Intel 80286 (1982)

 
Launched February 1982

By 1982, Intel was on a roll. Their 8086 processor series (launched in 1978) was gaining widespread acceptance and in particular had found itself in the IBM PC launched the previous summer.

Four years is a very long time in the microprocessor market, and by 1982 things had moved on. While the 8086 was good enough for a single-user business computer, more sophisticated systems needed a more sophisticated CPU. Intel wanted to capitalise on the success of the 8086, but come up with a processor that could be use in more powerful multiuser systems while maintaining a good deal of compatibility with the older CPU.

The resulting Intel 80286 processor was launched in February 1982, and it became commonly referred to as the “Intel 286” quite quickly. A 16-bit CPU clocked at 5 to 8 MHz at launch, the 286 could either run in “real mode” which was directly compatible with the 8086, or a “protected mode” which was more suitable for multitasking operating systems. Up to 16MB of RAM could be addressed, although few systems would come equipped with that much memory due to the price.

Intel 80286

Although you could multitask with the 286, you could not run virtual “real mode” sessions. So it was impossible (for example) to run multiple DOS sessions on the computer. Switching between modes required either a reboot or some clever hardware and firmware trickery.

Some operating systems did use the full power of the 80286, including Microsoft’s long-forgotten version of UNIX called XENIX and a couple of other Unix-like OSes. These were niche markets, instead probably the best-known use of the 80286 was 1984’s IBM PC/AT which was a redesign of the original PC with the 286 dropped in, along with a new bus and various other improvements. Although the PC/AT still ran DOS and didn’t use the full features of the 286, it was much faster than the original PC which was frankly a bit of a tortoise.

Because IBM and other suppliers insisted on a second source for the 80286, Intel licenced the processor to other manufacturers. These included IBM, AMD, Harris, Siemens and Fujitsu. Harris pushed the speed of the processor up to 25MHz, twice as fast as the top-of-the-line Intel 80286 which ran at just 12.5MHz. For AMD, the second sourcing of the 286 gave them an entry into the Intel-compatible CPU market where they are still the only real competition to Intel today.

The 286 certainly moved things forward, but in terms of the PC it wasn’t the technological leap forward that it needed. In 1985, Intel launched the 80386 which could run multiple virtual 8086 real modes… this meant that a PC could run several DOS applications at once which was a key factor in the uptake of Windows rather than MS-DOS in the PC marketplace.

Although Intel officially dropped the 286 in 1991, Harris and AMD continued to develop it and provided some serious competition to Intel’s new 386 for quite a while. Today these 286 CPUs are still used in some embedded systems, and the Renesas CS80C286 is still available today for these applications.

Second source AMD 286 variant

The 80286 established that the PC architecture wasn’t a one-off design, and marked the beginning of a continual evolution of the platform which of course is still with us today. Because it couldn’t multitask DOS programs, its impact was more limited than the 80386 that followed. However, Windows supported the 286 until version 3.1 (launched in 1992). Many 286-based PCs soldiered on well into the 1990s, some even making it to the Internet age with applications such as Netscape Navigator – far outliving the usefulness of the previous generation.

Image credits:
Thomas Nguyen via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 4.0
Pascal via Flickr – CC0

Defender (1981)

Introduced February 1981

The Golden Age of Arcade Machines really started in 1978 with Space Invaders, an addictive game built on simple hardware. But technology was pushing ahead at a pace, and the same sort of hardware that was finding itself into microcomputers of the era was also finding its way into the arcades.

Defender is a case in point – the first arcade game from pinball masters Williams, the Defender machine used the relatively new Motorola 6809 CPU and a 16 colour monitor with a 320 x 256 pixel resolution, with a second Motorola CPU (this time a more basic 6800) handling the sound. Of course, powerful hardware is one thing, but good gameplay is even more important.

Defender

Thematically, Defender was a sort of cross between Space Invaders and Asteroids. The player controls a small spaceship which is tasked with protecting humans on a barren planetoid from hostile aliens. The ship can move left and right, causing the screen to scroll with it, or up and down to the top of the screen. The play area wraps around from left to right, and is displayed on a mini-map at the top of the screen. Aliens will either try to kidnap and mutate the humans, or will attack the player’s ship directly. Compared to other shoot-‘em-up space games, Defender allows the player a large degree of mobility and they can develop their own strategies.

However, the game was notoriously difficult to play. The controls consisted of an up/down joystick, a thrust button, reverse button, fire button, smart bomb button and away from all the others was the emergency hyperspace. Pressing “thrust” would make the ship accelerate in the direction it was pointing (left or right), keeping the button pressed down make it go faster and faster until usually you smacked into an alien invade. Slowing down required the use of the reverse button and then reverse thrust. While trying to do this, invariably you would need to shoot at stuff and keep an eye on the minimap. Newbies would die very quickly – and this being an arcade game, they’d need to put in more money to try again.

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Ergonomics? What's that? Defender's notoriously difficult control panel

The Defender game itself had been subject to a prolonged period of development difficulties (although the Motorola EXORciser used to develop it is a whole rabbit-hole by itself), and had taken up a considerable amount of time and money at Williams. When it finally hit the arcades in 1981 it was unpopular at first, most likely due to the difficult gameplay. But as people got used to it, Defender became more popular.. and eventually turned into a massive hit. Williams shipped nearly 60,000 arcade machines which brought in more than $1 billion of revenue.

