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.

PalmOne Treo 650 (2004)

PalmOne Treo 650

Announced October 2004

The history of the mobile phone market is a bit like the history of the world itself, with empires rising and falling and new superpowers emerging and sweeping the old orders away.

One of these old orders was Palm – which due to its Byzantine history was at the time called PalmOne. Palm pretty much owned the PDA market in the 1990s with the Palm Pilot, but they’d missed out on the emergent “wireless PDA” (or as we would call it “smartphone”) market in the early noughties. This led to Palm buying out a company called Handspring, who made wireless PDAs based on Palm’s own operating system – this enabled Palm to get into the market in 2003 with the Handspring Treo 600, followed by the improved PalmOne Treo 650 in 2004.

It seems a bit alien compared to a modern smartphone with the large keyboard and relatively small screen, plus a stick-out antenna which was old-fashioned even in 2004. The 2.4” 320 x 320 pixel TFT touchscreen display was very advanced for its time, and Palm OS 5.4 was a highly usable and sophisticated software platform which included good support for corporate email too.

Bluetooth, expandable memory and a decent multimedia player rounded off the specification, but unlike modern smartphones there was no high-speed data (it was GSM-only) and no GPS. Still, it was competitive for the time.

It was a valiant effort by Palm - but RIM, HTC and Nokia were all established in the “wireless PDA” market by the time Palm came along. Ultimately the Treo sold well to fans of existing Palm Pilots, but it only had limited success outside its existing market base. The Palm OS platform refused to go down without a fight, and it soldiered on for another three years with the Palm Centro being the last of the line.

Prices for the Treo 650 and 600 vary a lot, with decent ones starting at £50 and going up to £200 for ones in mint condition. If you collect interesting old phones you should probably have at least one running Palm OS, and the Treo 650 is certainly a good candidate.


Image credit: Palm

Samsung SGH-i530 (2004)

Samsung i530

Introduced August 2004

The Samsung i530 is one of those handsets that appears to have popped in from a parallel reality. A clamshell smartphone with a touchscreen, the i530 was one of a small number of mobile phones to run the Palm OS operating system.

Flaws – well, it had those. The i530 lacked any sort of high-speed data and the fact that it came with two batteries probably told you what you needed to know about battery life. As with all other Samsungs of the time, the i530 lacked Bluetooth. And at 190 grams it was a bit hefty for its day too. But perhaps the biggest flaw was that you couldn’t actually buy one… but we’ll come to that shortly.

Samsung had some form with Palm OS smartphones – the SPH-i500 launched in 2003 on the Sprint network in the US showed promise. The i530 added a much better screen and a camera and supported GSM networks rather than CDMA.

Palm OS had been around for a while – first debuting in Palm’s own Pilot 1000 and 5000 in 1996. By the term of the millennium the phrase “Palm Pilot” was pretty much synonymous with handheld computing. Palm themselves had missed the emergence of smartphones altogether, but there was certainly demand for a wireless-enabled Palm OS device, and that was the niche Samsung were aiming for.

So really all the ingredients were here for the i530 to be something of a hit, especially for Palm OS fans who wanted something practical as a mobile phone. But the i530 never got that far. And here the story takes a weird turn.

Samsung is a long-standing sponsor of the Olympics, and they took thousands of i530s to the 2004 Athens games and handed them out to officials, VIPs and athletes. And that was the first and last time anyone ever saw the Samsung i530.

Samsung didn’t stay in the Palm OS market for long. The CDMA SPH-i550 planned for released on the Sprint network was dropped, the SCH-i539 turned up only in China. Palm themselves got into the smartphone market by buying a small rival called Handspring, but Palm OS was fading away by this point and eventually it fizzled out.

If things had worked out differently, we could all be tapping away on Palm OS devices today. But we are not, and Samsung’s involvement with the platform has largely been forgotten. Despite several thousand Samsung i530s being built, they seem to have vanished completely and if you want to add this oddity to your collection then you are probably out of luck.

Image credit: Samsung

Palm Pre (2009)

Launched January 2009

When Palm launched their Palm Pre smartphone half a decade ago, we were quite excited. Perhaps this was the phone that would have wowed consumers and changed the market forever. If it had been launched two years previously, that is.

Today, we still think the same. The Palm Pre was a brilliantly unique smartphone, which despite a few rough edges gave a user experience that was superior to anything else at the time. Designed from the ground up to be an easy-to-use multitasking operating system, the Pre’s webOS environment ran different apps as “cards” that users could swipe between easily. Comprehensive email support (which was important at the time), a decent web browser and even a reasonably large selection of apps were all available, combined with a cute curved design which made the Pre look very different from the rival iPhone. And it had wireless charging too, which was certainly a novelty for the time, and a physical keyboard set it apart from Apple's offering too.

