Ericsson T68 (2001)

Introduced July 2001

By the middle of 2001 the golden age of mobile phone design was beginning. New features were added to phones rapidly, and every handset managed to look very different from rivals. The next few years would see a wave of innovation – but for Ericsson, 2001 was also its swansong as a mobile phone brand.

Ericsson had produced a range of successful (and mostly very compact) phones but was losing money on the operation in a big way. Despite this, Ericsson continued to launch great new products and the Ericsson T68m (usually referred to as just the “T68”) was one of them. A diminutive 84 gram device, it packed in more features than rivals to create a very desirable handset.

This Ericsson T68m has seen better days

One of the main selling points was Bluetooth – one of the first phones to feature this technology. It also had a colour screen, tri-band GSM, GPRS packet data, a WAP browser, predictive text, a bitmap editor and a bunch of included games. A camera – the MCA-25 CommuniCam – was available as a clip-on extra, again making it one of the first phones to feature that particular technology.

Not long after the launch of the T68, Ericsson merged their mobile phone business with Sony to create Sony Ericsson. The T68 received a slight cosmetic makeover and had a software update to become the Sony Ericsson T68i, the first phone to carry that branding. Eventually the camera add-on became a standard accessory, helping to popularise the idea of cameraphones.

Sony Ericsson T68i with Communicam

When it eventually arrived, the replacement for the T68 was the stylish T610 and there was a successful run of handsets after that. Today, used prices for the T68i and T68m are pretty healthy with really good ones selling for £100 or more, although sub-£50 is more common. The Communicam camera add-on is available as new old stock from £50 or more, all pretty healthy for a 20 year old feature phone..

Image credits:
The Norwegian Telecom Musuem via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 4.0
Science Museum Group - CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Sony Ericsson P910 (2004)

Sony Ericsson P910

Announced July 2004

Fifteen years ago, if you wanted a smartphone your choice was either Windows or Symbian. And if you wanted the latter, then the best smartphones were probably made by Sony Ericsson.

The Sony Ericsson P910 was the third generation of the P-series of Symbian touchscreen devices. Running the UIQ platform, these smartphones came with a touchscreen while it was still quite rare. Back in those days, Nokia was still very much in non-touchscreen territory.

The 2.9” 208 x 320 pixel screen was not the only notable feature of the P910 – the other was the unique flip-out keypad which had a tiny QWERTY keyboard on one side and a standard number pad on the other. When closed, the pad covered part of the screen and the P910’s software would adapt to the screen size as needed. In addition to the keys, the P910 could be used with a stylus or finger and there was a jog control too.

Connectivity was a bit limited, with GPRS data only – so no 3G, WiFi or even EDGE. Internal memory was expandable with Sony’s Memory Stuck Duo Pro cards. There was a basic camera on the back. The main feature was the operating environment which included a web browser, support for various email clients plus of course any compatible applications that you wanted to download onto the phone.

The P910 was moderately successful, but back then smartphones were still a niche market so it was pretty rare to see one. However, it helped to create a template for the smartphone revolution that happened a few years later.

Sony Ericsson did produce a number of other UIQ phones after the P910, but ultimately it was a dead end. Today you can pick up a decent network-locked P910 for around £35 or so, but unlocked examples and ones with accessories can cost much more.

Image credit: Sony Ericsson

Sony Ericsson T630 (2004)

Sony Ericsson T630

Launched January 2004

The follow-up to the successful and stylish T610, the Sony Ericsson T630 was a product of a partnership that was beginning to find its feet and come up with its own design language. An elegant candy-bar phone, the T630 had all the fashionable features you’d find in a mid-noughties feature phone, wrapped up in one of the best looking handsets designed up until that point.

One of the key problems with the T610 was the rather muddy STN display, but the T630 came with a beautifully clear TFT instead. On the back was a basic CIF resolution camera that had been tweaked to give VGA resolution pictures. Somewhat atypically for handsets in this price range the T630 had Bluetooth, it also supported Java downloadable games and customisable polyphonic ringtones.

But it was the way that the T630 looked that attracted attention, with the white version in a translucent case being a particular hit. The understated design showed attention to detail with a distinctive Scandinavian flavour, and it set a benchmark that future Sony Ericsson phones would use in terms of design language.

This combination of features and styling was a big hit with consumers, and the T630 continued the T610’s sales success, making Sony Ericsson a serious contender in this slice of the market for a time. The long battery life and reliability of the T630 also won fans, and many people clung onto their T630s for a long time.

