Renault Avantime vs Renault Vel Satis (2001)

Introduced 2001

French cars are cool. That’s a fact. Big French cars are cooler. Quirky big French cars are cooler still. And in 2001, Renault launched not one... but two quirky big French cars for our delight – the Renault Avantime and Renault Vel Satis.

The name “Avantime” is a portmanteau* of the French word “Avant” (“Before”) and the English word “Time”. It wasn’t like anything else on the market at the time – a sort of cross between a grand tourer, MPV, coupé and convertible. These days we’d think of it as a crossover, but twenty years ago customers were baffled.

Is it an MPV? Coupé? Grand Tourer? Convertible? The Avantime is a bit of all of those things.

Like the Vel Satis, the Avantime was designed by Renault’s legendary chief designer Patrick Le Quément. But unlike the Vel Satis, the Avantime was built by Matra who a history in aerospace, defence and motor racing and who somewhere had along the way created the magnificent Matra Rancho.

The Rancho was really just a Simca van converted into the world’s first MPV with the addition of some fibreglass, seats and plastic panels. Although it was a modest success, Matra took the idea further and created arguably the world’s first purpose-built MPV in their P18 prototype which they intended to sell to their long-time partners Chrysler-Simca. Chrysler were interested, but their business was collapsing and they were bought out by PSA (Peugeot Citroën) who weren’t interested in the concept at all.

Matra then sought out a new partner for this radical new car, and in the end Renault agreed to work with them. After some back-and-forth, the Renault Espace was launched in 1984… although the original still had many components from the Simca parts bins. Consumers did not understand the Espace at first – huge, radically shaped and quite different from anything else on European roads. However, once customers “got it” the Espace became a significant success.

Matra was a relatively small company though, and in order to build enough Espaces for Renault they had to drop their sports car line and give 100% of production over the to the new MPV. The Espace II was launched in 1991 with the same basic formula but a more Renault style, followed by the Espace III in 1996 which introduced a radical new interior.

Hundreds of thousands of Espaces were built by Matra, but Matra’s automotive division had just one customer…. Renault. And in 2002 Renault switched the production of the new Espace IV to their own factory in Sandouville. This was potentially very bad news for Matra.

Renault’s solution was to co-design a new car based on the Espace which would utilise Matra’s own engineering skills. Based on the same floorpan as the Espace, the Avantime had just four luxurious seats (squeezing in a fifth person at a pinch), two double-hinged pillarless doors, an almost completely glass roof with the largest production sunroof of the time, a cavernous boot, futuristic yet minimalistic interior all housed in a radical and coherent body based on Matra’s space frame engineering.

Typically this was all powered by a big 3 litre V6 engine and an automatic gearbox, combined with a soft ride for eating up the miles on the autoroute. One interesting feature was the “full air” mode, where at the press of a button all the windows would drop and the sunroof would open to create a sort-of-convertible. The lack of B-pillars helped the illusion of open-ness.
There was nothing else like it, and the Avantime didn’t fit into anybody’s pre-defined notion of what a car should be. Sure, it was a radical design… but so was the Espace and with that it just took a little while for consumers to understand that this was the car they needed.

So, sales of the Avantime were slow to begin with. Alas they stayed that way, with the model selling just over 8000 units worldwide rather than the 100,000 needed for profitability. Despite being critically acclaimed, it was a sales disaster. Matra’s automotive division went bankrupt, ending 40 years of innovative car designs..

..and yet, Renault consider the Avantime to be a design success even if it wasn’t a commercial one. Twenty years late, the huge bulk of the Avantime is not unlike the majority of other new cars. Even the esoteric two-door layout has found its way into other large cars. Today, the Avantime is recognised as being innovative… but nearly two decade too late to save Matra. This is a car that was ahead of its time in more ways than one.

Part of the problem with the Avantime may well have been the Renault Vel Satis. If you wanted a big, weird Renault then this was another choice you could make. A bit bigger than the Laguna, it was also designed by Patrick Le Quément but with a rather different design philosophy.

