Going nowhere: Windows 7, Bada, Symbian, BlackBerry OS and WebOS (2010)

Announced October 2010

It’s October 2020 and if you have a smartphone in your pocket it’s almost certainly going to be one of two things: an Apple iPhone or an Android device. It seems like it has been that way for ever, but ten years ago this month rival platforms were duking it out as if they had some sort of chance.

The big news ten years ago was Windows Phone 7. Microsoft had been haemorrhaging market share ever since the iPhone was launched. Earlier versions of Windows Mobile (as it was then called) had been capable enough, but the user interface was a frankly horrific relic from an earlier age. Stung by failure, Microsoft decided to redesign the product entirely and came up with something entirely different.

Windows Phone 7 was a huge critical success in interface design. Clean, responsive, informative and intuitive at the same time, it made Android and iOS look old-fashioned. iOS in particular was wedded to the skeuomorphic design that had been an Apple hallmark for decades, but by contrast Windows looked utterly modern.

Microsoft made the decision to base Windows Phone 7 on the same underlying Windows CE platform that had powered previous generations, rather than the more modern Windows NT platform that could have delivered the same power as Android and iOS. The next-generation of Windows Phone – version 8 – would change the platform while retaining the UI… but that is another story.

There was certainly some buzz about Windows Phone 7 though, and a lot of manufacturers had lined up behind Microsoft to push this new platform. HTC were the keenest with several new devices – the HTC 7 Pro, HTC 7 Trophy, HTC 7 Mozart, HTC Surround and the high-end HTC HD7. Samsung resurrected the Omnia sub-brand to come up with the Samsung Omnia 7, where rivals LG had the LG Optimus 7 and LG Optimus 7Q. Even Dell got in on the act with the Dell Venue Pro.

A trio of doomed Windows Phone 7 devices

The operating system was sleek, the phones were pretty good and competitively priced. But of course Windows Phone failed, mostly because it lacked the apps that Android and iOS had. And perhaps partly because… who actually needed another mobile phone OS anyway?

But Windows Phone 7 wasn’t the only doomed platform being touted this month. Samsung had also developed the Unix-like Bada operating system for use in smartphones. The Samsung Wave II was the company’s flagship Bada phone… again it was a sleek operating sytem, competitively priced with excellent hardware. Samsung had tried hard to get apps for the platform and had done reasonably well. But still… it wasn’t Android or iOS. But it did at least feature the somewhat infamous Rick Stivens.

Samsung Wave Goodbye might have been a better name

Bada didn’t last long, being folded into Tizen in 2012. Tizen itself was the effective successor OS to a medley of other Unix-like platforms: Maemo, Moblin, MeeGo and LiMo. Tizen found itself ported to a wide range of smartwatches and the Samsung Z range of smartphones up to 2017 when eventually they fizzled out. But Tizen didn’t die, instead becoming the most popular operating system in Smart TVs instead.

Another relatively new kid on the block was Palm’s webOS platform found in the Palm Pre 2. Stop me if you’ve heard this before… but the phone had a combination of good hardware, a great OS, competitive pricing and a reasonable set of apps which sadly couldn’t compete with the market leaders. The Pre 2 was the last smartphone to be launched under the Palm name (apart from the peculiar Palm Palm). But less than a year after the Pre 2 the entire webOS product line was cancelled by Palm’s owners, HP.

Palm Pray might also have been a better name

The excellent webOS operating system lingered on, with HP attempting to open source it. Eventually it was picked up by LG who applied it to smart TVs and smartwatches, in a directly parallel to Samsung and Tizen.

Three doomed platforms is surely enough? Not quite.

The Nokia C5-03 was a nice enough, low-cost Symbian touchscreen smartphone. Unlike the others, this had a really good library of apps, it was attractively priced and designed and also Symbian had been around for donkey’s years there had been a process of continual improvement and an established base of fans. But Nokia were on the verge of a spectacular collapse, and Symbian would effectively be dead within a year.

Inexpensive but doomed smartphone fun with the Nokia C5-03.

Windows Phone 7, Bada, webOs and even the aging Symbian were all modern platforms that could deliver the sort of experience that customers might want. In comparison, the BlackBerry OS on the Bold 9780 was not. BlackBerry’s efforts at repeatedly warming over an OS that was nearly a decade old had created a device that was pretty good at email and absolutely appalling for web browsing or any other of the meagre collection of apps that were available.

BlackBerry missed the memo about what a 2010 smartphone should be

It sold pretty well into corporations that had standardised on BlackBerry, but users hated it – instead choosing to use their own iOS and Android devices which they expected their companies to support, leading in turn to the idea of BYOD (“bring your own device”). BlackBerry did eventually come up with a vaguely competitive smartphone… in 2013, a full six years after the iPhone was announced.

Today, if you want a smartphone without Android or iOS then the pickings are fairly slim. But Huawei – currently the world’s number two smartphone manufacturer – is working on the Linux-based Harmony OS to replace Android. This move is mostly due to trade sanctions from the US, but Harmony is also available as open source, or alternatively Huawei will licence their closed-source version to other manufacturers. Who knows, perhaps this rival OS will be a success?

