Nokia E7 (2010)

 Introduced September 2010

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

Nokia E7

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

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

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

Nokia E7

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

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

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

Nokia E7

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image credits: Nokia

TRS-80 Color Computer (1980)

Introduced September 1980

The original TRS-80 (launched in 1977) was one of the “holy trinity” of early consumer-friendly microcomputers along with the Apple II and Commodore PET. Capable though the original was, it lacked colour and sound which was what the next-generation of home micros would provide, so in September 1980 Tandy Radio Shack launched the TRS-80 Color Computer.

It had almost nothing in common with the original TRS-80 Model I except for the name. Crucially the Color Computer (often called the “CoCo”) didn’t have the Z80 processor that gave the “80” to the Model I’s name but instead it included a Motorola 6809. Indeed, the whole thing was more Motorola than Tandy – the basis of the CoCo was a Motorola-designed Videotex terminal which Tandy joined in to manufacture and market.

TRS-80 Color Computer 1

 

The 6809 was a bit more sophisticated than the Z80 and the rival 6502, and the more powerful Motorola 68000 was still an expensive and rather niche device. This was combined with a Motorola MC6847 graphics chip and there was an optional sound and speech cartridge.

Although the CoCo had pretty powerful graphics capabilities it was complex to get the most out of them, and the machine had some odd quirks such as being unable to display pure white and lacking lowercase character support. At launch the CoCo had 4, 16 or 32KB of RAM but later models shipped in 16 or 64KB configurations, and the last series of Color Computers could support up to 512KB.. and wonder of wonders, even lowercase text.

Over eleven years the hardware evolved somewhat with three distinct series of computers being made with different case colours, detailing and keyboards. The third and last series had improved graphics, built-in software and better support for peripherals. The larger memory allowed the sophisticated OS-9 operating system to run which brought a modern operating system to this fairly simple 8-bit machine.

TRS-80 Color Computer 2

Production ended in 1991, which wasn’t bad for an 8-bit machine. It was more popular in North America than in Europe, but the same Motorola reference platform emerged in the somewhat CoCo-compatible Dragon 32 and Dragon 64 a few years later.

For collectors, the CoCo isn’t an expensive buy and is commonly available in the US, however those run on a different voltage and have different video standards to European ones. Plenty of software emulators are available if you fancy tinkering on more modern hardware.

Image credits:
Adam Jenkins via Flickr - CC BY 2.0 - [1] [2]

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

Xerox 914 (1959)

Xerox 914 plus contemporary advertising

Launched September 1959

Pretty much ever since human beings invented paper, they’ve wanted an easy way to copy what was written, printed or drawn on that paper. One Wednesday in September 1958 – about 2000 years after paper was invented – there was finally a solution.

The Xerox 914 was the fruit of a two-decade development of a dry copy processes called xerography, a technology that had been acquired by the Haloid Company of New York. Able to copy full-sized documents onto plain paper, the 914 was a significant technological advance over the slower, messier methods that had gone before.

Weighing nearly 300 kilograms and with a large footprint as well, the 914 was pretty big but still quite usable as a departmental copier. With an ability to copy 100,000 pages per month at 7 sheets per minute, the 914 is still pretty competitive by modern standards.

If you wanted to buy one it was phenomenally expensive at $27,500 (roughly equivalent to a quarter of a million dollars today) or apparently you could rent one for just $95 a month plus a charge for each copy made.

It has its problems though, notably paper jams could result in a small fire which later models of 914 dealt with by including a small fire extinguishers euphemistically called a “scorch guard”.  Despite this the Xerox 914 was a huge success, shipping 200,000 units until the end of production in 1976. Haloid even changed its name to Xerox after its best-known line of products.

A behemoth such as the Xerox 914 is hardly a collectable item, and given that probably most of them were rented you are probably unlikely to stumble across one. But perhaps there are still a few gathering dust in basements and store rooms…

Image credit: Xerox

Apple Macintosh Portable (1989)

Apple Macintosh Portable

Launched September 1989

Launched five years after the original Macintosh, the Apple Macintosh Portable was the first truly portable Mac, a device that prioritised performance over everything else and ended up as a notable but rather heroic failure for Apple.

Here was an extremely elegant all-in-one device, although the sheer bulk of the thing and the hefty 7.2 kilogram weight pushed the definition of “portable” even thirty years ago. Once opened up the central feature was the 9.8” active matrix display – a very rare technology at the time – giving a pin-sharp and very usable 640 x 480 pixel monochrome display. Below was a decently-sized keyboard and a trackball that could be swapped around according to the user’s preferences.

Inside was a venerable Motorola 68000 processor running at 16MHz with up to 9GB of SRAM which made the Macintosh Portable a very fast Mac indeed for its day. Typically the Macintosh Portable would have a 40MB hard disk and possibly a modem. A 3.5” floppy disk drive was included as standard.

The Macintosh Portable could run on either AC power or the internal lead acid batteries which could give an astonishing 10 hours of runtime. These batteries were one of the main contributors to the size and weight of the thing, and indeed they were the Mac Portable’s biggest flaw.