A large hatchback designed for executives and dignitaries, the Vel Satis was designed to look imposing. This was a car with presence rather than elegance, while not exactly ugly there was a hint of brutalism in the exterior design. Inside, the was comfortable and more conventional. The odd name - a bit like the Avantime's - was a combination of Velocity and Satisfaction.

Not the prettiest thing perhaps, but the Vel Satis had presence and looked like nothing else in its class.

It lent itself well to those who needed a car that people would notice without it looking too flashy. The President of France had one, which he loaned to Queen Elizabeth II. The French police would use them as unmarked police cars. These were serious motors.

The design never really fitted in with the rest of the Renault range of the time, with the result that it didn’t date in the same way. Although the Vel Satis is a rare site, especially in the UK, it still looks fresh.

A revision in 2005 kept the car going until 2009, although it wasn’t sold in the UK. About 64,000 were built, although just 1200 made it to the UK… even so, that was 8 times the number of Avantimes worldwide.

Both cars are uncommon these days, but it you are in the market for a big weird car with 20-year-old French electrics, then prices do vary depending on condition. The Avantime is probably the most collectable, with some prices going as high as £10,000 but mostly much cheaper. The Vel Satis can typically be picked up for a few thousand pounds, but it’s not as well-loved as the Avantime and numbers are dwindling fast.

Lovers of big weird French cars in the UK don’t have much choice. Although the fifth-gen Espace is pleasingly individual, it isn’t available in the UK. Other most other big French cars don’t have the character, with most big Renaults originating from Korea and Citroen and Peugeot producing badge-engineered Stellantis models you would be hard pushed to find anything quirky.

* literally meaning “coathanger”, a word created by merging two other words.
 

Image credits:
Vauxford via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 4.0
Rudolf Stricker via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 3.0

Nokia 5510 (2001)

Launched October 2001

At the same time that Apple launched their groundbreaking iPod digital music player, Nokia were going for the same market with their equally groundbreaking Nokia 5510. Of course, today people remember the original the original classic iPod… but the 5510 hides in obscurity filed under W for weird.

A weird-looking Nokia 5510

The two devices were both trying to do the same thing, but both Apple and Nokia started from different origins. Where the iPod had a 5GB internal hard disk and was strictly a music-only device, the 5510 had 64MB of internal flash memory and also a full QWERTY keyboard, WAP browser, email client and of course it was a phone too.

This was Nokia’s first music capable phone, but it required a Windows PC to encode MP3s in a copy-protected format, and the 64MB of memory was about for about one album’s worth of songs (compared to the 1000 or so on the iPod). This was slow and cumbersome, and the 5510 didn’t support memory cards so you were stuck with this 64MB limit. However, the 5510 did include an FM radio which was quite a useful feature for its day.

Nokia wanted it to be more than just a music phone, so the inbuilt email client and the built-in QWERTY keyboard should have been a good match. Except of course that looking at it now, the keyboard takes up most of the device with a relatively tiny screen. But RIM hadn’t yet come up with their iconic 6230 design which was frankly a lot more usable, and which was much-copied in the years that followed its release.

Doubly weird, two Nokia 5510s

Flawed as a music player, and flawed as a messaging device… the 5510 nonetheless foreshadowed technologies that were to come. You can’t attach any blame to Nokia for seeing what consumers wanted, giving it a go and getting it wrong. But Nokia got it wrong rather too often, whereas the iPod was right first time.

Weird Nokia phones are quite collectable, and the 5510 easily falls into this category with good examples going for about £70 or so. You might only get limited use out of it, but certainly on looks along it still has the wow factor…

Image credits:
Nokia

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

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

Samsung S9110 (2009)

Samsung S9110

Introduced July 2009

The Samsung S9110 looks like a smartwatch, but instead it came several years before what we’d think of as a modern smartwatch, and it instead a complete feature phone shrunk down to the size of a wearable.