If you are after a slice of nostalgia, the T630 can cost as little as £10 in good condition and there are a range of accessories that can be found do go with it such as car mounts, docking stations and even spare parts.

Image credit: Sony Ericsson

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.

Sony Ericsson P1 (2007)

Sony Ericsson P1

Launched May 2007

In the early noughties Sony Ericsson had pioneered touchscreen smartphones, starting with the P800 announced in 2002, which was followed up by other high-end "P-Series" smartphones, the P900, P910 and P990. All of these featured a distinctive flip-down keypad that covered part of the display, and these devices ran Sony Ericsson's own flavour of Symbian running the UIQ interface.

Although initial models had been well-received, the P990i (launched in 2005) ended up being a bit of a disaster. It was later, buggy and Sony Ericsson dropped support for it leaving owners in the lurch. So, the P1 was a bit of a reboot of the P-Series and it came at a time where they were renewed interest in smartphones.

It wasn't an entirely new design. Based heavily on the lightweight M600 and its Walkman variant the W950, the P1 (called the P1i in most markets) ditched the keypad and instead had a more conventional QWERTY/numeric hybrid keypad instead. In order to fit this in, the screen shrank slightly to 2.6" but with the same resolution, and the whole thing was significantly less bulky than its predecessor.

The removal of the flip pad simplified the software experience quite a lot. With the earlier P-Series phones, applications needed to adjust for the different screen sizes when the flip was open and closed. In some cases, the software behaved very differently. It's still a common problem today with landscape and portrait orientations, but it was a really annoying one with those P-Series devices. Other specifications were also improved and the P1 came with a capable 3.2 megapixel camera on the back, an FM radio, expandable memory, 3G support, WiFi and handwriting recognition.

However, the world had moved on and the new Apple iPhone which was about to hit the market after being announced at the beginning of the year had a more polished user experience, a bigger screen and crucially that screen was a capacitive one which was easier to use.

The P1 was not a huge success. P-Series users had been alienated over the P990i debacle, and the change in keypad on the P1 put off some customers even further. Without the loyalty of their user base and up against tough competition from other smartphones, the P1 struggled in the market. Successors to the P1 were planned but eventually cancelled, leaving the P1 as the very last P-Series phone. Sony Ericsson stuck with Symbian for a few more devices, notably the rather interesting Satio in 2009 and the awful Vivaz in 2010.

Sony Ericsson's P-Series devices are quite collectible today, and although the P1 is uncommon it typically ranges in price between €30 to €120 depending on condition.

Image credit: Sony Ericsson

Sony Ericsson Xperia Play (2011)

Sony Ericsson Xperia Play

Announced February 2011

It's a fact of modern life that people like to play games on their smartphones, so it would seem like a fair bet that if a company made a smartphone designed for gamers then it might be a success.. especially if that manufacturer is affiliated to one of the giant names in gaming.

Launched five years ago this month in an attempt to capitalise on this market, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play looked like a sure fire thing. Yes, it was a normal Android smartphone, but hidden under a sliding mechanism was a set of PlayStation-style controls and a secondary touchpad. Sony were busy porting games to the platform, and other manufacturers were free to write games that could use the secondary controls. And of course, it would do everything that every other Android phone would do too.

Sony had done something similar with the PSP Go gaming platform, so using some of the technology on a device like this should have been a winner. Except it wasn't.

The Xperia Play had several problems.. not big ones, but overall they added up to something that lacked desirability. For example, the single-core CPU was slow, the screen was adequate but not great, the camera wasn't as good as it could be, battery life was disappointing and the whole thing was bulky.

Sales were slow, and it was beginning to become apparent that Sony Ericsson didn't exactly love the device. A promised upgrade to Android 4.0 was canned, and the Xperia Play headed for the bargain bucket.

The Xperia Play remains the only dedicated gaming smartphone from a mainstream manufacturer. But it wasn't the end of the story, because a small but dedicated group of enthusiasts have continued to unofficially support the device with custom ROMs and ports of games from other platforms. One in good condition will set you back €100 or more, so they are still in demand.

It's doubtful that Sony would ever want to repeat this experiment.. but who knows?

Sony Ericsson P990 / P990i (2005)

Announced October 2005

Back in the early noughties, if you owned a smartphone with a touchscreen, then there is a good chance that it would have been a Sony Ericsson P-Series device.

Starting off with the P800 in 2002, followed by the P900 in 2003 and P910 in 2004, the P990 (announced in October 2005) looked on paper to be an impressive device that was far ahead of the competition in terms of features. But instead, the P990 turned into something of a disaster for Sony Ericsson instead.