The humble 8-bit 6809 CPU was pushed right to the end of its performance with the game – indeed, it could often suffer from lag when there was too much going on. But it made a good candidate for conversion to the growing market of micros and consoles which were also expanding in capabilities at the time, with a variety of official and unofficial ports available for almost every system that could keep up with the demands of the game.

Defender demonstrated that video games could be more complex than the simple format inspired by Space Invaders, although not many games would succeed if they were as unforgiving to newbies. But other side-scrolling games followed, including Scramble which hit the arcades later the same year. Today Defender machines are quite collectable today assuming you have the space and.. errr.. about £7000 or so.

Image credits:
Matt Grommes – CC BY-SA 2.0
Rob DiCaterino via Flickr - CC BY 2.0

LEO I and Ferranti Mark 1 (1951)

Introduced February 1951

The years immediately after the end of the Second World War saw huge advances in the use of electronics and the development of early computers. By 1951, these machines were becoming practical – albeit in strictly limited scenarios – and February 1951 saw both the world’s first public demonstration of the LEO I and the delivery of the first Ferranti Mark 1 computers.

Both computer systems were British designed and built, they used vacuum tubes and masses of discrete components such as diodes and resistors, housed in huge boxes weighing several tons that sucked in electricity at a phenomenal rate. Primitive by today’s standards, the Ferranti Mark 1 and LEO I was early examples of successful commercial computers.

The computers had different markets, the Ferranti was aimed at scientists and engineers but the LEO was the world’s first dedicated business computer.

LEO Computer name plate

“LEO” stood for “Lyons Electronic Office”, and it was a computer originally designed for the J Lyons company in the UK. Lyons at that time was a massive business of food manufacturing, tea shops and other hospitality businesses spread throughout the country. Almost every town had a Lyons Tea Shop, making them the post-war equivalent of Costa Coffee or Starbuck today – and they had a huge number of customers and staff to support them, requiring a steady and uninterrupted supply of food to keep everything going.

It was a massive logistical enterprise, and Lyons managed it very successfully. Indeed, Lyons successful management of logistics led to the British government giving them the contract to run a large munitions factory called ROF Elstow during World War II. Logistics was the key to the Lyons business, and this led to their interest in the developing world of computers.

The LEO I was designed to help with that. Inspired largely by the EDSAC computer developed at the University of Cambridge, the LEO I started with the mundane task of bakery valuations before moving on to inventory management and payroll. Lyons even started doing payroll for other companies, and there was demand for LEO I systems from other large companies in the UK.

LEO I Mercury Delay Line Storage Unit

A few years later, the successful computer division was spun out as LEO Computers leading to the LEO II and LEO III which used more modern technology. In the 1960s, LEO Computers were merged into English Electric, then International Computers and Tabulators (ICT) and eventually found their way into ICL which itself was taken over by Fujitsu in 2002. The J Lyons company also faded away, by the 1960s the tea shops were losing money and despite a merger with Allied Breweries in the late 1970s, the profitable parts of the company were sold off but the Lyons name lives on under different owners.

The Ferranti Mark 1 had a different lineage – essentially a commercialised version of the Manchester Mark 1 developed at the University of Manchester. Ferranti themselves were a more traditional electrical engineering and electronics company, working in diverse markets such as defence, power systems and home appliances. Their experience in electronics in World War II made them an obvious choice to collaborate with the Manchester project.

Although both computers used vacuum tubes, they had very different forms of memory – the LEO used acoustic mercury delay lines and the Ferranti used a CRT called a Williams Tube. These technologies were only marginally viable even in 1951 and neither technology made it to the end of the decade. Data storage for both systems included the rather more long-lasting solutions of paper tape and punched cards.

Several generations of improved computers came after the Mark 1, but Ferranti wasn’t competitive in the business computer market so eventual sold that off to ICT (who became ICL), concentrating instead on industrial and military applications. Development of these computers continued into the 1980s, alongside Ferranti’s successful semiconductor business.

Ferranti Mark 1 Logic Door

But where J Lyons faded away, Ferranti’s end was more sudden and dramatic. A takeover of a US firm called International Signal and Control (ISC) in 1987 was a disaster – although ISC looked like a good fit, it turned out that the books that Ferranti had inspected were false and instead of ISC being a profitable and above-board defence contractor, its real business was in illegal arms sales which were often made at the behest of the US government. These illegal contracts stopped as soon as ISC because British-owned leading to a massive black hole in Ferranti’s accounts. By 1993 it was all over, Ferranti collapsed and the viable business units were bought out by competitors.

It’s a familiar story of course, early innovators fall by the wayside and then disappear. Not every company can become an IBM or Apple, but in the case of Lyons and Ferranti rather more was lost along the way. 

Image credits:
Ferranti Mark 1 Logic Door - Science Museum Group – CC BY 4.0
LEO Computer Name Plate - Science Museum Group – CC BY 4.0
LEO I Mercury Delay Line - Rhys Jones via Flickr – CC BY-NC 2.0

Kodak Brownie Camera (1900)

Introduced February 1900

Photography these days is commonplace – we snap a photo with our smartphones and don’t give it a second thought. But early photographs were difficult, time-consuming and above all expensive to make.