The most obvious feature of the phone itself was a 1.76” 176 x220 pixel touchscreen mounted on the front, the S9110 also supported Bluetooth, had an MP3 player and voice recognition and even a web browser. Internal memory was just 40MB and wasn’t expandable, and the S9110 took an old-fashioned mini-SIM car which must have taken up a fair amount of its internal space. A 630 mAh battery was quoted as giving 300 hours of use and the whole thing weighed 91 grams.

It was all very clever and this sophisticated gadget was a bit like something out of a James Bond movie. But it was also pretty useless… and it didn’t really need to be a phone at all, it might well have been better as a Bluetooth add-on to a more normal phone instead. As you might have guessed, the S9110 wasn’t a big seller and neither were the rival devices launched at the same time.

Ultimately the watch phone was a failure, and the modern smartwatch has fared little better.
It did have its fans though, and in those pre-smartwatch days it was one of the best ways of fulfilling that particular gadget need, with second hand ones selling for hundreds of pounds. Today you’d be lucky to find one at any price.

Image credit: Samsung

Nokia 6260, 6170 and 2650 (2004)

Launched June 2004

Cast your mind back and think of a classic Nokia. Perhaps you are thinking of the 3210, the 6310i or the N95. Whatever you are thinking of, it’s probably one of Nokia’s signature monoblock or candy bar designs. But Nokia could also make some interesting clamshell phones, and in June 2004 they launched a trio of innovative designs.

Nokia 6260

Sitting at the top of the pile was the Nokia 6260. Not just any old clamshell phone, but a Symbian S60 smartphone to boot. This was Nokia’s first attempt to put Symbian in a clamshell, and this was certainly competitive with other similar devices with downloadable native apps, a 176 x 208 pixel display and expandable memory.

But really, that was all boring stuff… because the 6260 also came with a novel rotating display. Possibly inspired by similar devices coming out of Japan, the 6260 could be used like a traditional clamshell or have the screen twisted around to create a sort of touchscreen-less tablet. Or if you wanted you could use it in pretty much any position in between.

The clever screen is perhaps what gave the 6260 its “wow factor” rather than the powerful Symbian OS underneath. Ultimately, the sort of users who liked Symbian weren’t really drawn to clamshell designs. Nonetheless, this is a very collectable Nokia handset with typical prices being £70 or more.

Nokia 6260

Nokia 6170

Where the 6260 had hidden depths, the lower-cost Nokia 6170 didn’t. A very basic phone in terms of technical specifications, the 6170 came with a gorgeous design that made this a very desirable handset.

Not a million miles away from the 6260 in terms of understated squared-off design, the 6170 was clad in an etched stainless steel housing. Even the NOKIA name was discretely etched into the steel, and the phone looked just as good on the inside as on the outside, along with a small colour display.

The lack of Bluetooth was certainly a hindrance in what could have otherwise made a decent business phone, but overall the 6170 was quite usable despite its simplicity. Today, examples in decent condition will cost around £30 or so.

Nokia 6170

Nokia 2650

2004 was certainly in the middle of Nokia’s “weird period” when it came to design, and given that their only other foray into clamshell design was the fabric-clad 7200 you might think that Nokia would want at least one sober design. Well, instead the Nokia 2650 was the weirdest to date.

On the outside, the 2650 looked like nothing at all. A plastic case with NOKIA written on it, an exercise in utterly minimalistic design. But open the 2650 up and it revealed an amazingly retro-futuristic design of flexible plastic that looked like a cross between a prop from a Sci-fi show and a sun lounger.

A very basic (and inexpensive) phone underneath, the 2650 always polarised opinions and even fifteen years later it a love-it-or-hate-it proposition. It does however represent the sort of fresh thinking that phone designers had a decade-and-a-half ago, an approach which is sorely lacking today. Again, £30 or so will get you one in decent condition if you want one.