Unlike a modern laptop, the battery was wired in series to the AC supply which meant that if the battery was discharged, the unit wouldn’t power up… even if connected to the mains. In the longer term it meant that Mac Portables with defective batteries couldn’t be used at all. Complicated workarounds exist to bypass or replace the batteries which have not been available as a replacement part for years.

It was an impressive piece of equipment, but the price was pretty eye-watering. A hard disk model cost about $7300 (equivalent to $15,000 or £12,000 today) and the original flat panel display on the M5120 model lacked a backlight which was fixed in the later M5126 at the expense of battery life.

It didn’t sell particularly well despite having a huge amount of press coverage, probably down to being just too expensive, just too bulky and just too flawed to make it desirable. The Macintosh Portable line spent just two years on the market before being replaced by the PowerBook 100 which was designed in partnership with Sony which was half the weight and one third of the price.

Although it was deemed a failure, the Macintosh Portable’s uncompromising design introduced advanced features that proved to be something to be aspired to. Today these Macs are rather rare and very collectable if in working condition, with typical prices starting at £1000. Even so, working around the battery issue is a major headache in any Mac Portable restoration and is best done by someone with the appropriate skill and lots of patience.

Image credit: Credit: Benoît Prieur - CC-BY-SA

Motorola 68000 (1979)

Launched September 1979

Motorola had been one of the early pioneers of microprocessors with the 8-bit Motorola 6800 launched in 1974. Launched a few years before there was really a big market for it, the 6800 was nonetheless successful and it inspired other 8-bit rivals such as the MOS Technology 6502 and Zilog Z80.

These rivals took a big chunk of the market that Motorola helped to create, but since Motorola were a forward-looking company they were looking ahead to devices that would be in a different and more powerful class to the 8-bit masses. Skipping the obvious step of making a purely 16-bit CPU, Motorola pressed ahead to create the (mostly) 32-bit Motorola 68000.

Motorola 68000

Introduced in September 1979, the 68000 was less like the cheap and cheerful 8-bit CPUs finding their way into home computers such as the PET and Apple II and was rather more like the powerful processors found in minicomputers such as the DEC VAX.

Although the 68000 started in high-end devices such as the Sun-1 workstation, it progressively got cheaper and found its way into a new generation of powerful home computers such as the Apple Macintosh, Atari ST and Commodore Amiga and even Apple laser printers. Games consoles soon took on the 68000 and eventually derivatives of it ended up as embedded systems which are still in use to this day (the NXP ColdFire for example).

During the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s the 68000 series of processors was the only real rival to Intel in terms of volume. By 1994 the line had really been upgraded as much as it could, and Motorola then teamed up with IBM and Apple to create the PowerPC processor which was used mostly in the Power Macintosh line until 2006.

Processors are a pretty niche thing to collect, but early examples of the 68000 are pretty common to find. Much more collectable – and usable – are the 1980s computer systems that use the 68000, especially those from Commodore and Atari.

Image credit: Konstantin Lanzet via Wikimedia Commons

Sharp 902 (2004)

Sharp 902

Launched September 2004

By 2004 3G networks were becoming quite widely rolled out with most major carriers offering pretty good 3G coverage. There weren’t a lot of handsets though, and few of them really offered anything other than the high-speed data connection itself.

Vodafone had something up its sleeve though because of their Japanese subsidiary Vodafone K.K. 3G networks had been available for a little while in Japan, and Japanese domestic phone makers had come up with several interesting handsets that were quite unlike those being designed in Europe and the United States.

Sharp was key player in Japan, and they partnered with Vodafone to make what was quite possibly the best phone of its time – the Sharp 902.

Essentially this was just a big 3G clamshell phone, however the 902 exceeded rivals in almost every specification. One key feature was the camera – the first two megapixel unit on the market, it also featured a 2X optical zoom (rather than a digital one). The camera had a multi-coloured LED flash and built-in image-to-text conversion as well.

Inside the 2.4” display panel featured Sharp’s continuous grain silicon (CG Silicon) technology in a 240 x 320 pixel screen that was so much clearer than rivals it simply knocked them out of the park. The screen itself could rotate 180 degrees, so you could flip it back to front if you wanted and use it that way round. Nothing else on the market in Europe could do that.

Add to this a full-sized SD/MMC card slot, video calling, Bluetooth, streaming media support, an MP3 player and a whole bunch of other features – in most respects the 902 made other 3G rivals look primitive. In addition to the standard model, a striking red Ferrari edition came out which boosted the profile of the phone further.

Sharp 902 Ferrari Edition

It should have been a game-changer, but it wasn’t. It turns out that the much-vaunted 2 megapixel camera really wasn’t as good as people were expecting, the user interface was nowhere as good as Nokia’s and the handset was a Vodafone exclusive and couldn’t be unlocked. And although the Sharp 902 was undoubtedly an attractive device to look at, perhaps it was a bit too Japanese for conservative European customers.

Most importantly, your average mobile customer in 2004 wasn’t really that interested in 3G anyway. Most web pages were not optimised for running on mobile phones, streaming content and downloads were expensive and the sort of social media apps we see today simply didn’t exist.