Palm had been a pioneer – perhaps the pioneer – in early handheld computing. The Palm Pilot (launched in 1996) dominated that market segment, to the extent that the phrase “Palm Pilot” was sometimes applied to any PDA. But the rise of early smartphones such as the Sony Ericsson P900 effectively killed off standalone PDAs, and it took a while for Palm to respond with its range of PalmOS-based Treo smartphones that it acquired from rival firm Handspring.

A move into Windows phones hadn’t provided the boost that Palm was looking for, so they started to develop a completely new operating system called webOS. When it was launched in January 2009 along with the Pre, Palm still had enough market presence to have the phone dubbed an “iPhone killer” by the press (spoiler alert: it wasn’t).

Although the software environment was promising, the hardware was pretty shoddy. Palm fans who decided to be loyal to the brand were rewarded with brittle screens and cases, and keys and control sliders that would break or malfunction. This did not help sales.

The competition was also getting serious – the iPhone was in its second generation with the much improved 3GS on the way, HTC had already kick-started the Android market and Samsung was on the verge of releasing its first Galaxy smartphone. And if you didn’t want either of those, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic was a pretty accomplished alternative. And all of those rivals had more apps to choose from than the Pre.

As good as it was – and even with the goodwill of Palm fans – the Pre was neither a success nor a failure. The Palm Pre 2 (launched nearly 2 years later) fixed many of those faults, but it was really just the product that Palm should have launched four years earlier. Even with the weight of new owners HP behind it, the entire line was heading for extinction.

WebOS eventually ended up with LG, who use it in smart TVs and other appliances, and the Palm name lives under today with the peculiar Palm Palm, made under licence by TCL who also build BlackBerry and Alcatel smartphones. Collectors of esoteric devices might be interested to know that the various generations of Pre can be picked up for between £10 to £50.

Image credits: Palm, Inc.

Palm Foleo (2007)

Announced May 2007

Ten years ago we were seeing the start of widespread smartphone use, but although these devices were getting increasingly powerful and allowed people to work and communicate everywhere, their small size was a limiting factor in what they could do. Sure - you could get yourself a laptop computer, but these were designed to be used in the office or at home and taking one out on the road could be difficult.

Palm Foleo

Having helped popularise handheld computing in the 1990s and early 2000s, Palm had missed the boat when it came to smartphones and was struggling to keep up. But instead of just looking at what was happening in the market now, Palm were looking forward to the next problem - specifically trying to overcome the limitations of smartphones when it came to serious work.

Launched in May 2007, the Palm Foleo looked like a small laptop but it was really something different. The idea was that the Foleo would integrate with a smartphone via Bluetooth or USB and act as an extension of that device. This wasn't just limited to PalmOS devices, but also Windows, Symbian and there were plans for the new-fangled iPhone too.

The Foleo itself ran a modified version of Linux, relied entirely on flash memory for storage and it was fan-less due to the low-power CPU, making it very quiet in use and extending the battery life. It weighed just 1.3 kg and had a 10.2" 1024 x 600 pixel screen and a physical keyboard. Email access and cellular connectivity would go through the phone, but as a standalone computer it was pretty capable by itself.

Everything looked rather promising, with developers coming on board and pledging support for the device into the summer of 2007. And then - rather abruptly - Palm cancelled the entire project, presumably very close to the anticipated launch date.

At the time, Palm was facing considerable financial problems. The PDA that it dominated has collapsed, and it was only a very small player in the smartphone market, so given limited resources Palm had decided to step back from the rather innovative Foleo and instead developed the ill-fated Palm Pre launched at the beginning of 2009.

Although the launch of the Foleo would have had its risks, 2007 was the year that Netbooks really started to take off with devices such as the ASUS Eee becoming very popular. Had Palm done the Foleo well, it could have turned around the company's fortunes. Netbooks took a hit the the launch of the iPad in 2010 but then newer devices such as Chromebooks followed in the same vein.

Despite never hitting the market, a small number of Foleos were built, some in full retail packaging. These are very rare and prices of $1500 have been seen for units still sealed in the box.

Video

At the time, Palm provided various bits of B-roll. We've added some cheesy music. Enoy

Image credits: Palm Inc

Palm Treo 680 (2006)

Launched October 2006

It's hard to look back at smartphones launched a decade ago without the hindsight that the game-changing iPhone would redefine the market utterly. But ten years ago this month, Palm came up with the Palm Treo 680 which looked interesting at the time... but a few months later it would look like a relic of times past.

Palm Treo 680

The story of Palm is one of the more complicated ones in tech history. Having defined the PDA market a decade previously, Palm completely failed to realise that the standalone PDA was on the way out in the early 2000s. However, some Palm employees had broken away to form a company called Handspring which decided to make a PalmOS-based smartphone called the Treo, and in 2003 Palm liked the idea so much that they bought the company.