Nokia never really did crack the clamshell market, and of course in the long run it didn’t matter anyway. But Nokia handsets from this era are highly collectable, and these three are certainly no exception to that rule.

Nokia 2650

Image credits: Nokia

TAG Heuer MERIDIIST (2009)

TAG Heuer MERIDIIST

Launched March 2009

A luxury watch can easily cost thousands of pounds, but a good quality luxury watch is a bit of an investment – with a bit of care it should last for decades and be every bit as useful as it was the day you bought it.

Alternatively, you could spend that sort of money on something else. And a decade ago, luxury watchmaker TAG Heuer came up with the idea that you might want to spend a similar amount of cash on a mobile. And because TAG Heuer can also make a pretty decent watch, they decided to use some of that expertise to come up with a phone.

So, starting at about £5600 in today’s money and going up to the equivalent of about £30,000 you could buy yourself a TAG Heuer MERIDIIST. A beautifully engineered and very striking device that also had the unfortunate problem that it was a pile of crap.

OK, we are probably being harsh. It was a beautiful pile of crap. Even a diamond-and-leather encrusted pile of crap. It was, in effect, an exquisitely designed device that gave about as much functionality as a £100 feature phone.

Even for a decade ago, the MERIDIIST looked obsolete. For a fraction of the cost you could have bought an iPhone 3G. With the money you saved... well, you could buy yourself a nice watch. A really nice watch.

Despite it being almost entirely useless, the MERIDIIST did seem to find a market with people who perhaps had more money than sense. These days you can pick one up second-hand for about £600 or so, which is still an expensive way to get hold of a pretty basic feature phone.

Image credits: TAG Heuer

Nokia 7610 (2004)

Announced March 2004

The Nokia 7610 was a phone with a rather obvious elephant in the room. Sure, this was a capable Symbian smartphone with a decently-sized 2.1” 176 x 208 pixel display with expandable memory, Bluetooth and a 1 megapixel camera. It had impressive multimedia capabilities, a large library of applications and you could even swap out the covers if you wanted a new look.

But it didn’t really matter how good the phone looked when it came to technical specifications but the 7610’s particular elephant was the keypad. One of the maddest keypads ever to be fitted to a Nokia phone.

Nokia 7610

Sure, Nokia could have arranged the keys in a traditional grid, but that would have been too easy. Clearly influence in part by the batshit insane Nokia 7600 from a few months earlier, the 7610 was all about curves. The asymmetric design of the phone had curves on opposite corners, and this was strongly reinforced by the curvy design of the keyboard.

The keys were all different sizes and laid out in a striking but not particularly obvious way. Presumably designed to be used with a thumb – it was unclear which thumb – the result was an impressive looking mess. Users either loved it or hated it, and it seemed that there was no middle ground. Compared with the preceding and pleasingly chubby Nokia 6600, the 7610 was a bit too radical for its own good.

For years and years, Nokia had a philosophy of not putting all the features they could in any single phone, so although the 7610 was a decently capable smartphone, it didn’t come with 3G support whereas it’s non-smartphone stablemate the 7600 did.

Nokia did address the controversial keypad later in 2004 with the release of the otherwise almost identical Nokia 6670, but somehow they managed to come up with something even uglier than the 7610. Eventually they started to get their act together with the 6680 launched in early 2005 which then morphed into the rather nice Nokia N70 in April 2005. Today a 7610 is a somewhat collectable device, with typical prices for an unlocked one in good condition being about £40 or so.

Image credits: Nokia

Motorola V80 (2004)

Launched February 2004

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image credits: Motorola

Nokia 3200 and 7200 (2003)

Launched November 2003

These days all phones tend to look rather similar, but in the early noughties Nokia came up with some interesting ideas to come up with something different. Unlike some of the more unusable ideas, the Nokia 3200 and 7200 were much more conventional –and usable - devices.