The Sharp 902 ended up as a niche success, but it wasn’t enough to make Sharp one of the big handset sellers in Europe. Less than two years later, Vodafone sold its Japanese operations to Softbank which effectively stopped the flow of Japanese 3G phones into Europe. Today the Sharp 902 is pretty uncommon to find with prices starting at around £20 or so with the rare Ferrari edition being very much more expensive.

Image credits: Sharp and Vodafone

Nokia 7260, 7270 and 7280 (2004)

Launched September 2004

Fifteen years ago we were in the golden age of mobile phone design. Although technologically limited compared to the powerful smartphones of today, manufacturers were not constrained by what they could design physically and all sorts of bold designs emerged as a result.

A trio of fashion phones, the Nokia 7260, 7270 and the 7280 certainly took boldness to a new level. Noted usually for their understated design, Nokia ripped up their rule book in this case and came up with something which was certainly a lot more eye-catching.

For most people the phone of choice would be the cheapest – the Nokia 7260. At the time we called the design “a complete mess” but in retrospect this bold art deco look is refreshing. Blending the keypad itself into the decoration, the 7260 also had a slightly asymmetric shape to set it apart from normal brick phones.

Underneath the startling exterior was a different story. A small screen, very basic camera and a couple of games were included with the only real concession to fun being the inbuilt FM radio. Even by 2004 standard this was a bit crude, with no music player or Bluetooth for example. Yet it sold in huge quantities, presumably based on looks alone.

Nokia 7260

One step up, the Nokia 7270 clamshell had a much better screen and slightly toned-down the looks. The 7270 featured changeable textile covers and was a more practical alternative although in the end it didn’t sell as well as the cheaper 7260.

Nokia 7270

But the phone that got everyone talking was the Nokia 7280. This “lipstick phone” didn’t have a conventional keypad at all but instead features an iPhone-style rotator. The little screen had a mirror finish, so you could preen yourself when not using it. Surprising it was taller than the 7260 but much narrower. The detailing was an intricate pattern of black and white, revealing a flash of red when the camera was expose. On of the details that owners liked most of all was the little fabric NOKIA label on the side.

Nokia 7280

Sorely lacking in practicality but making up for it in sheer “wow factor” the 7280 was surprisingly successful and many people used it as a second phone. Even fifteen years on, this phone would probably attract a lot of attention.

The 7280 is the most collectable with prices ranging between about £100 to £300 depending on condition. Prices for the 7270 and 7260 vary between about £50 to £250. So it’s quite possible that all three in really decent condition could set you back nearly a grand. Tempted?

Image credits: Nokia

Motorola CLIQ / DEXT (2009)

Motorola CLIQ / DEXT

Announced September 2009

September 2009 marked the first anniversary of the launch of the first consumer Android phone, the T-Mobile G1 also known as the HTC Dream. The following 12 months had seen a handful of other devices from HTC and Samsung but there still wasn’t much choice on this supposedly open platform.

Motorola’s entry into the Android arena had been long anticipated. The struggling mobile maker had bet the barn on Google’s new operating system and had cancelled all the other varied smartphone platforms it was involved in.

As with some other early Android devices, the Motorola CLIQ or DEXT (depending on market) had a slide-out QWERTY keyboard but the relatively small 3.1” 320 x 480 pixel display was unimpressive compared to better-equipped rivals.

Android had improved a lot over the previous year, and Motorola had loaded a whole bunch of their MOTOBLUR social networking applications on top. It looked pretty decent overall, but it was also something of a red herring as Nokia also had the significantly better Motorola DROID under wraps which would be announced the following month.

It wasn’t a massive success, but the CLIQ / DEXT was the point where Motorola just about saved itself from oblivion. There were still going to be turbulent times ahead, but Motorola ended up raising the bar significantly in early Android phones. This isn’t a particularly collectable device, but it is quite rare with prices being around £40 or so.

Image credit: Motorola

Video: Motorola CLIQ / DEXT

BlackBerry Passport (2014)

Launched September 2014

By 2014 the once-giant BlackBerry had more-or-less faded into insignificance following the disastrous launch of the Z10 and Q10 running the powerful but unpopular BlackBerry 10 operating system. A history of bad decisions by management had sidelined the company, but it turned out that they still had some fight in them.

The BlackBerry Passport is certainly one of the oddest-looking devices that we’ve seen in the past half-decade, but it was BlackBerry’s attempt to build a BlackBerry 10 device that would appeal to the corporate consumers that had stuck by it all these years. And although ultimately it wasn’t the success that BlackBerry hoped it would be, it had some novel features that set it apart from the devices we see today.

When the Z10 and Q10 were launched in January 2013 after an incredibly long time in development it soon became obvious that BlackBerry had made a huge strategic error. People who wanted an all-touch device such as the Z10 had defected to the iPhone or Android long before, but BlackBerry still prioritised the Z10 over the Q10 with its physical keyboard. And it was the Q10 that BlackBerry loyalists wanted. The upshot was that the Z10 flopped and BlackBerry ended up writing off a billion dollars to cover the fiasco.

BlackBerry ditched their top management and had a good rethink about the sort of device their customers wanted. And as a result, they came up with the rather brave BlackBerry Passport.