By 1900 the science (or art) or photography had been around for half a century, and although it had become progressively easier and cheaper things were about to take a big leap forward with the introduction of the Kodak Brownie camera.

Priced at just one dollar at launch (about $31 today), the Brownie was a leatherette-covered cardboard box with a simple lens and a roll of film in the back. Cheap, lightweight and very easy to use the “Box Brownie” camera became a huge success. The improved Brownie 2 followed the next year (priced at $2) and this too sold in huge numbers. The real value of the Brownie to Kodak was not the camera itself, but the huge profits to be made from selling film and developing the photographs.

Box Brownies went on to document everything from family gatherings to wars. Simple to use, robust and portable – what they lacked in sophistication they made up for by being there at the right moment.  The Brownie spawned a huge range of similarly low-cost Kodak cameras over the following decades, and if you’ve ever owned a camera then you’ve probably owned a Kodak at some point.

Kodak’s business model of selling cameras cheaply and making money from the film sustained it for a hundred years, but by the end of the 20th Century digital cameras were making significant inroads into the market. Kodak tried hard to compete in this market, grabbing a decent share of the market… but it lost money on almost every camera it sold. Various other strategies were tried and largely failed, and finally the rise of high quality smartphone cameras proved a fatal blow. Kodak files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2012, two years after the launch of Instagram which came up with a new paradigm for sharing photographs.

Despite its woes, Kodak still exists today although much slimmed down from the giant of the past. And Kodak Box Brownie cameras are still commonly available for not much money. Although nobody makes the film for the original Brownies any more, you can adapt current film for use in them if you are after a bit of retro photography.

Image credit: Federico Leva via Wikimedia Commons

HTC Desire (2010)

HTC Desire

Launched February 2010

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 other HTC handsets) – 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.

Image credit: Retromobe and Mobile Gazette

Motorola V80 (2004)

Launched February 2004

In these days of big slabby smartphones, it’s easy to forget that in the dim and distant past there was a bit more choice. There were monoblock “candy bar” phones, clamshells, sliders and even tacos and bricks.

On top of that, there was one other quite rare form factor - the rotator. Motorola were the king of this particular idea, and somewhere between the V70 of 2002 and the AURA of 2008 was the curious Motorola V80.

You could say that the V80 summed up Motorola in one handset. A combination of clever design, exquisite engineering, poor attention to detail and terrible software made the V80 both brilliant and infuriating at the same time.

To modern eyes, the V80 looks rather like the phones we have today, with the display dominating the front with a few buttons added in. But there was a trick – with a quick move of the fingers, the numeric keypad would swing out from underneath and rotate out. This was probably the most carefully engineered part of the V80, and was certainly its coolest feature.

There were some other cool features – the V80 could be pretty good at games as it was easy to use in landscape mode with a little joystick for control. Incoming phone calls would trigger a pretty epic display of lights, which you could customise according to caller. The 176 x 220 pixel display was sharper than most, and overall the physical design looked very different from anything else on the market.

There were some catches though, not least that the phone was nearly an inch thick. Given the phone’s pretty decent media and gaming features, there was no expandable memory so you had to make do with what was on board. The keypad itself felt cheap and the little green joystick had a habit of coming off. And because this was a Motorola from the early noughties, the software was pretty horrible too.

Despite its flaws, the V80 attracted a loyal fan base who often held onto their phones far longer than would seem reasonable. The rotator format itself remained pretty rare, but the Nokia 7370, Sony Ericsson S700 and Samsung X830 all attempted to do something similar. Today you can pick up a V80 for around £25 to £80 depending on condition.

Image credits: Motorola

Sharp GX30 (2004)

Sharp GX30

Announced February 2004

Back in the early noughties, Sharp was competing in the European market pretty successfully with a series of highly-regarded phones that offered features that were often far ahead of the competition.

February 2004 saw the announcement of the Sharp GX30 – the first phone in Europe to have a megapixel-class camera, complete with an LED flash. In addition to this, the GX30 had a best-in-class 2.2” 240 x 320 pixel display using a CGS (Continuous Grain Silicon) LCD display which give an exceptionally clear and – and forgive the intentional pun – sharp image.

The rest of the phone was pretty good too – the GX30 had expandable memory via a full-sized SD card, an MP3 player, Bluetooth and all of this was wrapped up in a very pretty silver clamshell design (although peculiarly it still had an external antenna).

In most European markets, Sharp handsets were exclusive to Vodafone who had access to all sorts of interesting Japanese devices through their ownership of one of the major Japanese mobile networks. Although some handsets did make it to other carriers – notably the Sharp TM200 – you were pretty much limited to Vodafone if you wanted one.

Perhaps it was this carrier exclusive agreement that stopped Sharp from having the breakthrough they needed, and despite some very good devices they faded out from the European market within a few years.

Perhaps not an obvious phone to collect, but the GX30 is pretty commonly available from about £5 to £40 depending on condition.

Image credits: Vodafone and Sharp

Samsung Blue Earth S7550 (2009)

Announced February 2009

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

Samsung Blue Earth

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image credit: Samsung

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

Orac (1978)

Orac

Introduced March 1978

Forty years ago this month the British public got their first glimpse of a computer system so advanced that it put everything else to shame. Invented by a brilliant computer scientist called Ensor, Orac was a sophisticated artificial intelligence system which was adept at both speech synthesis and speech recognition, could control any other computer, and it all came in handily transportable transparent box.