Nokia 3200

Nokia had pioneered the idea of Xpress-on covers where you could change the look of your phone by changing the panels, indeed you can still do that today. The Nokia 3200 took it further – it was a phone where you could design your own covers and make your handset truly unique.

The secret was the transparent case, underneath this you could fit covers you printed out yourself with any design you wanted, or you could use one of small selection of pre-printed covers. The phone itself was a rather basic 2G affair but it did come with a built-in flashlight. And of course the Nokia of 2003 gave you a weird keypad too which could be a bit tricky to use.

Adding something like this to a modern smartphone would be possible but perhaps tricky, and indeed one of the criticisms of the 3200 was the flimsy-feeling case.

Nokia 7200

Rather more upmarket but still visually unique was the Nokia 7200. This was Nokia’s first clamshell phone, and instead of going for something bland and silver they came up with something much more imaginative.

The key fashion feature of the 7200 was the fabric Xpress-on covers. These came with a matching bag and also matching themes on the phone itself. A sort of retro-futuristic design overall made the 7200 look very different from the competition.

From both a tactile and design point of view, fabric seems like an obvious choice for a smartphone cover. Sadly it seems not to be a choice that modern manufacturers are willing to offer.

Both the Nokia 3200 and 7200 are pretty commonly available second-hand with prices for the 3200 starting at £30 or so and the 7200 starting at about £60. Although neither phone changed the world, their design is certainly an antithesis to modern blandness.

Image credits: Nokia

Nokia 6810 and 6820 (2003)

"Ta-dah!" - the Nokia 6280 shows off its party trick

Launched November 2003

A pair of handsets from Nokia’s “weird phase” in 2003, the Nokia 6800 series of devices attempted to make messaging easier by adding a large keyboard, while at the same time keeping the size and weight down to that of a standard mobile phone.

Both phones were derived from the original Nokia 6800 launched the previous year and copied the novel unfolding keyboard that it had pioneered. Cleverly hidden underneath the numeric keypad was a QWERTY keyboard which opened up by a hinge halfway up the screen. This led to the unusual layout of having half the keyboard on each side of the display.

The Nokia 6810 was a straight upgrade of the previous year’s phone, but adding Bluetooth in addition to the FM radio the 6800 had. The Nokia 6820 came with a basic CIF camera and a more compact keyboard which meant that the phone was more compact than the 6810. The 6820 was sold more to consumers, the 6810 was marketed at businesses – especially for email.

The 6810 and 6820 were certainly a triumph of industrial design and they certainly had the “wow factor” when opened up. However, the keyboard arrangement forced you to use two hands (unlike a contemporary BlackBerry) and the whole thing definitely looked rather strange.

They were a niche success in the end, and although sales were quite low these funny little handsets did have their fans. Two years later, Nokia tried the same format again with the Nokia E70. This was a much better phone all around, but it still failed to break the mould in the way Nokia would have hoped.

These handsets are quite collectable today, with prices starting at around £40 or so and going to up a couple of hundred for ones in perfect condition. They’re an interesting glimpse into what might have been, and are certainly testament to Nokia’s efforts in coming up with new ideas… even if you really wouldn’t want to be seen using one in the street.

Image credit: Nokia

Dial W for Weird: The Strange First Days of 3

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

Motorola A920 and A925

Motorola A920 and A925

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

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

NEC E808

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

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

NEC E808 and E808Y

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

Nokia 7600

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

Nokia 7600

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

NEC E616 / E616V

NEC E616

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

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

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

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

Nokia 3660 (2003)

Launched October 2003

Sometimes Nokia’s weird designs are too weird even for Nokia. The Nokia 3650 (launched in 2002) is a case in point. The 3650 was a very early Symbian smartphone and it ticked all the boxes for an early-noughties Nokia device. Smartphone OS. Tick. Candy bar format. Tick. Biggish screen. Tick. Camera. Tick. Expandable memory. Tick. Weird design. Tick.