The Passport was like no other smartphone. Featuring a large 4.5” 1140 x 1140 pixel panel – which was square – and a three row physical keyboard on the bottom, the Passport had about the same footprint as.. well, a passport. Bigger than most other phones on the market, the solid construction also meant that it was pretty heavy too.

The unusual form factor was optimised for reading emails and documents rather than for playing games or web browsing. In this they had judged their core customer base pretty well, but the sheer bulk of the thing made it a little tricky to handle, the keyboard wasn’t like a classic BlackBerry and the whole thing felt a bit sluggish despite impressive hardware specifications.

The BlackBerry 10 operating system was much improved over earlier versions, and users could now download Android apps (albeit from Amazon and not Google) on top of BlackBerry’s class-leading enterprise software.

The Passport was well received, and sold pretty well – reportedly shipping hundreds of thousands of units in a relatively short time. But ultimately it was a bit too big, the operating system was unpopular and the device was simply too late to be the turnaround phone that BlackBerry needed.

The BlackBerry 10 OS made it into a couple of other smartphones before BlackBerry outsourced the manufacture of their smartphones and switched over to Android. Today the Passport represents an interesting part of the BlackBerry story and should be fairly collectable for those who like unusual devices. Typical prices for unlocked models seems to be between £50 to £100.

Image credit: BlackBerry

BlackBerry Passport - Video

Apple iPhone 6 and 6 Plus (2014)

Apple  iPhone 6 and 6 Plus

Launched September 2014

By 2014 the iPhone had been around for 7 years and although each generation of the device had added new features, increasingly the iPhone was lagging behind on screen size. 2013’s iPhone 5S was particularly weak in this respect, but the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus launched the following year broke the mould of old iPhones and created a completely new one.

The standard iPhone 6 came with a 4.7” 750 x 1334 pixel display, a useful improvement over the 4.0” 620 x 1136 pixel panel in the older one. But it was the 6 Plus with a 5.5” full HD 1080 x 1920 pixel panel that propelled the iPhone into the era of the modern high-end smartphone. The iPhone also came with Apple Pay, kick-starting the concept of mobile payments.

The 6 Plus is perhaps the pinnacle of Apple’s iPhone design. The convenient front-mounted fingerprint sensor, the notchless screen and the 3.5mm audio jack are all the sorts of things that we miss. At this time Apple’s design was led by what customers wanted, not what designers wanted.

On the negative side, both iPhones were prone to bending and a widespread fault with the screen called “touch disease” proved an annoyance. There were other more minor faults and niggles too. Despite this, 220 million iPhone 6 devices were sold over its lifetime.

Perhaps not an iconic design, the iPhone 6 was one of those moments where a number of relatively small improvements all came together at once to make a truly satisfying product. Indeed, the same basic design is still available in today’s iPhone 8 and 8 Plus for those who think the all-screen iPhone XS is going a bit far.

Image credit: Apple

Apple iPhone 6 and 6s video

Nokia 7600 (2003)

Launched September 2003

Fifteen years ago the mobile phone market was still new and exciting. New technologies and features were being squeezed into handsets, and those handsets themselves came in a variety of different designs. And the Nokia 7600 was certainly different. In fact, the 7600 is probably one of the weirdest looking phones ever made.

Let’s ignore the shape for the moment – the 7600 squeezed in some very advanced features for its time. It had a 2” colour display, a VGA resolution camera that could also take really basic low-res videos, Bluetooth, an MP3 player, Java, a stonking 29MB of internal storage, email support, a WAP browser and most importantly of all the Nokia 7600 was a very early 3G phone capable of an awesome download speed of 384 kbps.

Nokia 7600. There's a reason phones don't look like this.

It’s easy to be dismissive of these specifications, but the 7600 really was something very advanced for its time. On paper it should have been a success – but for some unfathomable reason they packaged it in about the maddest way possible.

Instead of putting the keypad at the bottom, Nokia decided to put the numbers on either side of the screen with the call control buttons and selector pad at the bottom. This meant that you’d have to re-learn texting completely to use it and you would also have to hold in in two hands. Worse, the buttons were different sizes with the “6” key being particularly tiny.

Oh yes, the Nokia 7600 looked immensely cool. The unique shape (curved lozenge? asymmetric rounded rectangle?) looked amazing with swooping intersecting lines and a variety of plastics that contrasted not only in colour but also in texture. It’s just that somewhere along the way Nokia forgot about usability completely and came up with some ill-thought-out but very high-tech fashion accessory.

You might guess that the 7600 didn’t sell all that well. Although it had killer specs, the weird design didn’t help its appeal… but also consumers were proving pretty cool when it can to the idea of 3G phones. There wasn’t a lot you could actually do with so-called high-speed data on a tiny 128 x 160 pixel screen.

Nokia's "7000" series always had a tendency to be a bit "out there" when it came to styling, but this is one of those designs to file under “W for Weird”. As with a lot of odd-looking Nokias it is somewhat collectible with prices for really good ones being £200 or more, however prices vary a lot depending on condition and accessories.

Image credit: Nokia

Apple iPhone 5S and 5C (2013)

Apple iPhone 5S. Sleek. Sexy. Successful.