You might think that this sounded a bit more complex than (say) a contemporary RM 380Z, and you would be right. Orac was in fact a fictional computer from the cult BBC TV Show Blake’s 7, and was clearly just a Perspex box with some flashing lights and odds and ends inside it.

Debuting in the final episode of the first series, Orac became a key member of the cast. Short tempered, irascible and often unpleasant to deal with, Orac was probably marginally nicer to use that Windows 8. But not much.

Blake’s 7 itself was a low budget but thoughtful space opera, featuring a dysfunctional group of resistance fighters battling against a powerful and corrupt Federation, using a salvaged alien spaceship with a grumpy computer of its very own – by the name of Zen.

Inspired by the show and the advanced but oddly uncooperative technology, the names “Orac” and “Zen” were adopted by a generation of computer scientists who would apply these liberally to computer systems of the time.

These days of course voice-controlled and somewhat unhelpful computer systems are commonplace, but in 1978 they seemed to be very futuristic. Just not a future many of us would like to be living in. The closest modern equivalent to Orac might be the Amazon Echo, however for a bit more you could buy yourself a Baby Orac replica instead… and although it might not do as much, it is probably much cooler.

Image credit: Phil Parker via Flickr

Apple Macintosh Colour Classic (1993)

Mac Colour Classic (1993)

Launched February 1993

Nine years after the launch of the original Macintosh, Apple launched the Macintosh Colour Classic (or “Color” for colonials) which was the final generation of compact Mac. Well, sort of.

The Colour Classic was perhaps the machine the original Mac should have been. The obvious technical difference here being that the Colour Classic was a colour Mac, unlike all the previous monochrome Classic models. The display was a little larger at 10”, and the all-in-one case had been redesigned to give it a more contemporary look.

Inside the Colour Classic was an expansion slot which could take an Apple IIe card, allowing the Colour Classic to run Apple II programs. This feature was primarily designed to get the Colour Classic into schools where (especially in the US) the Apple II was still very popular. Despite being launched more than a decade and a half earlier, the Apple II was still in production (in the IIe form) mostly for the education market.

The card had an odd trick of allowing the Colour Classic to run at 560 x 384 pixel resolution (better than the 512 x 384 standard Mac capabilities) to help with emulating the Apple IIe’s 280 x 192 pixel resolution by providing exactly four times the pixel count. However, the Colour Classic could not run many native colour Mac games which required a higher resolution of 640 x 480 pixels, making the Colour Classic somewhat flawed in this respect.

Despite running a 68030 CPU, the performance of the Colour Classic was not as good at the SE/30 introduced four years earlier. The performance problems were caused in part because the Colour Classic was essentially a Macintosh LC II shoehorned into the all-in-one case, and the LC II was a lemon of an Apple, basically.

Despite these limitations the Colour Classic succeeded in selling well into education markets and was also a hit in Japan. Later in 1993 an upgraded version – the Colour Classic II – was introduced in non-US markets which fixed many of the performance problems.

It’s quite a collectable device today, with prices for standard systems starting at around €400 or so with “Mystic” upgrades (essentially the innards of an LC 575) being about €100 more.  “Takky” upgrades with even later motherboards in can cost much more. Today

Image credit: Mystère Martin via Wikimedia Commons

Nokia 8110 (1996) vs Nokia 8110 (2018)

Nokia 8110 (1996)

Nokia is of course a familiar name to our readers, but the phones branded “Nokia” today are actually the product of HMD Global who work with Nokia to design and produce phones. The bulk of their output is a series of rather well-regarded and inexpensive Android smartphones along with a range of cheap feature phones. A year ago they caused a stir by launching a reimagined version of the classic Nokia 3310, and this year they are doing it again with a remake of the Nokia 8110.

We’ve covered the Nokia 8110 on Retromobe before, launched in 1996 it gained the somewhat cruel nickname “Banana Phone”, but it was made famous and rather cool when it appeared in The Matrix.

The key feature was the slide-down cover which contained a microphone. This protected the keypad when not in use, and it was meant to make the user’s voice carry better. Nobody had made a phone like this, and it was certainly different from the brick-like handsets of the time. There wasn’t much else going on – it had a small monochrome graphical display, supported GSM voice calls and apart from a neat little desk mount that really was about it.

Fast forward 22 years and the Banana Phone is back, and this time it is actually available in bright yellow as well as a more sober black colour. The new 8110 isn’t a smartphone, but can be considered as an advanced feature phone that is rather interesting under the hood.

The new 8110 looks quite contemporary, taking Nokia’s current styling cues from the rest of the range. On the top is a 2.4” QVGA TFT display which is a pretty familiar feature for this type of device. There’s a 2 megapixel camera with geotagging and a flash on the back and a secondary one for video calling. Inside Is 4GB of storage plus a microSD slot, and there’s a media player and FM radio.