Treo 680 running Google Maps

But by 2006 Palm was an also-ran. Windows and Symbian were battling it out to be king of the smartphone market, and BlackBerry was rapidly growing in strength with increasingly attractive and capable devices. Palm's previous smartphone, the Treo 650, had come out two years previously and looked almost ridiculously old-fashioned.

The Treo 680 looked a bit more contemporary, with the antenna tucked inside the case and a more modern design. The 2.5" 360 x 360 pixel display was large for its time, but it was a 2G-only affair and the increasingly geriatric look of the PalmOS platform meant that it really appealed to Palm fans only, and not anyone else.

Still, it was successful enough for Palm to soldier on until 2010 when it was bought by HP... which proved to be the kiss of death. PalmOS was dying too, the Treo 680 was the penultimate PalmOS device from Palm with the Centro being the very last in 2007.

Treo 680s are not commonly available on the second-hand market, but the older 650 is available in small numbers for around €50 and upwards for an unlocked model.

Palm Pilot 1000 and 5000 (1996)

Introduced March 1996

Before “always connected” smartphones and tablets, there were PDAs. And for a long time the name synonymous with PDAs was “Palm Pilot”. Twenty years ago this month, the first Palm Pilot devices were launched, the Pilot 1000 and Pilot 5000.

With a form factor and weight that was quite similar to a modern smartphone, the Pilot was powered by two AAA batteries that could keep the device in use for weeks. It had a 160 x 160 pixel monochrome display with an area underneath for handwriting recognition (using a stylus) plus some buttons for application control.

Inside was a Motorola 68328 “Dragonball” processor, with 128Kb of RAM for the Pilot 1000 and 512Kb for the 5000 versions. The only connectivity offered was a serial connection to a PC or Mac, allowing data to be synchronised between the two.

The built in applications were pretty basic – a calendar, address book, to-do list and memo taker, but for 1996 that was pretty impressive in a device this small. The basic Pilot 1000 model was $299 in the US, with the 5000 coming in at $369. For a pocket computer, that was pretty good value.. but for a fraction of the price you could buy a Filofax instead, and that was almost infinitely customisable.

Despite its limitations, the Pilot and it successors were a huge success in the late 1990. But rivals such as Nokia had a different vision, and devices such as the original Nokia Communicator combined PDA function with a mobile phone, although without initially gaining much success.

Palm ended up owning the market, and other models followed with improved features, including the ability to sync email which could be read and replied to offline. But it took Palm a long time to understand that people wanted more than a PDA and it wasn’t until 2003 that they released their first smartphone, the PalmOne Treo 600.. and only then because they had bought a rival company called Handspring.

Ultimately, Palm suffered the common fate of tech companies where it helped to define a market and then got left behind. The company’s byzantine history ended in 2011 as part of HP. Today, these original Palm Pilots are uncommon but inexpensive with prices as low as £35 / €32 / $35. Trying to USE one with a modern computer could be tricky, since you’d need an old-fashioned serial port too.. but it might just be worth it for the reaction when you pull one of these ancient devices out of your pocket!

Image credits: Palm

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. 

Biggest handset disasters.. Part 1

We recently covered the ten best and most influential 3G and GSM devices ever, but not every handset is destined for greatness, and it turns out that there have been more than a handful of disasters and catastrophes along the way. This list is our top ten handset disasters, but there are many more to come.
 
And despite being failures, some of these handsets are quite collectable, so we have included a buyers guide in some cases as well.

1. Microsoft KIN (2010) In our view the most disastrous mobile phone product launch ever, the Microsoft KIN was the wrong product at the wrong time, but that was only half the story.   While the world was waiting for Windows Phone 7 to come along and do battle with the iPhone and Android handsets, Microsoft were also working on the KIN feature phone. Part of the problem was that feature phones were dying off, and the KIN was just too limited to be accepted by consumers. But what was worse is that the software was slow and buggy, so even if you did buy one (and hardly anyone did) the chances were that they'd send it back.   But the KIN was a double disaster. The team that created it were largely from a Microsoft subsidiary called Danger who developed the T-Mobile Sidekick. Because of the drain of talent and resources, Danger suffered a catastrophic systems failure which was an early example of what happens when cloud storage goes wrong. Effectively, this mess-up killed the successful Sidekick line.   It rapidly became clear that the KIN product was not selling and the whole thing was cancelled. And then for good measure, Microsoft closed down the entire division responsible for the fiasco. Just to be on the safe side.