Image credits: HTC, LG, Samsung, BlackBerry, Dell, HP, Nokia.

Nokia 770 vs HTC Universal (2005)

HTC Universal in vanilla form and an O2 XDA Exec

Fifteen years ago the golden age of mobile phones was in full swing – each generation added new features, but most phones concentrated on the business of making phone calls, playing games and taking a few grainy photos. But on the higher end of the market were devices that would lay a path followed by the smartphones of today. Two of these were the Nokia 770 and the HTC Universal.

In 2005 HTC exclusively made devices sold with the names of other companies on them – so the HTC Universal went under many names including the O2 XDA Exec, T-Mobile MDA IV, Qtek 9000 and i-mate JASJAR. Despite the marketing confusion, HTC’s reputation was growing… but it would still be another year before HTC would sell phones under its own name.

The Universal itself was ground-breaking. Here was a smartphone with absolutely everything – a smartphone with a large 3.6” VGA-resolution touchscreen display on a swivelling hinge, a physical QWERTY keyboard, front and rear cameras, expandable memory, Bluetooth, infra-red connectivity, WiFi and 3G. The only thing missing from the feature list was GPS, which was a rare option back then (although the rival Motorola A1000 did feature GPS).

It was a big device for the time, measuring 127 x 81 x 25mm and weighing 285 grams. But in modern terms, that’s about the same footprint as the iPhone 11 but about 50% heaver and three times thicker. The swivelling hinge meant that you could use the Universal like a mini-laptop or a PDA.

There were flaws – it could have used more RAM, the VGA resolution screen was effectively a just a scaled-up QVGA screen most of the time and the new version of Windows it came with was still clunky and harder to use than a modern OS. The wallet-lightening price of nearly €1000 for SIM-free versions compared unfavourably with laptops of the same era, and while the Universal had awesome mobile working capabilities it just wasn’t as powerful as a real computer. And from a practical point of view, the sheer size and weight made it impractical to use as a mobile phone from the point of view of a customer in 2005.

Nokia 770 Internet Tablet

Nokia on the other hand were trying something different. The Nokia 770 Internet Tablet wasn’t a phone at all but was instead a compact Linux-based computer with built-in WiFi and Bluetooth for connectivity. You could still use the 770 pretty much anywhere, but you’d need to spend a little time pairing it with your regularly mobile phone and setting it up as a modem.

There was no camera or keyboard either, but there was a huge (for its day) 4.1” 800 x 480 pixel touchscreen display, expandable memory and pretty decent multimedia support. The operating system was Maemo, a Linux-based platform that was quite different from Nokia’s regular Symbian OS. It was wider but thinner than the Universal and at 230 grams a good deal lighter.

The whole Internet Table project was a bit left-field for Nokia, but it attracted a small but dedicated following. Many were attracted by the idea of using Linux on a small handheld computer which was a fresh idea, indeed in retrospect it seems trailblazing because both iOS and Android are closely related to Linux.

The 770 suffered from a lack of software at first, although it didn’t take long for Linux application to be ported across. The processor was a bit slow and there was a lack of RAM which hampered things, and some people just couldn’t get used to the idea of carrying two devices. It was successful enough though to spawn several sequels, which is a different story.

Even though the 770 was priced at just €370 (about a third of the price of the Universal) there was some criticism that it was expensive. In retrospect it looks positively cheap though, and although modern tablets are much bigger there are many echoes of modern smart devices here.

Neither the 770 nor the Universal were a huge success, perhaps partly because the technology of 2005 wasn’t quite good enough to deliver the results people wanted, and perhaps partly because consumers didn’t understand that they wanted all these features from a mobile device until handsets such as the original iPhone came along.

Today both devices are fairly collectable, with the HTC Universal coming in between £100 to £350 or so depending on condition and about £80 to £250 for the Nokia 770. Oh, and the winner between the two? The Nokia 770's software platform is pretty close to what we use today, with the "everything but the kitchen sink" hardware specs of the HTC Universal. Let's call this one a tie.


Image credits: HTC, O2, Nokia

Windows 3.0 (1990)

Software... in a box!

Introduced May 1990

By 1990 Microsoft’s Windows platform had been around for five years and had made pretty much no market impact at all. Early versions of Windows were truly terrible and combined the very worst of clunky user interface design with the technological backwardness of late 1980s IBM-compatible PCs.

Most PC users stuck with plain old-fashioned DOS and were seemingly happy to run just one program at a time, each with a different user interface and incompatible file formats. WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase and ruled the market – all very different products from different vendors. But a high-end business PC could have an Intel 80386 running at 20 or 25MHz with up to 4MB of RAM, plus a VGA card and a 100MB hard disk and a really high-end system might have a powerful 486 processor inside. But by a large of lot of these systems just ran DOS programs… but very, very quickly.

The limitations of DOS were pretty crushing. One application at a time and a maximum memory address space of 640KB. Various tools and memory managers existed, but many of these were incompatible with each other and they couldn’t make up for the clumsiness of DOS itself. Microsoft’s way out of this was to partner with IBM to make a new operating system called OS/2. This had been developed alongside earlier versions of Windows, but it was a much more modern operating system designed for 80286 processors and above where Windows 1 and 2 could run (just about) on a first generation 8086-based PC.

