS, and after a great deal of deliberation they eventually sold it to LG where it ended up as an operating system in Smart TVs and other appliances. The Palm brand itself was bought by TCL (who make Alcatel-branded phones) who are looking at reviving it for a range of Android smartphones.*

So perhaps, it is just possible that the HP fiasco of half a decade ago isn’t the last time you might come across a Palm product..

* Just for another weird twist.. TCL use the Alcatel brand under licence from Alcatel-Lucent who dropped out of making phones, and that company recently came under the control of Nokia, another company that no longer makes phones.