Thursday, 10 October 2013

The ten most influential 3G and GSM phones.. ever?

2013 is Mobile Gazette's tenth anniversary, so it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look back at what we think are the ten most influential devices of the past decade (plus a bit more). Some are obvious, but we hope that a few of our choices will surprise you!

1. Apple iPhone 3G (2008)

An obvious choice perhaps, but why would we choose the Apple iPhone 3G over the original 2007 iPhone? The answer is that the original iPhone was pretty dire - it didn't have 3G or GPS and you couldn't download third-party applications, which are all essentials in a modern smartphone, and it was often very slow as well. The 3G also started to sell in really significant numbers, quickly eclipsing the first-generation device and it really started to eat into the market share of its competitors.
 
Of course, the 2009 iPhone 3GS is even better, but the 3G was the first time the iPhone didn't have to come up with a string of excuses as to why vital features were missing.
 
In terms of influence.. well, it should be obvious. Although touchscreen smartphones existed long before the iPhone came out, Apple's offering popularised a certain look-and-feel of both the hardware and software which led to many copycats.. and many legal disputes with rivals. In terms of mobile phone history there is a very clean "before iPhone" and "after iPhone" period when you look at the products on the market.

Motorola RAZR V3 2. Motorola RAZR V3 (2004)

The Motorola RAZR V3 may be nearly a decade old, but it was one of the first handsets to sell purely on design rather than features. Following on what seemed to be the incredibly tiny Motorola StarTAC, the RAZR V3 was incredibly thin and carefully engineered from aluminium. And when it was launched it was very, very expensive.
 
The RAZR demonstrated that consumers wanted something more that just a brick to make phone calls on, and the handset was an enormous success. However, beneath the pretty exterior was a pretty dreadful handset which put a lot of consumers off.
In the end, the RAZR nearly killed Motorola as the firm kept trying to remix the same tired old formula instead of innovating, as a result Motorola eventually lost its independence and is now a subsidiary of Google.

Nokia N95 3. Nokia N95 (2007)

The Nokia N95 and it's successor, the N95 8GB competed directly against early iPhones, but came with 3.5G data, GPS and a first-rate camera plus access to a large library of third-party applications.. all the things that the original iPhone lacked.
 
The relatively large QVGA display wasn't a touchscreen, but it was a lot better than most devices on the market. This combination of features created a new class of mobile phone that all other manufacturers had to beat, and even six years on these old Nokias are still quite useful.
 
The competitive advantage of the N95 and it successors was quickly eroded when Apple added many of the missing features to their range of smartphones, and it took Nokia until 2009 to come out with a touchscreen device to compete, with the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic.

Nokia 6310i 4. Nokia 6310i (2002)

Launched in 2002, the Nokia 6310i became the quintessential business phone. It was easy to use, had a long battery life, Bluetooth, a really loud ringtone and was robust enough to handle to odd knock and bump.
 
You could even look at WAP pages on it (which nobody did) and play Snake (which probably everybody did). And one reason why it remained popular for years and years was that many business users had car kits designed just for this phone.
 
The 6310i understood its market completely. It didn't have a colour screen, because it wouldn't add anything of real value. It didn't have a camera because frankly the cameras of the day were useless, and in some businesses and organisations cameras are not permitted on site. It was a perfectly tailored device for its target market, and Nokia could never quite repeat the trick with any of its successors.

Ericsson R380e 5. Ericsson R380 (1999)

One of the last handsets to come out under the "Ericsson" brand, the Ericsson R380 was a touchscreen Symbian smartphone that came out eight years before Apple really popularised the concept..
 
The R380 was a monochrome device with a flip down keypad, like the Sony Ericsson P800 and P900. Although it was restricted in what it could do (you couldn't install apps, for example) it demonstrated what was possible, and for a long time Sony Ericsson were the clear leaders in smartphone technology and helped to set the benchmark for what a smartphone should do.
 
Back in the 20th century, the R380 looked like a James Bond gadget.. indeed, a mock-up of a closely related phone (called the JB988) appeared in the movie Tomorrow Never Dies.

HTC Wallaby 6. HTC Wallaby (2002)

Back at the turn of the century, standalone PDAs were still popular with the two main platforms being Palm's PalmOS and Microsoft Windows CE. Windows CE was very popular, but unlike smartphones these devices couldn't make phone calls or access the internet on the move.
 
Combining a PDA with a phone seems to us to be obvious, but by 2002 there were very few examples. The HTC Wallaby was one of the earliest recognisable examples of what we would regard as a modern touchscreen smartphone, and rapid improvements came afterwards which eventually established HTC as one of the key players in the smartphone market.
 
The Wallaby was never sold under its own name, instead being marketed at the O2 XDA, T-Mobile MDA, Siemens SX56 and Qtek 1100 plus many other names. And although both Windows and HTC have had their ups-and-downs since then, the Wallaby and the handsets that came afterwards helped to shape the concept of the modern smartphone.