But Microsoft too had been pushing technological limits with Windows/286 and Windows/386 with special versions of Windows 2.1 which maintained the clunky look-and-feel of the old Windows but could actually take advantage of newer CPUs, including multi-tasking DOS applications. These were niche products, but when Windows 3.0 was introduced in May 1990 it included enhanced support for the 286 and 386 processors out of the box.

Not only was it better underneath, but Windows 3.0 had a complete overhaul of the user interface, featuring the application-orientated Program Manager rather than the brutally ugly and simplistic MS-DOS Executive in previous versions. Utilising attractive icons and taking advantage of what was then high-resolution VGA graphics, Windows 3.0 was approaching the usability of the Macintosh – although the Mac’s Finder was more about data files than programs.

That's a billion person-hours down the drain then

Windows 3.0 design was a mix of polished-up elements from previous versions of Windows with a rather flat feel to them, along with 3D elements largely borrowed from Presentation Manager in OS/2. Compared with modern minimalistic versions of Windows, Windows 3.0 had a lot of “Chrome” around the edges which resulted in visual clutter and wasted space. But it certainly wasn’t bad looking for a 30-year-old design.

It had flaws – many flaws – in particular it wasn’t very stable and the dreaded Unrecoverable Application Error (which was Windows 3.0’s Blue Screen of Death) was all too common. Driver support was fiddly, if you didn’t have a popular system out of the box then you’d need to acquire and install things like video drivers and sound drivers. Most importantly, it wasn’t really an operating system in its own right, it was an operating environment perched on top of the ancient DOS OS. It took another three years and a major schism with IBM to create a completely modern version of Windows with Windows NT.

Windows 3.0 was a huge success (perhaps in part to the maddeningly addictive card game of Solitaire it shipped with), and of course the quest for ease-of-use spread beyond the operating system itself. Microsoft Office 1.0 was launched in November 1990 with Word for Windows 1.1, Excel 2.0 and PowerPoint 2.0, typically priced at around half of what it would cost you to buy the programs separately. Windows 3.1 followed two years later with improvements all around, and because Microsoft would cut PC manufacturers a good deal to ship Windows with new PCs it eventually got everywhere and wiped out all the other PC-based opposition.

As an operating system it isn’t of much practical use today, but if you want to play with it there are a few places that you can get virtual machines to run under VirtualBox or VMware, and you can relive the frustrations of Solitaire if nothing else. Complete set of installation disks, boxes and manuals are quite collectable too with prices typically ranging from £60 to £100.



Image credit: David Orban via Flickr - CC BY 2.0

Compaq iPAQ H3600 (2000)

Compaq iPAQ H3630

Launched April 2000

PDAs had been developing rapidly in the around the turn of the millennium. Popularised by the iconic Palm Pilot of 1996, the market had grown and evolved considerably over the next few years – and these little gadgets had a particular appeal to business decision makers.

While Microsoft owed the desktop, they had very little penetration in the handheld market. Attempts to push Windows CE in this market segment had not been very successful, but version 3.0 of the OS (launched in 2000) was a vast improvement. Alongside this new version of Windows, Compaq launched the iPAQ H3600 series on handheld computers running the Windows CE 3.0-based Pocket PC 2000 platform.

Compaq had some form in the handheld market, with devices such as the Aero 1500 and Aero 2100 preceding it. But the development story behind the iPAQ actually begins with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) who had developed the StrongARM CPU in the late 1990s along with two reference boards (“Assebet” and “Neponset”) which became the hardware basis for the iPAQ. This was developed into a development system called “Itsy”. DEC was in its dying days however, and while StrongARM ended up with Intel, the rest of DEC was bought out by Compaq in 1998 who continued to develop the Itsy platform.

The iPAQ wasn’t much like the Itsy – for a start it ran Windows CE and not Linux – but it did show all the experience that Compaq had acquired in the previous few years. Although today we might remember “iPAQ” as referring exclusively to handheld devices, this sub-brand included legacy-free PCs, MP3 players, projectors, web appliances and even Compaq-branded BlackBerry smartphones. The H3600 range slotted into this range of next-gen futuristic products quite nicely.

So much for the history – the hardware itself was what buyers were interested in. One immediately obvious feature was the large 3.8” 240 x 320 pixel TFT touchscreen display. Although you could do pretty much anything just on the touchscreen alone, a large navigation pad and other control buttons also took up quite a lot of space. The resistive technologies in the display combined with a general fiddlyness of the OS design meant that a stylus was required, and this simply slid out of a slot in the back.

HP branded iPAQ

Inside was a 206MHz StrongARM CPU with 32MB of RAM, and the iPAQ could connect to a desktop computer via a serial or USB cable. There was also an infrared port (common in those days) but no built-in Bluetooth, WiFi, Ethernet, cellular or any other connectivity at all. You could add WiFi, a modem, memory cards, expansion slots or a larger battery with a series of elegant but bulky sleeves that slid into place around the main housing.

Out-of-the-box the iPAQ was rather limited. If you wanted to read emails on the move you would have to sync them with your PC first, type a reply on the go and then sync them again later. Web access was possible through the connected PC only which was a bit pointless, unless you had an expansion sleeve. But it was far better than previous generations and the lack of mobile connectivity didn’t seem as bad in those days.