Launched September 2013

A few days ago we saw Apple’s annual launch event of new iPhones with the XS, XS Max and cheaper XR devices. The XR is designed to bring iPhone features in at a lower price point by replacing some of the more expensive features with something a bit cheaper. This isn’t the first time that Apple have tried a marketing approach like this. Five years ago this month they launched the iPhone 5S annd iPhone 5C at the same time, with mixed results.

As with the XS, the iPhone 5S was an upgrade of the previous year’s model – the iPhone 5. Keeping the same smallish 5” display of the 5, the 5S added a fingerprint scanner and had a more powerful 64-bit processor, housed in a variety of high-end metallic-and-glass cases.

The iPhone 5C was the cheaper model, similar in concept to the new XR. The 5C was essentially a reskin of the old 5, replacing the case with a brightly-coloured polycarbonate affair. This was essentially copying Nokia who had won praise for the cheerful design of their Windows-powered Nokia Lumia range. It wasn’t just the hardware that look a bit like Nokia, the new version of the operating system – iOS 7 – introduced a simpler, flatter interface which was a little more like Windows than the skeuomorphic feel with older versions of iOS.

The new design of iOS was well-received, shipping with both the 5S and the 5C and pushed out over-the-air to everything back to the iPhone 4. On top of that, the iPhone 5S sold very well – as most new iPhones do – but the 5C was more of a problem.

Apple iPhone 5C. Cheapskate.

Ever since Apple had launched their second iPhone, there was always a lower-cost option available… the previous year’s model (or in some cases the model before that too). Cheaper they may have been, but it wasn’t obvious that the owner had got something out of the bargain bin. The 5C was different – it wasn’t just priced more cheaply, it was constructed out of cheaper materials and because it looked very different from other iPhones it was immediately obvious that the owner had gone for the cheaper option. That might have been acceptable if the 5C really was cheap, but in reality the 5S didn’t cost a lot more. So, buy a 5C you might look like a skinflint even though you’d forked out a substantial wad of cash.

Sales of the 5C were nowhere near the levels that Apple was expecting, and the 5S outsold it three-to-one. This led to a shortage of 5S devices in the supply chain and a surplus of 5Cs. It seemed clear that consumers preferred the premium product to the better value proposition, which was probably not lost on Apple when they launched their top-of-the-range grand-and-a-half iPhone XS Max this week.

The iPhone 5S is still supported by Apple and is due to have the new iOS 12 OS available for it, support for the 5C ended in mid-2017. Yes, you could have saved $100 by buying the 5C instead of the 5S, but it wouldn’t have had the life-span. And everyone would have thought you were a cheapskate.

Image credits: Apple

Morris Minor, Hindustan Ambassador, Rover P5, Citroën Visa, Fiat Strada (1948-1978)

What do the Morris Minor, Rover P5, Hindustan Ambassador, Citroën Visa and Fiat Strada have in common? Well, they were all launched in September 1948, 1958 or 1978… but let’s see if we can make a tenuous connection between them all.

Morris Minor (1948)

Late model Morris Minor Traveller

Perhaps – after the classic Mini – the post-war Morris Minor is the most quintessential British car. Manufactured between 1948 and 1971, over 1.3 million of these cars were produced. This made it the first British car to ship over a million vehicles.

Much of the inspiration behind the Morris Minor can be attributed to legendary car designer Alec Issigonis. Work on the Minor began under the codename “Morris Mosquito” during the Second World War, work that had to be carried out in secret because Morris Motors was meant to be concentrating on war production.

The Mosquito was technically a radical design for its time…  a bit TOO radical it turned out. But most of the ideas behind it found themselves productionised into the new car. The Minor came with rack and pinion steering, independent torsion bar front suspension that allowed the engine to be placed nearer the front and lower down giving better handling characteristics and optimised internal space by having small wheels near each corner. Taking inspiration from American cars of the time, the original Minor had low-set headlights, although these were moved to the more familiar position on top of the wings later.

Work was already being finalised on the Minor when a last-minute decision was made to widen the car by four inches. Although this made for a bigger cabin and better handling, many of the panel pressings had already been finalised. As a result, the bonnet had to be widened by adding a strip in the middle, which actually looked rather pleasing. However, on the original models the bumpers also had an unsightly gap as a result.

There were three main versions of the car over 23 years of production, including two and four-door saloons, an attractive convertible, a popular estate version called the Traveller with exposes wooden beams plus vans and pickups. Many engines were shoe-horned into the Minor over the years, and there was a process of continuous improvement… although by 1971 it was looking extremely dated.

The Morris Minor remains a popular classic car today, with over 13,000 still on the road in the UK. Issigonis went on to design several other cars for Morris and its successor British Leyland, one of which was the Morris Oxford...

Hindustan Ambassador (1958)

Rare example of an Ambassador exported to the UK

The next part of our story takes us to the Issigonis-designed Morris Oxford Series III, which was introduced in 1956 and was a fairly traditional saloon. Morris had a long history of cooperation with Hindustan Motors of India, and in 1958 they made their own version of the Oxford – the Hindustan Ambassador.