Nokia 8110 (2018)

So far, so much like any other feature phone. But here is where it is unexpected – the 8110 is a 4G LTE device as well as having 3.5G HSPA and 2G support. On top of that the 8110 has WiFi and GPS, and you can use it as a mobile hotspot. The processor is no slouch either, with a dual core 1.1GHz CPU couple with 512MB of RAM which is plenty. The 8110 takes a microSD card and is available in single SIM and dual SIM configurations.

The surprises go on. Unlike most of the current crop of Nokia feature phones, the 8110 ditches the Series 30+ OS and instead uses on operating system called KaiOS. KaiOS is derived from the defunct Firefox OS, and it represents a lightweight and somewhat extensible operating system that makes this feature phone just a little bit smarter. An application store allows access to apps for Google Maps, Facebook and Twitter and the 8110 also syncs with major email systems.

It may not be as sophisticated as a smartphone, but at €79 before tax and subsidy it is a lot cheaper than almost all of those (except the Nokia 1 perhaps). The quoted standby time of 600 hours with 11 hours talktime from the 1500 mAh battery is another attractive feature. This is a device that you can easily carry around alongside your power-hungry smartphone while travelling, for example

Due to hit the shops in April, the 8110 may end up a hit in the same way that the 3310 did, showing that there is some appetite for these practical and rather knowingly retro devices. If you are after an ORIGINAL 8110, then prices are quite healthy at around €150 for unlocked versions in good condition, about twice that of the “new” one. Why not treat yourself to both?

Image credits: Nokia and HMD Global

HP DeskJet (1988)

HP DeskJet 500 circa 1990

Introduced February 1988

Thirty years ago if you wanted to print something from a computer, your main choices were a high-quality but expensive and quite large laser printer, or a cheap but slow, clunky and incredibly noisy dot matrix printer. If these didn’t work for you and you still needed high-quality printing you might still have to resort to an old-fashioned daisy wheel printer instead.

But there was another option, and in February 1988 Hewlett-Packard introduced the HP DeskJet – a desktop printer with quality almost as good as a laser printer but for a fraction of the price. It wasn’t the first inkjet printer, and indeed HP themselves had been marketing the ThinkJet range for several years, but that was little more than a dot matrix printer with an inkjet head in it.

Like laser printers, but unlike most dot matrix printers and even the ThinkJet range, the DeskJet was built only to handle cut sheet paper. Compact enough and quiet enough to be sat on a desk next to a computer, the DeskJet was ideally suited to small offices or home environments. It was an immediate hit with customers.

Early DeskJets were not without their problems. A lot of office paper was designed for typing or photocopiers, and some coped poorly with the ink from inkjet printers. Complex graphics could be a problem on early units due to hardware and software limitations, and although rated at the same 300 dpi as HP’s laser printers, even in the best cases the quality did not stand up to a close comparison. The water-based ink tended to take a long time to drive and would run if the paper got wet. But at around a third of the cost of a LaserJet II, the DeskJet seemed a good value proposition.

But then (as know) one of the drawbacks of inkjet printing was the price of cartridges. Inkjet printing was much more expensive than laser printing, and those slow and noisy dot matrix printers cost next to nothing in ribbons. However, thirty years later these ink cartridges are still available with prices at around £30 to £50.

Subsequent generations of DeskJet added colour, network printing, full duplex capability and more. These days you can buy an HP DeskJet 2130 multifunction printer for around £40, although a replacement set of ink cartridges for than will cost more than £20. The lasting commercial success of the DeskJet range is remarkable and it certainly introduced a significant step forward in affordable printing for many people.

Image credit: Stahlkocher via Wikimedia Commons

Samsung G810 vs Sony Ericsson G900 (2008)

Samsung G810

Launched February 2008

Today we are used to the idea of smartphones being a big slab of metal, glass and plastic with the capability to do just about anything. A decade ago, most smartphones were rather more modest and traditional affairs, looking like everyday feature phones on the surface but with a cleverer operating system underneath.

Almost all these simple smartphones ran some version of Symbian, and of course the undisputed king of Symbian devices was Nokia. But they weren’t they only players in the Symbian game, and in February 2008 both Samsung and Sony Ericsson launched new smartphones using that platform.

Samsung isn’t a name you’d readily associate with Symbian, but they actually made eleven handsets between 2007 and 2009 (excluding the cancelled D710 from 2004). The Samsung G810 was quite a high-end slider phone, seemingly aimed at the market the Nokia N95 appealed to.

The G810 was a 3.5G capable device with WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, an FM radio, 2.6” QVGA display, a microSD slot and it came with a 5 megapixel camera which unusually featured an optical zoom. The operating system was Samsung’s take on Symbian S60, meaning that it functioned very much in the same way as rivals from Nokia.

The elegant metal case and sliding mechanism was quite unlike anything Nokia had, but overall it wasn’t that different from the N95 and the newer N95 8GB came with a bigger screen and lots of built-in memory. The G810 wasn’t good enough to compete, and it was not a success.

Sony Ericsson G900

If you wanted Symbian with a touchscreen then this was a different proposition, and here it was Sony Ericsson’s UIQ platform that dominated. One of a pair of similar devices launched the same month, the Sony Ericsson G900 also competed against the N95.

Also featuring WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, an FM radio and memory slot the G900 lacked GPS. The display was smaller than the N95 8GB or Samsung G810 at just 2.4” – but this was a touchscreen affair with a stylus, or alternatively you could just use the buttons.