2. Motorola ROKR E1 (2005) The Motorola ROKR E1 is the phone that Apple would like you to forget. Why? Because the ROKR was a failed collaboration between Motorola and Apple and was designed to bring iTunes to a mobile phone.   The device was hotly anticipated, with many rumours of iPod style phones and other exotic creations circulating. But when the ROKR leaked out it was almost crushingly boring, being a twice warmed-over version of a handset called the E390. Worse still, it was limited to just 100 tracks and it only had a slow USB 1.1 connector, making it a pain to transfer music to the handset.   Despite a significant marketing campaign, the ROKR was a FLOPR and got a lot of negative publicity, although in reality it's quite a nice device to look at and the music playback is not bad. But Apple learned from their mistakes and came back a couple of years later with the world-changing Apple iPhone instead.   Buyers guide: if you collect esoteric Apple-related devices, these can be had for about €30 but they don't come up for sale very often.

3. BlackBerry Z10 (2013) Not all product disasters are because of bad products. The problem with the BlackBerry Z10 was that it was at least two years too late, and although it was a polished product with a lot of nice features there was basically no market, leading to a nearly billion-dollar stock writeoff and the firing of their CEO.   It had taken BlackBerry over five years to come up with a product that was in any way competitive with the iPhone and other similar smartphones. These delays weren't an isolated incident, as we were pointing out the dangers for BlackBerry all the way back in 2009.   Had the Z10 been launched in 2010 or 2011 perhaps it would have been in with a chance, but the Z10's 2013 launch was far too late to salvage BlackBerry's fortunes.

4. Apple iPhone 4 (2010) Despite the name, the Apple iPhone 4 was really the start of the second distinct generation of iPhones and it was a major improvement over previous generations.   But a basic flaw in the antenna design led to widespread complaints which it took a while for Apple to acknowledge, and for a long time the iPhone 4 struggled under the weight of negative publicity.   Apple fans are quick to forgive though, and although the iPhone brand quickly recovered this is still another bodged product launch that Apple would like you all to forget.

5. Nokia 7600 (2003) The Nokia 7600 was Nokia's second 3G phone, but it was the first one to be widely available. But the weird lozenge-shape and difficult to use keypad were completely nuts. Customers stayed away in droves.   In any case, the market wasn't really ready for 3G and the Nokia 7600 wasn't alone in failing to set the market alight. It took another four years or so for the technology in 3G phones to match up with their promises. Buyers guide: these are pretty common, prices typically range from €20 to €50.

6. Siemens Xelibri series (2003 - 2004) The Siemens Xelibri range consisted of eight highly unusual fashion phones that were designed specifically to be used as secondary devices that you could take with you on a night out. Designed more for style than function, the Xelibri range never really caught on (despite a massive marketing campaign) and was canned after just two generations. Perhaps one of the key problems was price.. they were no cheaper than a standard phone of the time. But in these days of incredibly expensive and brittle smartphones, the idea of having a high-fashion secondary phone doesn't seem such a daft idea after all.   Buyers guide: the Xelibri 1 is the rarest, the Xelibri 6 is the most widely available. Prices range from €20 to €50.

7. Siemens SX1 (2003) Both Siemens and Nokia were companies that could produce a weird looking handset. Although at first glance the Siemens SX1 Symbian smartphone looked normal, a closer inspection showed that the number keys were arranged up the side, making it rather awkward to use for any kind of text input.   There have only been a few successful non-Nokia Symbian devices. The SX1 was not one of them, but it was at least a good looking mobile phone. Buyers guide: the SX1 never sold very well, but does come up for sale sometimes. Price range is around €30.

8. BlackBerry Storm 9500 (2008) BlackBerry's first attempt to counter the iPhone was the BlackBerry Storm, launched in 2008. But it had a poor screen and buggy software. Early negative reviews proved a major embarrassment  and the product bombed.   Despite the failure of the Storm, BlackBerry posted impressive growth figures over the next couple of years, but it could never match the iPhone which led to the firm's decline.

9. Motorola RAZR2 (2007) The original Motorola RAZR had been a massive hit (despite its awful software), but it was strictly a fashion phone.. and fashions change. However, Motorola kept pumping out RAZR variants in an attempt to regain some of the old magic and the Motorola RAZR2 was a high-profile attempt that failed.   Despite the name "RAZR2", there had been a dozen or so variants of the original RAZR by the time this came out, and even more afterwards. But while Motorola were warming over the same old formula, Apple was busy redefining mobile handsets with the iPhone.

10. Palm Pre (2009) The rise and fall of Palm over the years is a complicated story of an early innovator being outpaced by upstart rivals. By 2009 it was in terminal decline, and is a last ditch-attempt to reverse its fortunes it piled all of its resources into the WebOS-based Palm Pre, an interesting touchscreen device that could have been a world leader if they'd announced it a couple of years beforehand.   Sales weren't very great, and eventually the company was taken over by HP leading to the failed Pre 3 in 2011. Cutting their losses, HP killed the entire WebOS product line and effectively killed Palm's legacy dead.