Although the Oxford Series III was in production for just three years, the Ambassador was in production for a remarkable 56 years. Although there were technically several generations of Ambassador, they all retained the basic body shape of the 1950s Morris and most of the changes were to the engine with some creature comforts added in over the years.

A huge success among the growing middle class in India, the Ambassador also fulfilled roles as a car for government officials and was a popular taxi too.

The Ambassador soldiered on in production until 2014, but it was always an oddity compared to the modern cars that the rest of the Indian automotive industry made. There are countless Ambassadors still on the road of India though, and there are rumours that the Ambassador may yet be reborn in partnership with PSA of France.

Rover P5 (1958)

Rover P5

Meanwhile, back in England the Rover Car Company released its new saloon, much more upmarket than anything in the Morris catalogue. The Rover P5 was designed to be impressive to look at and well-built, and it succeeded decisively over the 15 years it was in production.

The P5 was a favourite of senior management, politicians and the police… and even royalty. The plush interior with the stylish exterior made this an attractive car, and it was certainly screwed together with an air of quality. The main problem was the power plant.

Weighing approximately 1.6 tonnes, the P5 was a heavy car for its time. The original straight-six 3 litre engine produced 115 horse power which was good for the time, but it made the P5 a bit of a slouch. Tweaks to the engine for the 1962 Mark II upped to power to 129 HP, the 1965 Mark III squeezed 134 HP out of the same unit. This was better, but it hardly made the P5 fast.

In 1967 the final version of the P5 was introduced – the P5B. “B” in this case stood for “Buick” and referred to the American-designed V8 engine that Rover had acquired the rights to. This 3.5 litre engine produced 158 HP which was finally enough to make the Rover impressively fast with a top speed of 110 mph and a 0-60 time of 11.7 seconds.

Later P5s were available in a standard and rather stately saloon version, or a rather more rakish four-door coupé. The British government liked the P5B so much that it stockpiled a decade’s worth of cars for Prime Ministers and other important officials.

Most of the design of the P5 was done by David Bache, along with Spen King and Gordon Bashford. Between them, this trio also produced the Rover P6, Rover SD1 and the original Range Rover.

Although Rover and Morris were competing companies in 1958, in 1968 Rover was merged into British Leyland… where Bache, King and Bashford were employed alongside Alec Issigonis.

Citroën Visa (1978)

Issigonis had recognised the practicalities of the small hatchback car back in 1967 with the 9X prototype, which to our eyes is a recognisably modern layout, but his employers didn’t pick up on the idea. A decade-and-a-bit later, the small hatchback was all the rage and it was clear that Austin-Morris had missed the boat.

Citroën had been looking for something new to at least partly replace its extremely ancient range, including the then-30-year-old 2CV. The company had been struggling financially, and the oil crises of the 1970s had hit sales of their bigger cars hard. In 1976, Peugeot had taken over Citroën to form the PSA Group. Under this new ownership, Citroën had produced a small hatchback called the LN which was basically a frumpy-looking version of the Peugeot 104 with a 2CV engine. Hardly inspiring stuff.

A whole bunch of Visas in hatchback, van and even pickup configurations

Starting with the same 104 underpinnings, another renowned designer Robert Opron was working on something rather better and more in keeping with Citroën’s design philosophy which concentrated on sleek aerodynamics and comfort - the Citroën Visa. Up until then, hatchbacks (such as the Fiesta) had been rather boxy.

Over the years the original 625cc engine was upgraded, leading eventually to a 1.6L 115 HP unit in the Visa GTi – a car weighing just 870 kg, which was seriously fun to drive as a result. Production of the Visa ended in 1988, but it set new standards for design and also showed that platform sharing between cars wasn’t simply a case of badge engineering.

Fiat Ritmo / Strada (1978)

Fiat Strada

Launched in the spring but coming to market in September, Fiat launched a somewhat larger hatchback called the Fiat Ritmo (or the Fiat Strada in the UK). Fiat had pioneered the hatchback market with the 127, but the Ritmo was a replacement for the larger Fiat 128 instead.

Two things made the Ritmo stand out – firstly there was Sergio Sartorelli’s smart and contemporary styling, but secondly the body was assembled and painted by robots, which led to a memorable advertisement screened in the UK.

The advertisement was so well-known that it spawned a parody, filmed on the production lines of the British Leyland Ambassador (not the Hindustan Ambassador!). THAT car – to carry on our tenuous link – was designed by Harris Mann, who can be considered Issigonis’s successor in the Morris / BMC / BL story.

The Ritmo / Strada carried on in production until 1988, with a “facelifted” version that actually toned down Sartorelli’s original design. The 1983 Abarth model introduced the obligatory 80’s hot hatch with a 130 HP two litre version.

Today the robotic automation used in assembling the Ritmo is commonplace in the car industry, but back in 1978 it made the Rtimo / Strada stand out from other rival hatchbacks and helped to cement Fiat as a successful Europe-wide automaker.

From a pair of quintessential British and Indian cars of the 1940s and 1950s to a pair of quintessential French and Italian cars of the 1970s, all of these vehicles managed to do something significant. And curiously enough, out of all those cars – on British roads at least – the oldest one is the most common, with thousands of Morris Minors still roadworthy compared to only a few dozen Visas and Stradas from 30 years later..