Although Sony Ericsson had made many UIQ phones before, the software on the G900 wasn’t quite the same. This meant that you couldn’t just port applications over from other UIQ phones. Another weakness was the proprietary nature of the Sony Memory Stick Micro slot. But perhaps the biggest problem of all was the 2.4” display which was small for a smartphone even by 2008 standards.

As you might guess, a tiny touchscreen phone didn’t really have much shelf appeal and the G900 and its companion G700 were not very popular.

The Sony Ericsson G900 is a pretty uncommon device these days with prices coming in between €100 to €200, the Samsung G810 seems to be pretty much extinct.

Image credits: Sony Ericsson and Samsung Mobile

Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 vs Toshiba Portégé G910/G920 (2008)

Launched February 2008

Back in February 2008 there were two key competitors in the touchscreen smartphone market: Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 6 and Sony Ericsson’s Symbian-based UIQ. Windows was the more popular of the two, even though its user interface was a pretty horrible attempt to emulate the desktop environment on a pocket device.

Sure, Apple had launched the iPhone the previous year with a slick new interface, but it hadn’t really made much of a market impact at this point. Android was in the pipeline, but still a long way off. So at this point in time, it was really Microsoft who had the dominant position in this market.

Launched at roughly the same time, the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 and Toshiba Portégé G910 and G920 were both quite similar devices from well-known names in the industry. But what was a typical high-end Windows smartphone like in 2008?

Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1

Let’s start with the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1  - this was the very first “Xperia” smartphone, but where all modern ones run Android, this one ran Windows Mobile 6.1 instead. Featuring a 3” WVGA display (which was large for the time), the X1 also had a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, 3.5G data, WiFi, GPS and pretty much everything that you would find in a smartphone today. Unusually, the X1 also had a microSD slot rather than using Sony’s Memory Sticks… and this was a clue that the X1 wasn’t really a Sony Ericsson at all.

In fact, the XPERIA X1 had been designed and built by rival firm HTC who were experts in making Windows Devices. HTC had been making quite a name for themselves, so the decision to compete with themselves with the X1 was a strange one.

Some work had gone into making the Windows user-experience a better one, with a tile-based application launcher. It was quite a stylish device too, although the slide-out keyboard did add substantially to its bulk.

At the time of launch, the X1’s overall package was better than almost anything else on the market, but by the time it actually went on sale in October 2008 it was beginning to look a little dated. It was something of a success though, and in 2009 it was followed up by XPERIA X2 which was less of a success. Sony Ericsson moved away from Windows to concentrate on Android devices, but it did produce the BlackBerry-like Aspen in 2010 which rather sank without trace.

Toshiba G9-something-or-other

Toshiba made a huge effort in February 2008, launching the esoteric G450 along with the compact Windows-based G710 and G810. However, at the top end was the Portégé G910/G920 which had a pretty similar configuration to the XPERIA X1, but perhaps more aimed as being a laptop replacement than a high-end smartphone.

A clamshell device rather than a slide, the G910 and G920 also had a 3” WVGA display, 3.5G support and WiFi. The G920 had enhanced GPS functionality over the G910, but overall both featured almost everything you’d expect to see in a modern smartphone.

The Toshiba was even more bulky than the Sony Ericsson but it was much smaller than even Toshiba’s smallest laptops. The OS was plain old Windows Mobile 6 with no custom interface on top, although Toshiba did include the useful Opera web browser as standard

Toshiba had been trying to break into the mobile phone market for years, but except for Japan they had not had much success. Toshiba would give up trying to compete a few years after this, before attempting and failing to break into the tablet market. In the years past that, Toshiba continued to slide – even pulling out of consumer laptops, a market that it had once been a major player in.

In the end, neither device changed the world, although the XPERIA X1 did give Sony Ericsson (and later Sony by themselves) the impetus needed to concentrate on touch-screen smartphones. The  Portégé range couldn’t help stop Toshiba’s decline though. And today Windows Phone is an endangered species, for all its charms.

For collectors, the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 is commonly available for around €40 or so unlocked. The Toshiba Portégé G910 and G920 is much rarer with prices at around €100 for collectors of esoteric Windows devices.

Onyx Liscio vs Toshiba G450 (2008)

Toshiba G450

Launched February 2008

These days we are used to phones getting bigger and bigger, a trend started by the iPhone and its successors. But ten years ago there was still a trend to make phones smaller with each generation, and the Toshiba G450 and Onyx Liscio are examples of that.

The Toshiba G450 remains one of the weirdest phones ever. This tiny 57 gram phone featured two circular keypads and a tiny 0.8” display. Although the MP3 capabilities and 160MB of memory gave it some basic capabilities as a media player, the G450 was actually designed for something else.

In the days before ubiquitous WiFi and smartphone tethering, if you wanted to get your laptop online on the move you would often use a 3G dongle that you would plug into a USB port. Basically, the G450 was exactly that… but a dongle that you could make phone calls on. 3.5G data support meant that it was practical to use for mobile data, but you could also use it for basic phone functions if you needed to.

A similar size but with a different emphasis, the Onyx Liscio was designed to be a fully-featured 2G phone that you would use as a second handset when you didn’t want to take your main one – for example, on a night out.