Nokia 3650 (left) and 3660 (not on the left)

The Nokia 3650’s design is made up of sweeping lines and curves and at some point, somebody though it must have been a good idea to extend those curves to the keypad. Why make it square? Let’s make it round! A behold, the Nokia 3650 was launched with a rotary keypad.

Instead of being arranged in a grid, the number keys were set out in a circle. Nokia immediately polarised opinion on this, with many people thinking it was just plain stupid but also a significant number who liked it and thought it was easier to use.

Sure it was edgy and radical, and Nokia always did like to push the limits of design. But this was meant to be the launch of mainstream device that was going to carve out some market share for Symbian. But instead Nokia launched thousands of flame wars instead.


So, a year later Nokia reworked the 3650 and came up with the 3660 instead. Gone was the rotary-style keypad and in its place was something a bit more like a traditional grid, but still maintaining the circular shape of its predecessor. More mainstream, yes, but other than the keypad the only other improvement was a 65k colour screen over the 4096 colours in the old one.

Despite managing to annoy both factions in the keypad debate, both the Nokia 3650 and 3660 were successful enough to help cement Symbian as the market leader in smartphone platforms. It took a while for Nokia to stop messing around with keypads though, as the weird-looking Nokia 7610 proves.

Today the Nokia 3650 is very collectable, with typical prices for a good one being £100 or so. The 3660’s more sober design makes it a bit less interesting and these are very much cheaper.

Image credits: Nokia

Nokia N-Gage (2003)

Nokia N-Gage (2003)

Launched October 2003

During late 2003, Nokia was going through a weird phase with the remarkable looking but rather unusable 7600 and 7700 phones, respectively trying to bring 3G and smartphone features to the masses, and failing. Nokia obviously thought that you don’t make progress by being normal, and in that spirit they also launched the legendary Nokia N-Gage.

Legendary….? OK, perhaps we need to qualify that. Handheld gaming had been booming ever since the launch of the Nintendo Game Boy in 1990. Consoles were getting better over the years, but Nokia’s idea was that a mobile phone might make a really great gaming platform, which seems kind of obvious to us today.

It wasn’t just the idea of converged devices that we are all familiar with these days, where the smartphone in our pocket can do everything we need. Adding cellular networking to the gaming platform meant that you could compete against people anywhere in the world, and the N-Gage also used Bluetooth which meant that you could play against people in the same room with ease. Add to that the popular Symbian operating system that already had a load of applications available, it seemed that Nokia could probably do no wrong.

The N-Gage was one of the most anticipated product launches of late 2003, with all sorts of interesting rumours about what might be launched. Nokia had been working with Sega too, which added to the buzz. What was launched... well, what was launched was not really what was expected.

Like the 7700, the N-Gage was a taco-shaped side-talking device. It was a “wide” rather than “tall” device, designed to be used in both hands. But from here in, the N-Gage was pretty poorly thought out.

Let’s start with the screen – a 2.1” 176 x 208 pixel panel which was quite unsuited to gaming. Then there were the game cartridges themselves, which you had to partly disassemble the phone to swap. There were a reasonable number of games available, but the hardware limitations were rather off-putting. It was fairly expensive too at launch.

Overall, it wasn’t very good as a gaming platform and it wasn’t very good as a mobile phone. Even so, Nokia managed to shift 3 million of these things. Presumably a lot of them ended up in the back of drawers pretty quickly.

Nokia N-Gage QD (2004)

In 2004, Nokia addressed some of the problems with the phone with the improved N-Gage QD, but by this time the N-Gage brand itself had become a bit toxic. Perhaps if the QD was the device Nokia originally went to market with then it might have succeeded.

Despite high hopes, the N-Gage failed to change the world and by 2007 Nokia acknowledged that the attempt had failed, and instead they tried to roll the N-Gage gaming into other smartphones, but this also didn’t succeed.