The iPAQ was a success, but it Compaq itself was struggling and just four years after acquiring DEC, Compaq itself was acquired by Hewlett-Packard (HP). The iPAQ survived the inevitable product rationalisation that followed and it continued to evolve, adding built-in WiFi and a number of other features missing from the original.

We know now that the standalone PDA was a dead end, but in the early noughties sales were still strong. A change was coming with the introduction of the “wireless PDA” (what we would call a smartphone today), with the 2002 HTC Wallaby being a direct competitor for the iPAQ, but with an integrated cellular radio. HTC had been one of the main contractors in helping to build and design the iPAQ, and eventually they became pioneers in smartphones… the product that really killed the iPAQ off.

Despite losing sales to smartphones, the iPAQ name hung on until 2009 with the unpleasant sounding iPAQ Glisten being the last of the line. Not too long after that HP’s entire mobile strategy imploded dramatically, effectively leading to them pulling out of the market completely.

As a collectable the original iPAQs are kind of interesting, prices do seem to vary a lot
From about £70 to a couple of hundred depending on condition and accessories.


Image credits:
Andreas Steinhoff via Wikimedia Commons
Konrad Andrews via Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 2.0

Nokia Booklet 3G (2009)

Nokia Booklet 3G

Launched August 2009

By the summer of 2009 the technology used in smartphones was racing ahead. The third generation iPhone offered a beautifully seamless experience, Google's Android platform was catching up fast, Nokia’s market-leading Symbian OS had made a successful leap to touchscreens and the Linux-based Nokia N900 had been announced too and showed plenty of promise.

Great although these device were, they were all a bit small. Generally speaking, if you wanted something bigger then you’d be looking at a full-blown laptop or perhaps a smaller and cheaper netbook. And although a netbook was a practical thing with a variety of uses, they were very fiddly to use while out and about and lacked the “work anywhere” capabilities of a smartphone.

Nokia’s solution to this was the Booklet 3G, a high-quality lightweight device in an elegant aluminium case and with a high-resolution 10.1 inch screen. Powered by a 1.6GHz Intel Atom CPU with 1GB of RAM and a 120 GB hard disk, the Booklet 3G was designed to run Microsoft’s new Windows 7 OS.

In addition to WiFi, the Booklet 3G also came with a SIM card slot (as you might guess by the name) providing the potential for always-on connectivity through its 3.5G HSPA connection. Assuming you had a decent data plan, you could use the Booklet 3G seamlessly almost anywhere.

Nokia certainly showed everybody else how this sort of device should be done, but of course you might notice that we’re not all sitting around using Nokia Booklet 5Gs today. The problem was that just a few months after Nokia announced the Booklet 3G, Apple came out with the iPad. With a similar-sized screen to the Nokia, the iPad essentially upscaled the iPhone. And in this particular battle, it was the iPad that won.

Nokia had access to pretty much the same technology and resources as Apple, but Apple but it all together in a different and much more compelling way. Nokia didn’t make a direct successor to the Booklet 3G, however they did venture into a similar market with the excellent but ultimately unsuccessful Nokia Lumia 2520 in 2013. Meanwhile, Apple have a 38.1% share of the tablet market, but interestingly that market has been in decline for a while now.

Today, the Nokia Booklet 3G is a pretty uncommon find for collectors, with prices for decent examples being £150 or so. The problem with the Booklet is that Windows 7 goes end-of-life in January 2020, and although it does seem technically possible to install Windows 10 it does not seem to be a straightforward proposition. Still, for collectors of esoteric Nokia products the Booklet does seem tempting.

Image credits: Nokia

Nokia 9500 Communicator and Motorola MPx (2004)

Announced February 2004

We are going back fifteen years this month, a journey to the pre-iPhone era where smartphones were bigger, chunkier and altogether odder looking.

Nokia in particular had been pushing their own vision of what a smartphone should be with the Communicator series since 1996. These high-end devices looked like a normal albeit large mobile phone on the outside, but opened up to reveal a large screen and keyboard on the inside. In February 2004 they announced the Nokia 9500 Communicator.

Nokia 9500 Communicator

The display on the Communicators was like nothing else on the market, on the 9500 it was a 4.5” 640 x 200 pixel panel which was pretty good for rendering web pages, composing emails or writing documents. The keyboard was a little more cramped than the one in the previous 9210i, but it was still very usable. The 9500 was also the first in the range to have a camera, although it was only a pretty basic one.

One major omission was the lack of 3G support – it wasn’t as it they couldn’t fit the components into this massive brick of a phone, they just chose not to. The 9500 did have WiFi though, so get it near a wireless hotspot and it could do a decent job of coping with a web that was still designed for desktop PCs.

Nokia’s Series 80 platform was more capable than the Series 60 found in their other smartphones, and on top of that the 9500 had expandable memory, fax capabilities, a wordprocessor, spreadsheet and presentation application and if anyone tried to steal it you could bash them over the head with it.

It was a reasonably successful device in the days when smartphones were still pretty rare, and over the years the Communicator range acquired a dedicated and rather patient fan base. All Communicator models are highly collectable today.