Onyx Liscio

The screen was only a little larger than the Toshiba, but the 1.1” screen was an OLED display which was still quite rare. Unlike the G450, the Liscio also supported Bluetooth and had a microSD slot, but it didn’t support 3G data.

Priced at about €135 when new, the Liscio was about have the cost of a typical midrange phone of the time, so it would be a bit less financially painful if it got run over by a taxi. But not much. And since you could just by an ultra-basic Nokia for a lot less, it didn’t really make much financial sense. And it turned out that the Liscio was actually an 18-month old Haier handset which could be bought cheaper elsewhere.

It might not come as a surprise to discover that neither device was much of a success. The Toshiba G450 was just far too weird, and people who wanted a 3G dongle for their laptops probably just bought a 3G dongle. The Liscio was overpriced and under-powered, even though the basic idea seemed sound.

Both handsets are very rare these days, but from time-to-time the Toshiba G450 does crop up for about €70 or so. If you like collecting weird-looking devices then the G450 might well be something worth seeking out for your collection.

Nokia N96 (2008)

Announced February 2008

Back in 2006 Nokia produced the iconic Nokia N95 smartphone, followed up by the improved N95 8GB a year later. Both these devices were hugely successful products by a company at its peak. Although upstarts Apple had release the original iPhone in early 2007, it hadn’t had much material impact on Nokia’s sales figures and they were still confident of their dominance of the mobile phone industry.

Expectations were high for the new Nokia N96, launched at Mobile World Congress in 2008. And on paper, the N96 looked pretty good. Retaining a similar 2.8” QVGA display to the N96 8GB, the N96 doubled the amount of storage to 16GB and came with a microSD slot (which the N95 8GB did not), it had a similar 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, 3.5G data and WiFi, aGPS, a comprehensive media player, an FM radio and a TV output as well.

The biggest surprise was the inclusion of a DVB-H receiver, which meant that you could watch free-to-air transmissions where there was coverage. A clever little kick-stand around the camera lens meant that viewing TV or downloaded videos was a bit more convenient.

Because this was a Symbian smartphone you could add applications, although by modern standards this used a clunky approach. What we would consider a modern app store would be introduced by Apple for their second-generation iPhone just a few months later.

It was a good-looking device, where the original N95 had been rather utilitarian. But there was no getting away from the fact that it didn’t have a touchscreen like the iPhone did, and at 3.5” the Apple device had more display real estate too.

It took a long time to come to market, shipping in September 2008 with a fairly hefty price tag. Critical reception was poor: it was not easy to use, was slow and unreliable. Nokia also undermined the position of the N96 by announcing the N97 and 5800 XpressMusic shortly after launch.

Given the achievements of the N95, it initially seemed that the N96 would be a guaranteed success. Instead it turned out to be a flop. It didn’t help either that DVB-H – one of the key features of the N96 – was also never rolled out to any great extent. Today the N96 is largely forgotten, sandwiched between the better-known N95 and N97. Today N96s are somewhat uncommon, prices can be less than €100 for good unlocked ones with accessories but a median price seems to be around €150.

You could argue that the N96 marked the beginning of a long and slow decline for Nokia. The market that Nokia had utterly dominated was changing rapidly, but Nokia were not changing quickly enough to go with it. Nokia handsets remained popular (the N96 apart) but within a few years the Symbian platform that the N-series was based on became a dead end.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5 (1993)

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Piloted January / February 1993

Launched twenty-five years ago this month, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (ST:DS9) was a spin-off from the successful Star Trek: The Next Generation Series (ST:TNG), running for seven seasons until 1999. Set on board a second-hand space station on the fringes of Federation space, DS9 was a more gritty and complex show than TNG ever was. Using the advantage of the large fixed sets that the station setting allowed, DS9 was less reliant on the "planet of the week" approach that TNG had. And also unlike TNG, DS9 was a show of conflicts and war ending up in the epic struggle between the Federation and the seemingly unstoppable Dominion.

But that wasn't the only space station-based science fiction show that you could watch. Piloting in February 1993 was Babylon 5 (B5). Set in its own unique timeline, Babylon 5 also stood out because it was designed from the start to have a five-year story arc compared to Star Trek's traditional self-contained episodes. Babylon 5 introduced pioneering CGI animation and groundbreaking alien prosthetics, running for five seasons from 1994 to 1988 and then followed by a number of feature films.

DS9 was created by Rick Berman and Michael Piller for Paramount, B5 by J. Michael Straczynski for Warner Brothers. There was some intense rivalry between fans of the two shows, but less so between the two shows themselves. B5 itself was created as a sort of antithesis of ST:TNG, striving to create more consistency between episodes (so that a solution for a problem one week could also be a solution another week, and not forgotten as so often happened with TNG) and it also strove to break some of the cliches (in B5 the cute kid almost always dies). DS9 on the other hand showed that not all the Federation was a futuristic utopia, and the integrity of the Federation itself was not assured.
 