Image credits:
Loco Steve via Flickr
Ron Fisher via Flickr
pyntofmyld via Flickr
Klaus Nahr via Flickr
CarbonCaribou via Wikimedia Commons

T-Mobile G1 / HTC Dream (2008)

T-Mobile G1

Launched September 2008

Ten years ago we saw a significant shift in the mobile phone market. The “golden age” of traditional mobile phones was ending, where every phone had a different design and features and in its place the era of the modern smartphone was beginning, ushered in with the feature-rich Nokia N95 in 2006, the ground-breaking Apple iPhone touchscreen device in 2007 and finally the HTC Dream in 2008, mostly found under the name “T-Mobile G1”.

The G1 was the world’s first consumer Android handset, manufactured by smartphone pioneers HTC who had previously been a major partner in developing high-end Windows phones. T-Mobile and HTC had a long partnership with the MDA series of smart devices, and it was a natural extension of this to come up this.

Where the iPhone was sleek and with a minimum of control buttons, the G1 had a whole bunch of them, including a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. In addition to the 3.2” HVGA touchscreen there was a little trackball, plus buttons for call control, the home screen and the menu.

The QWERTY keyboard was completely necessary because originally Android did not support on-screen keyboards at all (a feature that was added more than half a year after the G1 was launched). Indeed the whole device was very much a “version 1.0” smartphone at launch, and although it featured full integration with Google’s suite of applications including Gmail and Google Maps a lot of the software features were clunky and not very feature-rich. Rivals Apple had already moved on to their second-generation iPhone and the G1 did not seem as accomplished.

On the back was a 3.2 megapixel camera (capable of taking videos, unlike the iPhone), the G1 supported HSPA 3.5G data, WiFi, GPS, microSD expandable memory and pretty much all the features you would expect from a modern smartphone with the notable omission of a front-facing camera.

HTC Dream

The first Android phone had been keenly anticipated, with the official launch of the project in later 2007 (although it had leaked out earlier that year). The G1 gathered masses of press coverage too, but consumer reactions were rather cooler to begin with, especially because in most regions you would have to be a T-Mobile customer to get your hands on one.

The T-Mobile G1 wasn’t only the first Android phone to market, for a long time it was the ONLY Android phone on the market. A few months later Australian retail electronics giant Kogan announced the Agora smartphone which was subsequently cancelled. In early 2009 HTC came out with a keyboardless version of the Dream known as the HTC Magic, but it took until April 2009 for the launch of the original Samsung Galaxy which was the first true rival to HTC.

A little more than a year later, Motorola launched the world’s first Android 2.0 handset – the Motorola DROID (sold internationally as the Milestone). This offered a significantly better user experience, and sales of Android devices skyrocketed – at the expense of Nokia’s Symbian range. Today Android holds almost 80% of the share of the smartphone market, with Apple’s handsets accounting for almost everything else.

A modern Android phone bears only a passing resemblance to the G1 – apart from BlackBerry, nobody makes an Android with a physical keyboard. But it’s still an important device, and unusual enough to be collectable. Typical prices for an unlocked G1 or Dream seem to be in the region of £150 or so.

 Image credits: T-Mobile and HTC

Atari VCS / 2600 (1977)

Launched September 1977

1977 was the dawn of home computing, with the Apple II, Commodore PET and TRS-80 Model I all being launched within months of each other. But another early computing pioneer also found success in the same year, and that was Atari.

Launched in September 1977, the Atari Video Computer System (“VCS”) was an early second generation console that came after the 1970s wave of single purpose games machines that could typically play Pong and nothing else. Based around a cut-down version of the 6502 CPU called the 6507, the Atari VCS was designed from the start to be a highly flexible system that could play a wide variety of games.

Atari VCS "Heavy Sixer" (1977)

One key thing that made the VCS easy to use was the cartridge system. Instead of struggling to load a game from tape or splashing out on a very expensive floppy disk drive, the VCS loaded in games from cartridges instead. Although it wasn’t the first cartridge console on the market, the VCS was the first one to be a real success.

Games included the ubiquitous Pong, Space Invaders, Breakout, Pitfall, Centipede, Defender and later on a poorly received version of Pac-Man and the infamous E.T. Despite the VCS’s fairly crude colour graphics and sound and the relatively high price of the cartridges themselves, the VCS and many of its games went on to sell in huge numbers.

Atari 2600 ad (1982)

Priced at just $199 at launch, including a game and two joysticks, the VCS represented impressive value for money. Cartridges were relatively expensive, typically coming in at $20 or more. However the cartridges were easy to use… and crucially for Atari, almost impossible to pirate.

The original VCS models were made in Sunnyvale, California and are known as “heavy sixers” because they have six switches on the top and a more solid construction than the later “light sixers” built in Hong Kong. Further revisions followed, with the fake wood panel surviving until 1982, but the VCS name was changed to 2600 in 1980. In one form or another, the VCS / 2600 remained in production until 1992, giving the console a staggering 15 year run with almost unchanged hardware, selling 30 million units in the US alone.