The P990 generated a lot a excitement ten years ago. Running the UIQ 3 flavour of Symbian, it features a 2.7" 240 x 320 pixel touchscreen display with a physical QWERTY keyboard that was hidden behind a flip. The P990 (sold as the P990i in Europe) had WiFi, 3G support, expandable memory and a two megapixel primary camera with a secondary one for video calling. It even had a FM radio.

Announced in October 2005, it was slated to ship during Q1 2006.. but in fact it didn't start to ship until the second half of the year. Worse still, the software was extremely buggy at launch, so users needed to update the software after they received it.. and even so the user interface had a reputation for being difficult to use. And then to cap it all, Sony Ericsson stopped providing updates for the phone less than a year after it started shipping.

Overall, the P990 was something of a disaster.. and it managed to alienate a lot of people who had been loyal fans of the P-series up to that date. At a 2005 price of around £585 / €850 (equivalent to £780 / €1060 today) it was an expensive device too. Sony Ericsson followed up the P990 with the P1 launched in 2007, but that found itself competing against the new Apple iPhone and the P1 was the last in the line of P-series smartphones.

P990s are commonly available today, starting at around £30 or €40 in working condition. You could buy all five P-Series smartphones for about £150 or so.. if you wanted!

Biggest handset disasters.. Part 2

A few months ago we looked at what we considered to be the ten biggest handset disasters of all time. Well, there's no shortage of devices that failed in the market, either because they were ill-conceived, weird or just too far ahead of their time.

 

11. Nokia N9 / N950 (2011) Nokia's one-and-only commercially available MeeGo handset, the Nokia N9 is actually a pretty desirable bit of kit with a well-regarded operating system and a highly influential hardware design that was copied by Nokia's Lumia range and helped to popularise brightly-coloured plastics. Also available to developers only was the Nokia N950, a handset that is quite rare and is highly sought-after.   The N9 represents Nokia's utter failure to come up with a home-grown rival to the iPhone. Coming two years after its predecessor, the N900, the N9 was too late to make a difference, partly because of a foolish decision to try to merge platforms with Intel. It was obvious even before launch that the N9 was going to be doomed, and even before it was launched in a few minor markets the project was killed, and Nokia went with the Windows platform instead. The bottom line? The world doesn't need another mobile phone OS, no matter how good it is.   Buyer's guide: N950s are available from time-to-time, but are expensive.. prices range from €700 all the way up to €2300. Strictly speaking, they are all property of Nokia and were sent to developers only. The Nokia N9 is more commonly available for between €260 to €330 depending on model.

12. Nokia 7700 / 7710 (2003 / 2004) Nokia's first attempt at a touchscreen for was the Nokia 7700 which was a strikingly designed device, but it was far too big to be practical and features Nokia's infamous "side talking" system where you had to speak into side of the phone rather than the front. The 7700 was also crippled by a lack of memory, so that particular device was cancelled and replaced with the slimmed down and slightly upgraded Nokia 7710.   The 7710 lacked the essentials of 3G and WiFi, and consumers weren't really interested in touchscreen phones anyway. Instead of sticking with it, Nokia ditched the idea of touchscreen smartphones.. which was to prove a mistake.   Buyer's guide: the Nokia 7700 is one of the rarest Nokias around with prices starting at about €700, but they are so rarely available that one could cost much more. The 7710 is a lot cheaper but still uncommon, at around €20 to €150 depending on condition.

13. Nokia N-Gage (2003) A handheld gaming console from Nokia, the Nokia N-Gage should have been a winner. But Nokia got it badly wrong - it was too bulky to use as a phone, too limited to be used for games - so it was never very popular. An attempt to improve the platform with the 2004 N-Gage QD wasn't much of a success either.   Buyer's guide: there seems to be quite a lively trade in the N-Gage and cartridge games. Prices range from €10 or less to €30 for the handset itself.

14. Sony Ericsson Xperia Play (2011) The lack of success for the N-Gage meant that there were no other high-profile phone/games console hybrids until 2011, with the launch of the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play. Where the N-Gage was underpowered, the Xperia Play was much more powerful (although hardly high-end). Despite this, the Xperia Play wasn't a success and no attempt was made to revive the format.   Buyer's guide: officially the Xperia Play is stuck with Android 2.3 although there are some custom ROMs available with later versions. It is an inexpensive device on the second-hand market, typically coming in at €40 or less.