Babylon 5

There were some striking similarities - both DS9 and B5 were originally under the direction of a Commander (not a Captain) in the form of Benjamin Sisko and Jeffrey Sinclair respectively, both of whom had question marks hanging over their careers. Both series feature a fight against an enemy that might be unbeatable (the Dominion and the Shadows). Both series explored moral ambiguities, betrayal, politics and diplomacy. Both series acquired a kick-ass ship to protect them (the USS Defiant and White Star). Oh yes, and both space stations had a number. But on top of that, Walter Koenig (from the original Star Trek series) plays a major role, and even Majel Barrett (wife of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry) had a small role. The argument of who might have borrowed what ideas from whom has rumbled on for decades.

But anyway - what of gadgets? Well, the biggest gadget in either show was the Babylon 5 space station, with the statistics spelled out in the series one opening sequence -  5 miles long, weighing 2.5 million tons and with a population of 250,000 humans and non-humans. Designed and built by Earth in the mid-23rd century it lacked artificial gravity, so Babylon 5 featured rotating sections. Shuttles and other small ships could enter the station directly and dock inside the hangars, and the station also had dorsal launch tubes for its Starfury fighters, plus an impressive defense grid that could take on a cruiser-class enemy ship.

Deep Space 9 was much smaller, reportedly about a mile long but weighing 10.1 million tons. Spacecraft had to dock on the outside. The station's armaments were complemented by deflector shields, and it could house up to 7000 people. As with all Star Trek series, the principles of artificial gravity had been long ago mastered. Originally known as Terok Nor when it was built by the Cardassians in the mid-24th century, DS9 was quite unlike anything else the Federation operated.

Both of these shows were made in a golden age of TV space opera. Twenty-five years later mainstream television has largely abandoned this format. Perhaps it's time will come again? Maybe we won't have to wait until the 23rd century to find out.

Image credits: iTunes [1] [2]

Nokia 3310 (2000) vs Nokia 3310 (2017)

There has been some excitement in recent weeks with a leak that Nokia was re-releasing the classic 3310 handset from 2000. But would a company really be brave enough to try to punt something nearly two decades old to consumers? Well, the answer was.. no.

The original 3310 was a simple monochrome phone, but it had a reputation for being tough, having a long battery life, swappable covers and also some simple games including the legendary Nokia snake. And that really was about it - no mobile data, no Bluetooth, no music playback and it didn't even have polyphonic ringtones.

Nokia 3310 (2000)

Superficially with a similar shape and footprint, the new Nokia 3310 tries to relive some of the magic of the old one. The most obvious immediate change is the much larger 2.4" QVGA display on the front and the 2 megapixel camera on the back. Despite efforts, it's clear that the keypad reflects that this is a Series 30+ device as are all contemporary Nokia feature phones.. in fact, the specification is very similar to devices such as the Nokia 222 but in a rather different case.
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Nokia 3310 (2017)

Nokia 3310 (2000) vs 3310 (2017)

Other features include a music player, FM radio, expandable memory, Bluetooth and some rudimentary 2.5G data support. The 1200 mAh battery is rated as giving up to 31 days standby time and 22 hours talktime on the single-SIM model, and there's also a dual-SIM variant available. And yes.. Snake is still there. The covers don't seem to be changeable, but are available in a choice of red, yellow, blue or grey.

HMD (who make the phones under licence) say that the retail price will be approximately €49. In truth of course this isn't really a relaunch of anything - it is just one of those feature phones that Nokia never stopped making in a different case. But it's still a striking and friendly but somewhat odd-looking device that should appeal to certain types of customer. Retro in some ways, but not in others.. it does at least serve as a reminder as to why we all used to own Nokias in the early days of mobile phones.

Image sources: Nokia and HMD Global

Nokia N77, E65, E61i and 6110 Navigator (2007)

Launched February 2007

Launched alongside the headlining E90 Communicator in February 2007 were a whole bunch of Symbian smartphones all looking for their particular market niche. As was common with Nokia 10 years ago, you could have any feature you wanted.. just not all in the same device.

The Nokia N77 was a normal-looking "candy bar" phone 3G phone with the unusual addition of a DVB-H TV receiver. Whether you wanted to watch TV on a 2.4" QVGA screen or not was another question, and of course these days most video is streamed over high-speed networks which the N77 lacked. DVB-H was seen as a great hope ten years ago, with quite a few devices launched in between 2007 and 2009, at which point it fizzled out.

Nokia N77

Looking a bit like any other Nokia slider (not exactly a huge range of devices, we know) the Nokia E65 was a Symbian smartphone with 3G support and WiFi. The clever thing with the E65 was that you could integrate it into your corporate PABX system which is something that manufacturers are still struggling to get accepted a decade later.

Nokia E65

A warmed-up version of the year-and-a-half-old E61, the Nokia E61i was another Symbian smartphone with a full QWERTY keyboard underneath, making it look like a Nokia version of a BlackBerry. But BlackBerry was always about more than just phones, and ultimately the E61i couldn't compete with BlackBerry who were just beginning to hit a period of rapid growth.

Nokia E61i

In 2017 we expect almost all of our phones to also be navigation devices, but in 2007 this was still rate. The Nokia 6110 Navigator was yet another Symbian device, but this time with GPS and turn-by-turn navigation. In essence, it was a cut-down version of the N95 which was a far better device.

Nokia 6110 Navigator

Perhaps Nokia's strategy with the E90, N77, E65, E61i and 6110 was to throw everything it had at the wall to see what would stick. Unfortunately for Nokia, most of these devices just slid off..

Image sources: Nokia