Traditionally, September marks the end of the summer vacations
and the start of announcements for products that will be in the
shops for Christmas. And September 2004 and 2009 certainly brought
some interesting-looking devices to the public view.
September 2004
Nokia announced several devices this month, but the most remarkable
were a trio of fashion phones. We hated the
Nokia
7260 with a passion when it came out because it was a very poor
handset underneath its very bold design, but these days it looks
much better than the bland black slabs we get. The
Nokia
7270 clamshell phone was the middle phone in the range, a rare
foray into clamshell phones for Nokia and a nice looking device
too. But the attention grabbing one was always the
Nokia
7280 "lipstick" phone. With no keyboard and a tiny
screen, the 7280 wasn't the easiest thing in the world to use..
but it looked fantastic and to a modern audience it is almost inconceivable
that the thing is actually a phone at all.
A somewhat overlooked entry into Nokia's range of Communicator
smartphones, the
Nokia
9300 distilled the essence of the much bigger 9500 into a compact
and rather elegant package. The lack of high-speed data held it
back though, and it took more than a year for a WiFi version to
come out which was much more popular.
In our view the
Nokia
6670 is one of the ugliest Nokia handsets ever made. Based on
the radical, interesting but not terribly usable Nokia 7610, the
6670 attempted to sober up the design by inserting a more conventional
keypad where the 7610 had one with swooping lines. The result is
a device that doesn't work in terms of ergonomics, or in terms of
styling.
Japanese firm Sharp were an important partner for Vodafone who
were pushing hard into the 3G marketplace. Headlining a number of
3G handsets to be announced this month was the
Sharp
902, which was a very Japanese-style swivelling smartphone with
a high-quality QVGA display, 2 megapixel camera with optical zoom,
expandable memory and of course 3G support. The 902 was significantly
more advanced in many respects than anything else on the market.
However the 902's modest sales were overshadowed by the cheaper
and very much non-3G
Sharp
GX25, a lightweight and stylish clamshell featuring Sharp's
ultra-sharp display which sold very well to Vodafone customers on
a budget.
Sony Ericsson also leveraged some of its Japanese know-how to
come up with the
Sony
Ericsson V800, also exclusive to the Vodafone network. It was
a generation behind the Sharp 902 in terms of features, but in the
end Sony survived in the European mobile marketplace where Sharp
did not.
HTC wouldn't start selling phones under its own name until 2006,
but in September 2004 it was busy making devices for other companies.
The
HTC Magician was sold as the
T-Mobile
MDA Compact, the
HTC Blue Angel became the
O2
XDA IIs, and two different versions of the
HTC Typhoon
were sold as the
T-Mobile
SDA and SDA Music.
Marketed at young children, the
Siemens
CX70 Emoty was a rather cute device with animated characters,
emoticons and special sensors on the outside. Like a lot of other
Siemens products from the time, it was interesting to look at..
but not really much of a success.
September 2009
The
Motorola
CLIQ (or
Motorola DEXT, depending on market) was Motorola's
first Android phone, and although it was a welcome change of direction
it wasn't quite the breakthrough device that Motorola needed.
These days all "Xperia" devices are Android smartphones,
but the
Sony
Ericsson Xperia X2 (and its predecessor the X1) were both Windows
devices instead, although Sony Ericsson's experiment with Windows
turned out to be a brief one. The Xperia name was also stretched
to the strange but rather wonderful
Sony
Ericsson Xperia Pureness fashion phone, which had a transparent
monochrome display and a concierge service. It's an esoteric and
very rare device, but at the time of writing brand new ones are
still available at the cost of up to €550 or so.
LG were also in on the fashion phone act with another "Chocolate"
phone, this time the
LG
Chocolate BL20, but it never reached the successes of the original
KG800. More successful was the fun
LG
GD510 Pop, a little touchscreen feature phone that sold quite
well.
Samsung also had several touchscreen feature phones, and the
Samsung Corby S3650 was a very popular device indeed. Less popular
but remarkably odd looking was the
Samsung B3310 messaging phone.
Samsung also made the
Vodafone 360 H1, an attempt by Vodafone to
build a platform based on their own content and smartphones running
the Linux-based LiMo operating system. The H1 was a failure, but
LiMo eventually became Tizen and ended up on Samsung's smartwatches
five years later.
Nokia tweaked the original rather buggy N97 to come up with the
significantly better
Nokia N97 Mini Symbian smartphone. The
Nokia
X6 was another attractive Symbian touchscreen device, launched alongside
with the pretty but basic
Nokia X3 feature phone. One weird handset
launched this month was the
Nokia 7705 Twist which had a hole in
it.. that idea didn't catch on.
And this month in 2009, Palm attempted to follow-up their moderately
successful Pre WebOS smartphone with the
Palm Pixi, which was cheaper
and had a more conventional layout. But while the Pixi was decent
enough, it couldn't compete with the iPhone and the new wave of
Android handsets that were coming to market in late 2009.
So
why did the N900 not become the breakout device that Nokia needed?
One problem was the way that it was launched - Nokia hinted that
there would be even better models around the corner which created
an 