Today the N-Gage is quite collectable in either the original or QD forms. Prices typically start at £50 or so, but if games are included in the package then they can command prices of several hundred pounds

Image credits: Nokia

Nokia 7700 (2003)

Nokia 7700. Looks weird from the front.

Launched October 2003

We’ve argued in the past that the modern smartphone era started with the launch of the original iPhone in 2007. But it could have happened much earlier than that. Back in 2003 – 15 years ago this month – Nokia launched something that could have been equally ground-breaking.

The Nokia 7700 is today one of the rarest and most elusive Nokia phones you can try to find. In many ways it was a genius design which was far ahead of its time, in others it was deeply flawed and destined for failure. The era of the modern smartphone could have started here. It didn’t.

2003 was part of a golden era of mobile phone design. Colour displays and cameras were becoming accepted as the norm, but manufacturers were pushing ahead with smartphone concepts and tinkering with form factors to find new design paradigms. The 7700 was part of this drive.

If you look at the technical specifications, the 7700 covers familiar ground. A 3.5” 640 x 320 pixel stylus-driven touch display was married with a new version of the Symbian OS called Series 90. A multimedia player, document viewer, email client and a full web browser are all the sorts of things you would see today, and there was an FM radio too.

And it looks weird from the back as well.

But then you look at the thing, and realise that the Nokia 7700 doesn’t really look like any other smartphone you have ever seen. Exquisitely designed in a sort-of-Taco shape, the 7700 was a slice of retro-futurism which completely ignored contemporary design conventions… or indeed common sense.

Although Nokia certainly had a whole bunch of technology to throw at this, they didn’t really understand what a smartphone could be. Lacking either 3G or WiFi connectivity, the 7700 was limited to plain old GSM, Bluetooth and a cable for getting data on board.

Nokia’s main idea for entertainment was the embedded FM radio which had added RDS so you could display data alongside the audio sequence, a concept they called “visual radio”. Hardly stirring stuff, and it didn’t really fulfil the potential of this sophisticated device.

The lack of 3G was bizarre, in a time when 3G phones were just starting to become widely available. WiFi wouldn’t have been a stretch either, and the Nokia 7700’s rather bulky case could certainly have squeezed in some new features. Nokia had already launched a couple of 3G devices including the equally “Dial W-for-Weird” Nokia 7600 and the WiFi-enabled Nokia 9500 wasn’t far behind, so Nokia certainly could have included those technologies if it had wanted to.

It was also short of RAM and the processor was rather underpowered. The 7700 wasn’t really designed as a phone, more as something you would put on your desk. And if you DID want to do something mundane such as TALK on it, you’d find that the speaker and microphone were on the bottom and not the front or back. This idea had also been used on a few other Nokia’s and earned the nickname of Sidetalking.

It's a smartphone Jim, but not as we know it.

Nonetheless, the Nokia 7700 was one of the most exciting phone launches of the year and Nokia fans were eager to see what they could do. But then Nokia cancelled it.

Perhaps wisely judging that the 7700 could end up as a costly disaster, they went away and redesigned it. Shrinking the case down, adding more memory, a faster processor and a better camera they came up with the Nokia 7710 a year later. Although the 7710 did reach the market, it still didn’t fix the underlying problems of being a bit too far ahead of its time while still lacking high-speed data.

The relative failure of the 7710 led Nokia to a serious strategic mistake – it stopped trying to develop touchscreen smartphones altogether. When Apple did finally show the world how to make one, it took Nokia a very long time to come up with their first truly successful touchscreen device, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic which was launched five years after the 7700.

Although the launch of the 7700 was cancelled, a unknown number of prototypes and pre-production models were made. Some of these were sent out as technology samplers to partners and the media, some ended up the hands of Nokia engineers. Just occasionally one of these very rare handsets comes to market, with prices ranging between £500 to £5000 or more depending on conditions and packaging.