Rivals Motorola were also eyeing up the QWERTY-equipped smartphone market, but they had a completely different approach. The Motorola MPx300 (later rename--d to just “MPx”) was a Windows clamshell smartphone with stylus-driven touchscreen inside. Unlike the large display in the Nokia, the MPx had a rather more modest 2.8” 240 x 320 pixel unit… this was still pretty good for 2004 though.

Motorola MPx

The stand-out feature with the MPx was the remarkable two-way hinge that meant you could open it up like a standard clamshell or the mini-laptop format of the 9500. In order to support this, the MPx had a really strange keyboard that was QWERTY in one direction and numeric in the other. Although on one level this was a stroke of design genius, it also badly compromised the usability.

In fact, the MPx was slow and had limited memory and there were hardware reliability problems too. Despite being announced in 2004, the MPx only got a limited release in Asia about a year later and by the spring of 2005 the worldwide launch was cancelled.

In the end, neither phone set the pattern for future smartphones which these days are unencumbered by a physical keyboard. For collectors, the Motorola MPx is quite a rare find but surprisingly inexpensive at around £50 or so. The much more common Nokia 9500 is conversely more expensive, with unlocked ones in good condition being around £150 or so.

Image credits: Nokia and Motorola

Motorola MPx200 (2003)

Motorola MPx200

Launched October 2003

Fifteen years ago we started to see the first widely-available smartphones. Built on Symbian or Windows technologies, these devices came in all shapes and sizes and although some are recognisable precursors of the phones we use today, many concepts anded up as dead ends.

Motorola added another alternative form factor to the market with the Motorola MPx200, a Windows-based clamshell phone which looked for all the world like a normal feature phone until you powered it on.

Although it seems odd to have a clamshell smartphone, it made a lot of sense. In particular, clamshell phones of the time had more space to play with inside. The MPx200 came with a relatively large 2.2” 176 x 220 pixel panel as a result, and the keypad was nicely spaced and not cramped.

The main selling point was Windows, and this was both a strength and weakness for the MPx200. Managing to squeeze much of the functionality of a PDA into a compact unit with wireless connectivity, Motorola came up with something that could potentially be very versatile… and perhaps it had the potential to be very popular.

But the MPx200 was deeply flawed. Firstly, the Windows Smartphone 2002 operating system was already out of date with most rivals using the improved 2003 version. It also lacked Bluetooth, something that was rapidly becoming an essential component of any business phone. Added to that, the device was slow and not very reliable. There was also no camera, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing for a business phone but was off-putting for individual consumers.

Despite its flaws, it was quite a successful device in terms of sales. But as with many Motorola products of that era, the MPx200 promised more that it delivered. In mid-2004, Motorola replaced the MPx200 with the much improved MPx220 which wasn’t particularly successful. Perhaps if Motorola had waited until they got the formula right then they might have had more success. For collectors of esoteric smartphones, the MPx200 isn’t too hard to find and is fairly inexpensive but the MPx220 is rather more difficult to locate and tends to be a bit pricier.

Image credit: Motorola

O2 XDA II / Qtek 2020 / HTC Himalaya (2003)

HTC Himalaya badged as Qtek 2020

Launched October 2003

Fifteen years ago smartphones were still in their infancy, and typically they would look rather like a traditional phone with a bigger screen. It turned out that this type of device was an evolutionary dead-end and instead the modern smartphone is actually descended from a concept called the “wireless PDA”.

Long extinct these days, a PDA was basically an early smartphone-like device that you had to sync with a computer to get data, rather than being a standalone computer in its own right. Early devices such as the Palm Pilot proved a hit, but really they were just glorified electronic calendars.

HTC had been making PDAs for some time, for example the successful Compaq (later HP) iPAQ range. It seemed like a natural progression to make these limited early PDAs rather more flexible by adding cellular data so that potentially they could be used when away from your desk.

Their first attempt at a wireless PDA was the unlovely HTC Wallaby which met with limited success. A year later they released the HTC Himalaya which was an improved version. Back in those days, HTC did not sell products under their own name, so you were likely to see the Himalaya badged as the O2 XDA II, Qtek 2020, Vodafone VPA, T-Mobile MDA II, Orange SPV 1000 or Dopod 696. Confusing, eh?

The key feature of the Himalaya was the very large (for the time) 3.5” 240 x 320 pixel touchscreen display on the front. Although the same size as the iPhone launched several years later, this one was a somewhat lower resolution and the older resistive touchscreen technology was more suited to a stylus than a finger. It was also a fair bit more bulky than the more iconic iPhone, but the Himalaya is a recognisably modern smartphone in its layout.

HTC Himalaya as O2 XDA II

Limited to 2G only and lacking WiFi, the Himalaya lacked the high-speed data that we take for granted these days. Loading applications onto the phone was a little clunky as you basically had to transfer them from a PC, and the Windows Mobile operating system of the day was rather limited and not all that easy to use. But there can be no mistaking that the HTC Himalaya is one of the direct ancestors of the modern smartphone we all know today.

HTC stuck with it, and following generations got better and better. After pioneering Windows smartphones, HTC followed up five years later with the world’s first Android phone, the HTC Dream. For collectors, the HTC Himalaya (under any of its various names) is quite an uncommon find, but is relatively inexpensive.