Samsung Galaxy S II 7. Samsung Galaxy S II (2011)

By the time the Samsung Galaxy S II came to market, Android smartphones had already been around for several years, but the S II represented a significant upgrade to screen size and processing power and put some clear blue water between Samsung and Apple.. at least in technical terms.
 
But despite the Galaxy S II having all the design charm of a cheap but reliable microwave oven, Apple took objection to this rather dull slab of a smartphone and tried to block it in the courts.
 
While the Samsung Galaxy S II is certainly no design icon (indeed, has there ever been an iconic Samsung phone?) it certainly represented an escalation in the specifications arms race between major manufacturers.

BlackBerry 7290 8. BlackBerry 7230 / 7290 (2003 / 2004)

It's hard to say exactly what device is the definitive BlackBerry, but we'd suggest that the BlackBerry 7230 is probably one of the best candidates. The 7230 was tightly focussed on messaging with an efficient compact keyboard, an unusual but very low power transflective display, excellent integration with corporate mail systems, some decent PIM tools with a fairly decent library of downloadable applications.. and even some games.
 
The BlackBerry 7290 added Bluetooth, but other features took a long time to come to the BlackBerry platform, especially modern essentials such as 3G, WiFi, GPS and even a camera. But the 7230 helped to popularise messaging on the move, even if consumers eventually defected to touchscreen rather than QWERTY devices.

Motorola FONE F3 9. Motorola FONE F3 (2007)

The elegant but very basic Motorola FONE F3 may not be a top-of-the-range smartphone, but it has a significant claim to fame as being the first consumer device to feature an electronic ink display.
 
Off the top of our heads we can list exactly two phones with an e-Ink display, the FONE and the as-yet-unreleased YotaPhone, although Samsung did experiment with an e-Ink keyboard.  Some manufacturers are experimenting with e-Ink displays in smartphone and tablet cases, but the biggest growth area has been electronic book readers such as the Amazon Kindle range, where the simple but low-power display is exactly what is needed.
 
To a large extent, the rather crude display in the FONE demonstrated that it was certainly possible to include this type of screen in a low-cost consumer device, and in this respect it was a pioneering handset.

T-Mobile G1 10. T-Mobile G1 / HTC Dream (2008)

The T-Mobile G1 (also sold as the HTC Dream) was the first rather clunky attempt at an Android smartphone. Where the contemporary Apple iPhone 3G was an elegant device, the G1 was rather utilitarian and featured a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and a little trackball, two features that are essentially extinct today.
 
Although modern Android phones are quite different from the G1, the market had been long awaiting a true "iPhone killer" handset, and the G1 heralded what was to become the best-selling class of smartphone in the world.
 
But of course, the G1 and all the Android phones that came after it did not actually kill off the iPhone at all. But they did kill off Windows Mobile and then Nokia's Symbian platform.
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Thursday, 22 August 2013

Retro: 2006

2006 was the year of the Winter Olympics in Turin, the FIFA World Cup in Germany, the start of the Iran nuclear crisis, North Korea's first nuclear test, a series of bomb attacks on trains in Mumbai, the Israel-Hezbollah War and in this year Montengro declared independence. Twitter was launched in 2006 and the top grossing film in the US was Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest with Casino Royale being the top grossing film in the UK. The best selling album in the US was the High School Musical album, in the UK it was Snow Patrol's "Eyes Open".

Nokia

Handset manufacturers were still concentrating on traditional designs, and none more so than Nokia. The Nokia 6300 is a well-loved, elegant and straightforward midrange phone that found many fans. At the very top of Nokia's line-up was the Nokia N95 which featured a relatively big display, 3.5G data, WiFi, GPS and a 5 megapixel camera, easily beating everything else on the market. Down at the bottom of Nokia's range, the simple but appealing Nokia 1110i carried on the legacy of the best-selling Nokia 1100 series.
Nokia continued to expand its N-Series range of premium handsets and E-Series range of business phones. The Nokia N93 is a rare example of a camera phone with an optical zoom, but rather unsurprisingly it was quite bulky. The Nokia N73 followed on the from the popular N70 with a substantially improved design. Nokia attempted to follow on from the classic 6310i business phone with the Nokia E50, but it was not an attractive handset and many customers went for the 6300 instead.


Nokia extended their L'Amour fashion phone range with the 3G Nokia 7390 clamshell phone and the Nokia 7373 rotator which was a small upgrade to 2005's 7370. The expensive but desirable 8800 slider was upgraded with the Nokia 8800 Sirocco Edition.

Nokia was never really big on clamshell phones, but the Nokia 6131 was one of the most popular they made. The ruggedised Nokia 5500 was designed for outdoors use and was water and bump resistant. The Nokia 5300 was a popular and attractive slider phone with dedicated music keys.