In hindsight it’s clear that if Nokia had stuck with the formula in the 7700 and 7710 then they would probably have gotten it right. In the end a lack of perseverance squandered Nokia’s potential technological lead and in the end it was usurpers like Apple and Google that stole Nokia’s crown.

Image credits: Retromobe [1] [2] and Nokia [3]

Motorola AURA (2008)

Launched October 2008

Imagine that you are a major mobile phone manufacturer whose sales are on the slide and you are desperately in need of something to give you a boost. Perhaps you’ll carefully research the market, put together some focus groups and come out with the next-generation “must have” device which will transform your business.

Or – as in the case of Motorola – you could simply go nuts.

Launched at a very low ebb in Motorola’s fortunes, the Motorola AURA was absolutely not what the market was looking for, but still it managed to be a stunningly unique and extremely clever piece of engineering while still being utterly pointless.

Motorola AURA

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the AURA was the circular screen. No, not a square screen with some parts masked off, but a perfectly circular 1.55” display with a diameter of 480 pixels covered by a sapphire crystal lens. Built around this extraordinary display was a metal Swiss-engineered rotating mechanism housing a phone that looked like nothing else that was on the market.

Although it was utterly amazing to look at, the clever innovation didn’t extent to the phone itself. Underneath it was a pretty standard 2G feature phone with a few bells and whistles. Perhaps it’s just as well… browsing the web or watching a video on that circular screen would have been a challenge. However, a pretty decent 2GB of memory meant that the AURA was capable at music playback.

The original R1 version was announced in October 2008 with a price tag of $2000. Various special editions followed over the next year including the “Celestial” edition to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing and a Diamond edition with gold plating and diamonds around the screen, costing an eye-watering $5700.

The AURA didn’t turn around Motorola’s fortunes, but it came during a period of relative inactivity as the company struggled to find a new direction (which it did a year later with its first Android phone). However, the AURA did become a collectable classic – and also a minefield for fakes – with prices starting at around £1000 and going up to £6000 and perhaps even more.

Image credit: Motorola

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

LG HB620T (2008)

LG HB620T. Catchy name, huh?

Released May 2008

File this one under “W” for “Weird”. The LG HB620T was a strange-looking clamshell phone that attempted to deliver something that customers didn’t really want, and ended up being horribly compromised along the way.

There was a good idea behind the HB620T – and that idea was that people wanted to watch TV on the move. Ten years ago there was no 4G, 3G services was spotty and public WiFi wasn’t great either. But more critically, mobile data was extremely expensive in 2008 Vodafone charged £7.50 a month for about 4Mb of data per day, with each 15Mb after that costing another £1. High-quality mobile video would have been too expensive to watch for very long.

The solution seemed to be to put a digital TV receiver in the phone itself. Early attempts, such as the Nokia N92, used a version of the common DVB system optimised for handhelds with the name DVB-H. The problem was that nobody really wanted to pay for the infrastructure to support DVB-H, so manufacturers instead tried to adapt phones for the more common household DVB-T. This meant that no additional broadcasting infrastructure was needed, but it wasn’t as easy to make it work in mobile handsets.

LG’s approach was to build a DVB-T receiver into a clamshell phone. Nokia had already done this years earlier with the N92, which was quite a chunky device – but it did feature a clever two-way hinge which allowed the 2.8” screen to be used in landscape orientation. But the LG HB620T didn’t do it that way: LG just made the clamshell wider than normal and squeezed in a quite small 2.0” display in landscape mode instead.

The phone needed to use a large antenna to receive the TV signal, and the receiver wasn’t compatible with the digital TV service in many countries either. You might not be surprised to find out that the combination of odd design and poor features – plus the small screen – meant that the HB620T was not a success.

The LG HB620T always was pretty rare, and if you can find one the prices tend to be €120 or more. As a device it service very little practical purpose, and you can actually get a 9” DVB TV for less than that. And of course these days you can just stream most things to an app instead..