Image credits: O2 and Qtek/HTC

Sendo X (2003)

Sendo X in docking station

Launched October 2003

If you’ve heard of Sendo at all, it might be because you have an ancient pay-as-you-go phone stuffed in the back on a drawer somewhere. But for a brief moment in the early noughties it seemed the Sendo might have the keys to the future of the entire smartphone market in its pocket…

Sendo was founded in Birmingham in the UK in 1998, and although it’s main market was indeed cheap prepay mobiles, they were a bit more sophisticated than its rivals. Instead of just hawking a device around carriers, they offered a customisable platform so that carriers could essentially design their own phone. Somewhere along the way this flexible approach caught the attention of Microsoft who were looking at developing their own mobile phone platform.

The result of this collaboration was the Sendo Z100, a device which was meant to be the world’s first Windows smartphone – although bear in mind that a “smartphone” of that era wasn’t quite what we would regard as a smartphone TODAY, instead the modern smartphone is descended from the “wireless PDA”, but I digress…

..so the Z100 looked like a candy-bar phone with a larger-than-normal screen, but underneath it was running a version of Windows CE that had been adapted (not very well) for phone use. It had taken Sendo some time to get the phone ready for product but just before launch it was cancelled, in November 2002.

Bitter recriminations then took place between Sendo and Microsoft, with Microsoft claiming that Sendo was insolvent and Sendo accusing Microsoft of stealing its intellectual property and handing it to HTC (who in turn created the Orange SPV). This particular fight went on for years with Microsoft eventually making an out-of-court settlement. Needless to say, Sendo abandoned the idea of launching a Windows phone but were still keen on the smartphone idea in general, so they set about building one using the Symbian operating system instead.

Sendo X: better than a Nokia?

Launched in October 2003 – almost a year after the cancellation of the Z100 – Sendo launched the tersely-named “X”. A 2G-only smartphone, it had a 2.2” 170 x 220 pixel display and a traditional numeric keypad. Inside it ran Symbian S60 and it had support for email, web browsing plus of course you could add compatible Symbian applications as you went along.

The problem was that Sendo were competing directly against Nokia, and although the X was arguably better that Nokia’s contemporary offerings it turned out that most people would sooner stick with Nokia. Still, the Sendo X was a niche success and it encourage Sendo to come up with an improved model, the Sendo X2.

The X2 was due for launch in 2005, but Sendo’s financial woes caught up with it again and in the summer of 2005 the company folded. There was a ray of light though when Motorola acquired Sendo’s R&D, and the fruits of this deal led to Motorola’s RIZR range. Sadly Motorola ended up with problems of its own, and within a few years their attempts at making a success of Symbian faded too.

Had things worked out differently, perhaps Sendo would have been in the role that HTC found itself in during the noughties, and have become a true pioneer in shaping the future mobile industry. But it wasn’t to be. These days the Sendo X is a very rare find, but not terribly expensive.

Image credits: Sendo

Nokia Lumia 1020 (2013)

Nokia Lumia 1020. Check out those megapixels.

Introduced July 2013

Let’s say that you are one of the world’s most famous brands, and you make a smartphone which easily has the best camera that any smartphone in the world has ever had, and then you add all the modern features that all the rivals have on top of it. Sounds like a recipe for success, yes? Well, in the case of the Nokia Lumia 1020… it wasn’t.

The headline feature of the Lumia 1020 was definitely the camera. Featuring a stonking 41 megapixels combined with optical image stabilisation (OIS) and a large sensor, this smartphone’s camera completely stomped on its rivals.

This remarkable “PureView” camera had first been seen in the Nokia 808 – Nokia’s very last Symbian smartphone – a bit over a year earlier. The clever folk at Nokia had tweaked it a bit in the meantime, and crucially had added OIS to make pictures even sharper. By default, the 1020 actually took 5 megapixel cameras that were vivid and sharp by using oversampling, but you could also use a Pro Camera app that could save both a 5 megapixel picture and one up to 38 megapixels at the same time. If you wanted to edit the photo and zoom into some detail later, then the higher resolution was probably for you. The Lumia 1020 could also effectively emulate an optical zoom by providing 4X near-lossless zoom with the huge megapixel count.

The rest of the hardware was no slouch either – a 4.5” 768 x 1280 pixel display, 1.5 GHz dual-core CPU, 2GB of RAM, 32 or 64GB of internal storage, NFC, 4G support and even an FM radio plus all the things that every other smartphone had. The camera could also take 1080p HD video and there was a 1.2 megapixel selfie camera on the front too. It was a bit of a big beast and it certainly wasn’t cheap, but what was there not to like?

The catch was… this was a Windows phone. Nokia had been punting Windows devices for a year and a half, and despite being critically acclaimed it turned out that consumers weren’t really that interested. The Windows 8 OS shipped with the Lumia 1020 was elegant and complemented the hardware precisely, but it simply did have whatever it needed to have to steal customers from Android and iOS. The seamless support for Office 365 did appeal to corporate customers though, and quite a few did start to migrate from BlackBerry to Windows. But it wasn’t enough.