15. Sony Ericsson Vivaz (2010) Sony Ericsson's Symbian swansong, the Sony Ericsson Vivaz featured a pretty unpleasant resistive touchscreen when almost everything else had moved to superior capacitive displays. The handset might have done better in 2008 than 2010.   The Vivaz and its sibing the Vivaz Pro were commercial failures, and Sony Ericsson never made another Symbian handset after that.   Buyer's guide: there are not many of these on the market, but those that are tend to be very cheap indeed.

16. Sony Ericsson P1i (2007) Sony Ericsson was a pioneer with Symbian touchscreen devices, but the Sony Ericsson P1i represented a step in the wrong direction for their P-Series of smartphones.   Although in many ways it was superior to the original Apple iPhone launched at roughly the same time, the small stylus-drive screen and physical QWERTY keyboard were not the sort of things that consumers wanted.   Buyer's guide: a quirky and quite interesting device, it also falls into the "rare but cheap" category of handsets that can be hard to find, but come in at less than €50 or so.

17. Samsung i8510 (2008) In 2008 Symbian was by far the best-selling smartphone platform around, even though the iPhone was coming into its second generation. In order to try to get a slice of the pie that was dominated by Nokia, Samsung released the Samsung i8510 (also known as the INNOV8).   A well-designed, well-engineered device with a good feature set it seemed like an attractive proposition, but it turned out that customers preferred their Nokias to be made by Nokia after all.   Buyer's guide: like the Vivaz, this probably only appeals to collectors of non-Nokia Symbian devices, and it is another uncommon but inexpensive handset coming in at less than €30.

18. Nokia N97 (2009) It should have been a winner - a touchscreen phone like the Nokia 5800 combined with a QWERTY keyboard like the Nokia Communicator, and a feature set that looked great on paper. But the Nokia N97 was slow, buggy and had several design flaws that made consumers unhappy. Most of these were fixed with the rather better N97 Mini launched later in the year. But keyboards were on the way out anyway, and in retrospect the entire concept was not likely to be a winner.   Buyer's guide: The N97 (in mini and non-mini versions) sells for around €25 to €50.

19. Nokia X7 (2011) Symbian had already been given its death sentence by the time the Nokia X7 was announced which led to a speedy collapse of that product line. The coffin-like design of the X7 didn't help either, although as with all late Symbian devices it is actually a pretty good phone. Consumers don't like buying into a dead end product, and the X7 was certainly one of those.   Buyer's guide: Resale values are quite high, expect to pay between €60 to €120 for an unlocked version.

20. Nokia 5000 (2008) With a product number like this, you would expect the Nokia 5000 to be something special. A good-looking and inexpensive device, one of the key features was that it had an MP3 player. But with no expandable memory and just 12MB of internal storage, you could probably only fit in about three tracks which was a bit useless. And you also had to be careful about how many photos you took with the 1.3 megapixel camera too. Adding a microSD slot would have transformed the product, as it was it was almost completely useless.   Buyer's guide: if you collect chocolate teapots then the Nokia 5000 might be the phone for you. Good ones can be had for next to nothing.

Sony Ericsson T610 (2003)

Introduced 2003

First seen in 2003, the Sony Ericsson T610 was one of the first handsets from the joint venture between Ericsson and Sony.

Despite being branded "Sony Ericsson", this was clearly an Ericsson design judging by the clear and stylish layout. The "T-Series" of devices were also an Ericsson trademark.

By modern standards, the specifications of the T610 are pretty modest - there was a 128x160 pixel STN display in 65,000 colours, Bluetooth, polyphonic ringtones, Java, a web browser and email client and GPRS. The camera was a very low resolution CIF device (352 x 288 pixels). 

Talktime on the T610 was quoted at up to 14 hours with 12 days standby time, which is something that most modern handsets can't manage. All of this was contained in a phone weighing only 95 grams which was very light for its time.

This is still a useful phone today, and indeed many Sony Ericsson T610s are still in use and well regarded due to their design and ease of use. Sony Ericsson recently revisited the styling with the 3G Sony Ericsson T650i. The T610 was replaced by the T630 in 2004.

Sony Ericsson T610 at a glance
Available:	2003-2004
Network:	GSM 900/1800/1900
Data:	GPRS
Screen:	128x160 pixels, 65k colours
Camera:	0.1 megapixels
Size:	Medium monoblock 102 x 44 x 19mm / 95 grams
Bluetooth:	Yes
Memory card:	No
Infra-red:	Yes
Polyphonic:	Yes
Java:	Yes
Battery life:	14 hours talk / 12 days standby

Source: Mobile Gazette