Despite ending production, the VCS / 2600 remained popular, and in 2004 a modern interpretation was made called the Atari Flashback which is currently in its eighth generation. A top-of-the-range Flashback with an HDMI connector and a huge number of games costs around €170, an original 2600 console can cost from next to nothing up to several hundred euro depending on exact model, condition and bundled games with consoles quite commonly available.

In 1983 a crash in the video games market led to Atari being sold by its then parent company, Warner Communications, and it split into two. On part of it was bought by Jack Tramiel (who founded rivals Commodore) and which later went on to make home computers including the Atari ST. The company’s name and assets have changed hands many times over the years, but “Atari” still exists as a gaming brand today.

Image credits:

Tom Simpson via Flickr

Pino Dita via Flickr

Nokia Lumia 920 (2012)

Nokia Lumia 920

Announced September 2012

By September 2012, Nokia had been in the Windows Phone business for just under a year, starting off with the Lumia 800 in October 2011 and then the bigger Lumia 900 in February 2012. Neither device was really successful, despite having their charms and the goodwill of an army of Nokia fans.

Although Windows Phone 7 and 8 had been well-received by critics, customers were not so keen and there was a general shortage of good applications. Well, Nokia was stuck with that problem whatever they did... but the other problem that the Lumia 800 and 900 had was that the technical specifications really weren’t up to much either.

The Nokia Lumia 920 addressed the hardware at least – here was a phone that made no compromises when it came to features and it could easily hold its own against the flagship devices of rivals.

Firstly there was the look of the thing – elegantly minimalist and housed in a variety of brightly-coloured thermoplastics, the physical design actually complemented the minimalist design of the operating system very well. A big, bright 4.5” 768 x 1280 pixel display dwarfed that of the iPhone and on the back was an optical image stabilised 8.7 megapixel PureView camera with Carl Zeiss optics, capable of full HD video capture. The camera itself caused quite a stir due to its advanced capabilities.

Mmmm... yellow.

Added to this was wireless charging, support for 4G LTE data, a 1.5GHz dual-core CPU with 1GB of RAM and 32 GB of flash storage and all the other features any high-end smartphone from the time would have. At 185 grams in weight the Lumia 920 was quite heavy, but it gave the whole thing a feeling of quality.

Windows Phone 8 was easy to use, integrated well with companies running on a Microsoft platform and Nokia threw in some useful apps of its own such as turn-by-turn navigation and a free music service. However, beyond that apps looked a bit scarce – not least because Windows 8 was built around a different core from Windows 7 meaning most apps had to be reworked.

In hardware terms Nokia had finally come up with a device that needed no excuses making for it, and which was just as good as, or better than the competition in most major respects. It was a relative success for Nokia and was the best-selling Lumia device to date. Even so, Nokia only managed to shift 4.4 million Lumia handsets in Q4 2012 while Apple shipped 47.8 million iPhones of all models in the same period. Despite giving it their best shot, the Lumia 920 was ultimately not the breakthrough device that Nokia desperately needed.

Apple iPhone 5 (2012)

Apple iPhone 5 (White/Silver)

Announced September 2012

Half a decade after the original iPhone, Apple announced the iPhone 5. The sixth version of this highly popular device, the 5 was an evolution of the second-generation iPhone 4 and 4S phones.

The launch of the 5 came when Apple’s competitors were beginning to pull ahead of Apple in terms of specifications, particularly when it came to screen size. For example, the rival Samsung Galaxy S III had a 4.8” display that completely dwarfed the 3.5” panel on the iPhone 4S. Indeed, even low-end rivals had bigger displays and it was becoming clear that a lot of customers wanted exactly that.

Of course the obvious solution was to make the phone bigger, but there was resistance from Apple management (reportedly Steve Jobs) in following Samsung’s lead with larger devices with each generation. Instead a design compromise was made, and the iPhone 5 fitted in a larger 4.0” screen by making the device taller. Adding 9mm to the height gave an extra half inch on the display (and yes, that IS a horrible mix of metric and imperial units).

The advantage was primarily that the iPhone 5 felt pretty similar in the hand, but because Apple also changed the connector on the bottom at the same time, you couldn’t easily dock the 5 in peripherals designed to hold the 4 and 4S.

A switch in materials from steel to aluminium made the iPhone 5 much lighter, and of course the 5 was faster than its predecessors and heralded a new version of the iOS operating system too. On the downside, the new Apple Maps application included with the phone was truly terrible and the paint on the devices was prone to scuffing and chipping.

Apple iPhone 5 (Black/Slate)

Perhaps it is no surprise to learn that the iPhone 5 was a massive success, although it only had a run of one year before being replaced with the popular iPhone 5S and the unpopular iPhone 5C. The 5S continued in production until 2016, and Apple recognised that many customers very much enjoyed the more compact design of the 5 over their newer and larger smartphones, launching the iPhone SE in 2016 with an almost identical form factor.

Software support for the iPhone 5 (and almost identical iPhone 5C) ended in July this year, so their usefulness is somewhat limited. Prices are currently around €100 for a unit in good condition, or alternatively the equally compact but much more capable iPhone SE starts at around €480.

Image credit: Apple