Nokia did start on the path to produce a successor – the Lumia 1030. But by then Microsoft were in charge and they tried to drive Windows Phone sales by pursuing the value end of the market instead. Although 2015’s Lumia 950 did revisit the PureView camera with a decent enough 20 megapixel unit, Windows Phone was largely irrelevant by that point.

Today an unlocked Lumia 1020 in good condition can cost you less than £40, where the earlier Nokia 808 will cost you several times more. Today, Android devices such as the Huawei P20 Pro come close in terms of camera specifications, but no mainstream camera phone to date has topped the Lumia 1020’s 41 megapixel camera.

Image credit: Nokia

Nokia Lumia 1020: Video

Check out some more shots of this epic cameraphone in the video we made to cover its launch five years ago.

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.

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.

Microsoft Surface RT (2012)

Microsoft Surface RT (2012)

Announced June 2012

Sometimes product lines take a while to become a success. The Microsoft Surface range of hybrid tablets is one such example. Sitting in the gap between traditional tablets and laptops, the original Surface (later renamed as the Surface RT) was a very elegant and modern looking device running a version of Microsoft's then new Windows 8 operating system (called Windows RT).

Unlike most Windows systems, the original Surface ran on an ARM processor rather than an Intel compatible one. This put the Surface more on the tablet side of the fence - the slightly later Surface Pro had an Intel CPU and was just on the laptop side of the fence.

The Surface was originally pitched against the iPad, but one key difference was the detachable keyboard that the Surface could use. Another one was the kickstand to keep it upright. Of course, this was a Windows device.. And more to the point, it was a Windows RT device which meant that it could only use applications from the Windows Store. And it turned out that there weren't many of them to choose from..

The Surface came with both front and rear cameras, and you could plug USB devices into it which is impossible in most other tablets. It was also very stylishly designed, and the clip-on keyboard was another unique selling proposition. Windows RT was theoretically more capable that iOS or Android, but in the event it never got to shine.

Despite some promising features, the original Surface was not a success… and neither was the Windows RT operating system. Sales were sluggish and Microsoft ended up writing off nearly a billion dollars worth of unsold inventory. Windows RT was just too restrictive for many, and after about six months there were no new devices from any manufacturer launched.

However, Microsoft stuck with it. One key change in later versions was the switch to an Intel architecture, a move upmarket to something more laptop-like and a full version of Windows. After five years of trying, the current range of Surface devices are something of a success at the premium end of the market.

The Surface was not Microsoft's first foray into the hardware market - it has been producing mice, keyboard and consoles for years - but it was their first product of its type. It may well have been instrumental in persuading Microsoft that they could "do" hardware which the disastrous 2014 takeover of Nokia proved otherwise.

HTC Advantage X7500 and Shift X9500 (2007)

HTC Advantage X7500

Announced March 2007

Even before the launch of the iPhone a decade ago, one company was pioneering smartphones with a vision years ahead of everyone else. That company was HTC. In March 2007, just a few months after the launch of Apple's iconic device, HTC came up with a rather different vision of what it thought the future should be.

The HTC Advantage X7500 (sold under many names including the T-Mobile Ameo) pushed the boundaries of what a smartphone could be. The 5" VGA resolution display was enormous for the time, there was a QWERTY keyboard that was detachable and a then very impressive 8GB of internal storage and an internal hard disk (yes, made of spinning metal). This was a Windows Mobile 5.0 device, and it also supported HSDPA and WiFi data, had GPS, a TV output, came with a 3 megapixel primary camera and VGA camera for video calling and had a microSD slot. Inside was a 624 MHz Intel Xscale processor with 128MB of RAM. In hardware terms it completely stomped over the iPhone, but it was two-and-a-half times the weight. It was quite an expensive device at about €850 SIM-free (€200 more than an unlocked iPhone) but it was pretty obviously a premium product.

It wasn't a huge sales success, but it is credited by some as helping to popularise big-screen smartphones. In 2008 HTC followed it up with the X7510 with more storage and Windows Mobile 6.0. Today you can pick up either model for around €50 to €70 for an unlocked version.

HTC Shift X9500

Launched the same month was the HTC Shift X9500. Sporting a 7" WVGA touchscreen, the Shift was actually an ultra-mobile PC (UMPC) with some clever tricks up it's sleeve but an eye-watering price-tag to match. The Shift could boot into either Windows Vista (which probably really, really counted against it in the long run) or an application called SnapVUE which was basically a specially-written mobile operating system. In order to accommodate these two OSes, the Shift required both an Intel x86 processor for Windows and an ARM11 CPU for SnapVUE. It came with a 40 or 60GB hard disk, a microSD slot, HSDPA and 3G data plus WiFi, a fingerprint reader and 1GB of RAM. Priced in the US at about $1500, when it finally did get to market in 2008 it was four times the price of a 7" Asus EEE PC.

It took a long time to come to market. It was not a sale success, but the 7" format ended up being a popular size for the tablets that were to come a few years later. But neither Windows Vista nor Windows Mobile 5.0 were ever really popular platforms, but eventually HTC switched its emphasis from Windows and produced the first Android smartphone. But that it another story.