HTC

2006 was the first year when HTC started selling handsets under its own name rather than those of carriers and other partners. The most significant release from HTC was the HTC TyTN, a high-end Windows device that proved that the Nokia N95 had some real competition. The HTC S620 was an attempt to bring Windows to a BlackBerry-style messaging phone, and the HTC P3300 was a slider phone with integrated GPS.
HTC also tried to bring Windows to some conventional handsets, and although the HTC MTeoR and HTC  STRTrk are technically smartphones, they are not a format that we would recognise today. And standing out as one of the ugliest phones ever, the HTC Monet featured a built-in digital DAB TV.. unsurprisingly it was a massive failure on several different levels.

Motorola

Motorola was becoming stuck in a rut with remixes of the RAZR, the most elegant of which was the Motorola KRZR K1. Showing some redundancy of effort, the Motorola RAZR V3xx and Motorola RAZR MAXX were both early 3.5G phones with a very similar feature set.

The first consumer device to feature an electronic ink display, the Motorola FONE F3 is an extremely basic but rather elegant device. In an attempt to give the moribund ROKR range a boost, the Motorola ROKR E6 added a touchscreen and a decent media player, but never made the breakthrough it needed.

 

Sony Ericsson

A bumper year for Sony Ericsson handsets, to the extent that "Walkman" branded phones were beginning to get out of hand. Customers could choose from the Sony Ericsson W700 or Sony Ericsson W810 monoblocks or the Sony Ericsson W850 3G slider among others. The Sony Ericsson W950 was a "Walkman" smartphone running Symbian, and was based on the Sony Ericsson M600 smartphone, a device that didn't quite manage to follow up the success of earlier Sony Ericsson Symbian handsets.
Rather more conventional were the lightweight Sony Ericsson K610 3G phone, Sony Ericsson K800 "Cybershot" phone, Sony Ericsson Z530 clamshell and glossy Sony Ericsson Z610 3G clamshell.

Samsung

Samsung's current strategy of having a mobile phone in every conceivable niche was well underway in 2006. The "Samsung Ultra" range of ultra-thin handsets included the Samsung D830 clamshell phone and Samsung D900 slider.
A couple of "girlie" clamshells, the Samsung E500 and Samsung E570 were a bit over-the-top when it came to design, but were still quite attractive to look at.
Some formats that never quite caught on included the two-sided Samsung F300 music phone, the Samsung i310 smartphone with an internal hard disk, the Samsung P310 "calculator phone" and the Samsung X830 "lipstick phone".

LG

One of LG's design icons is the LG KG800 Chocolate, so called because it looks a bit like a chocolate bar. Where the Chocolate was elegant, the LG KG920 must be another one of the ugliest handsets ever. LG was still doing well with 3G clamshells, and the attractive LG U890 borrowed a few design cues from Motorola's RAZR.

BlackBerry

BlackBerry was pushing hard to bring full push-email to customers who wanted a traditional style phone, first with the BlackBerry 7130 and then with the familiar BlackBerry Pearl 8100 which was something of a breakthrough device, however in the long term it seems that customers did prefer to have a QWERTY keyboard instead.

BenQ / BenQ Siemens

BenQ took over Siemens' handset business in 2005, and despite a promising start it ended up as a failure with the closure of the European arm in 2006 and the termination of the brand completely the following year. Many handsets never made it to market, but of those that did the BenQ Siemens E61 music phone was one of the most popular, the BenQ Siemens EF61 was one of the most elegant, and the BenQ Siemens AL26 "Hello Kitty" phone was definitely the cutest. Also launching this year, a full two years after it was originally announced was the BenQ P50 smartphone.

Palm

Palm was still a challenger in the market, and the Palm Treo 680 combined the traditional PalmOS platform in a neat little hardware package that looked nicer than anything BlackBerry had to offer. The Palm Treo 750 took a similar design and added 3G, but also replaced PalmOS with the then-popular Windows Mobile 5.2.

Other manufacturers

The Siemens name found itself applied to another smartphone with the Fujitsu Siemens Pocket Loox, a powerful device with a very silly name. T-Mobile fleshed out its range of messaging feature phones with the T-Mobile Sidekick 3. Voice-over-IP was beginning to find its way into handsets with the Pirelli Discus Dualphone and Tovo T450G, both versions of the same handset.
In 2006, Vodafone sold its Japanese arm which was effectively the end of Vodafone's interesting range of Japanese 3G phones. One elegant device that never made it to Europe was the Sharp 904 with a swiveling VGA resolution display, but the rather less exciting Sharp GX40 did make it into some markets instead.

In context

2006 featured many names that no longer exist and many handset designs such as sliders and clamshells that have largely been consigned to history. But some of the ideas were definitely ahead of their time, and perhaps the world would be a little more interesting if some of those esoteric concepts had been successful.
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