Image source: HTC

Mobile World Congress 2012: the year of the flops

Half a decade after the introduction of the original iPhone, manufacturers were still trying to get a handle on how to make their products more appealing than the latest Apple product that everyone was talking about. Unfortunately, not all of these attempts were successful, and these examples from Mobile World Congress (MWC)  in February 2012 are some prime examples.

Nokia tried to upscale the coolly-received Lumia 800 Windows smartphone by stretching the 3.7" display to 4.3" with the Lumia 900.. but keeping the same 480 x 800 resolution. The result was a phone with pixels big enough to be seen from space, but for a while it was a modest success because it was also very inexpensive and actually rather nice to use, even if it had hardly any apps.
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Nokia Lumia 900

Samsung meanwhile had decided to make an Android phone with a built-in projector with the Galaxy Beam, despite two previous attempts being failures. Here's a tip.. if you think that projectors in phones are a good idea then you probably need to read up about Miracast, DLNA or UPnP. Or just stick an MHL cable on it. It didn't take a genius to work out what the writing on the wall for this particular device was.

Samsung Galaxy Beam

LG also hadn't learned from past failures, and the LG Optimus 3D Max followed on from previous attempts to make 3D phones that almost nobody wanted. The 3D technology in both the screen and camera was clever, and LG weren't the only company going down this path, but consumers really couldn't see the point and with rare exceptions this technology has been rejected by consumers.

LG Optimus 3D Max

Another idea from LG was the Optimus Vu, a 5" smartphone with a 4:3 aspect display. Most rival smartphones emulated the ratio of a domestic TV with 16:9 ratios or something similar, but the Optimus Vu was quite a bit wider and shorter than the rival Samsung Galaxy Note and was bit odd-looking as a result. The mark of it's lack of success is that the follow-up Optimus Vu II scheduled for launch in 2013 was cancelled. But big-screen phones are now the norm, and the Vu did at least help to pioneer that idea.

LG Optimus Vu

ASUS had another brilliant but futile idea - the PadFone. Correctly identifying that people would like to retain the same settings and data whether they were using a tablet or a smartphone, ASUS came up with the idea of creating a smartphone that could slot into a tablet, or even a small notebook chassis. Technically brilliant, the idea really became obsolete with ubiquitous cloud computing that could do the same thing in software. ASUS made a whole range of PadFones over the next couple of years, but could never convince the market that they were a good idea.

ASUS PadFone

Panasonic returned to the worldwide market, six years after dropping out having made some of the most awful phones imaginable. The Panasonic Eluga was a competent and waterproof Android phone that also failed to set the world on fire. Competition in the Android marketplace was becoming fierce by 2012, and there was very little to set the Eluga apart from the competition. A high-profile failure, Panasonic briefly quit the market again only to return 18 months later with a range of mostly run-of-the-mill Android phones.

Panasonic Eluga

Of course there were other devices launched at MWC in 2012... but very few made an impact. Although remains a vital event even today, companies such as Apple don't bother with it and it isn't the force it once was. Will MWC in 2017 introduce some breakthrough products? We will have to see..

Image sources: Nokia, Samsung, LG, Pansasonic, ASUS

Motorola RIZR Z8, KRZR K3, MOTO Q8 and Q9 (2007)

Announced February 2007

In 2007, Motorola's strategy seemed to be a "throw it at the wall and see what sticks" approach. To this end, we saw several very different devices being launched by Motorola ten years ago. The most notable were a range of handsets falling under the Motorola RIZR, KRZR and MOTO Q names.

Technically perhaps the most interesting was the Motorola RIZR Z8 (sometimes called the MOTO Z8). A curved slider phone running the Symbian operating system with the UIQ interface, the Z8 was one of those Symbian phones that tried to out-do Nokia on its own turf. It was an unusual device even within Motorola's own line-up, but in fact much of the development of this had come from ex-Sendo staffers from the UK who had been absorbed into Motorola back in 2005. In the end, the Z8 probably didn't get the market push that it deserved but it was an interesting and quirky design in its own right.

Rather more predictable was the Motorola KRZR K3 feature phone. Motorola had been pushing the RAZR concept since 2004. Although it had enjoyed success, by 2007 customers were looking for something else. But this didn't stop Motorola trying again.. and the KRZR K3 was in essence a 3G version of the K1 launched in 2006. Although the K1 was probably the ultimate flip phone in terms of hardware design, both these KRZR phones belongs to a previous generation of devices and they could not follow the hugged success of the original RAZR V3.

Motorola RIZR Z8 and KRZR K3

As well as Symbian, Motorola was a leading provider of Windows devices. The Motorola MOTO Q8 and Q9 (also called the Q 9h) were BlackBerry-style devices with a physical QWERTY keyboard, lacking a touchscreen. One was a 3.5G device, the other was limited to EDGE. These devices continued the tradition of the modestly success MOTO Q series of smartphones, but ultimately physical keyboards were on the way out.

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Motorola MOTO Q8 and Q9

Despite these efforts, Motorola started to go into sharp decline, and in a few years the iPhone and Android devices led to a collapse in sales that nearly took out the company. Motorola wasn't the first company that misjudged the future and it certainly wasn't the last either.

Image credits: Motorola