Very rare Nokia 7700 for sale on eBay for £1700

Last month a non-working example of the incredibly rare Nokia 7700 appeared on eBay in the UK and sold for £1020.

Only a tiny handful of these have ever come to market, but now there is another one that appears to be in immaculate condition and is fully working (although bear in mind that this is a prototype) with a starting bid of £1700.

Strictly one for collectors rather than somebody looking for a smartphone they can use every day, the Nokia 7700 is a highly unusual and rather beautiful device to look at. The product was cancelled before launch and only a small number of technology samplers were produced.

We'll be keeping an eye on this particular auction to see how it goes. But if you have one of these lying in a cupboard somewhere.. it is probably time to sell it!

UPDATE
This Nokia 7700 didn't seem to sell at this price, but another Nokia 7700 in working order sold for $1,140.06 (approximately £720). This particular model was located in Finland, so perhaps many collectors missed out on it. There does seem to have been quite a few of these coming up for sale recently, which is unusual.

Nokia 770 Internet Tablet (2005)

Announced May 2005

If you mention the word "Tablet" today then most people will immediately think of the Apple iPad or perhaps one of Samsung's many Android tablets. But ten years ago this month, it was Nokia that was pioneering in the early tablet market. Initially announced in May 2005 (but only shipping in November) the Nokia 770 caused quite a stir when it was revealed to the public.

The Nokia 770 broke with tradition in many ways. Firstly, at a time that Nokia's smartphones were all running Symbian, the 770 ran a version of Linux called Maemo. The 4.1" 800 x 480 pixel display may seem small by today's standards, but it was much bigger and better than any smartphone on the market. But perhaps the most significant thing was that it wasn't a phone, it couldn't make calls and to access the Internet you either needed to use WiFi or connect to another phone using Bluetooth.

Pairing a tablet with a Bluetooth phone was a slightly fiddly arrangement, but the 770 would work with pretty much any Bluetooth device that had a data connection. It also meant that you weren't lumbered with carrying around the tablet when you just wanted to carry a much more compact phone, and because the tablet and phone both had their own batteries then it meant that web surfing wouldn't drain your phone.

One striking thing about the Nokia 770 was the physical design, with a very retro-futuristic look, and a brushed metal reversible hard shell. Although the 770 was originally designed to be used with the integrated stylus, a software update made it easier to use with just a finger instead.

Maemo was a much more sophisticated operating system than Symbian, and it soon established a dedicated group of developers who starting porting apps from other Linux-based platforms. Out-of-the-box the Nokia 770 had a web browser, RSS reader, email client, some games and PIM functionality, but it wasn't too difficult for someone with a bit of technical knowledge to add more. 2006 saw a major software update which made the 770 a lot nicer to use.

Despite all the promise of a little Linux-based computer the hardware platform was very limited with a tiny 64MB of memory and 128MB of onboard flash storage plus an RS-MMC slot. The ARM-based processor was clocked at 252MHz, which wasn't very fast even then. Many of these problems were fixed with the N800 launched in 2007 and a number of other devices following.

Ultimately, Nokia could never quite successfully transition these niche devices into success in the smartphone market. The Maemo-based Nokia N900 was the first and last Maemo-based smartphone launched in 2009, and a catastrophic decision to try to merge Maemo with Intel's Moblin OS stalled the development of the product line with disastrous effects.

It's an interesting and inexpensive device for collectors, and although they are quite rare they tend to sell for less than €50.. although remember that functionality is strictly limited compared to a tablet of today!

Nokia 5140i (2005)

Announced April 2005

Designed to be more rugged than a standard mobile phone, the Nokia 5140i was resistant to bumps, water and dust ingress and followed on from the Nokia 5140 and Nokia 5100 handsets.

Although most of the functions were that of a very simple Nokia phone, the 5140i also sported a flashlight and a digital compass and thermometer, both of questionable reliability. It had an FM radio, but no music player and only a basic 0.3 megapixel camera.

But one thing that put the 5140i ahead of pretty much every phone was its support for NFC and RFID tags through an optional shell. Back then the actual uses of NFC were unclear, and to be honest the situation hasn't changed that much today. To a large extent NFC has always been a solution looking for a problem.

The durability and simplicity of the 5140i made it rather popular, and if you collect such things then they are freely available today with prices ranging between about €35 to €70 depending on condition. There are far more durable handsets on the market however, but the 5140i is still a practical classic for people who just want a phone.

References:
GSMArena: Nokia 5140i Review
Microsoft: Nokia 5140i NFC Shell Guide [pdf]

Futureretro: LG Watch Urbane

LG Watch Urbane

Smartwatches are a new-old thing. About 6 years ago we saw a rush of "watch phones" such as the LG GD910 which included a SIM card and some basic feature phone functionality, but these never took off (despite which, they are very collectable devices today). The whole concept seemed to be quickly forgotten.

But the concept of wearables came back in 2014 with smartwatches such as the LG G Watch and many other devices, which generated a lot of media buzz but it didn't really translate into sales. But early-generation products are sometimes a bit rough around the edges, and the new LG Watch Urbane seeks to address some of these issues.

It's certainly an elegant device, as was last year's LG G Watch R, but this has the latest version of the Android Wear OS and is the first LG smartwatch to support WiFi, meaning that it won't have to be slaved to a phone all the time.

So it this a Futureretro device? Will people look back at the LG Watch Urbane in (say) 2020 and say "that was a design classic"? Perhaps as with the watch phones from half a decade ago, this is the point at which smartwatches with either sink or swim. We give it a Futureretro score of 5/10.

The LG Watch Urbane might either mark the point at which the smartwatch market became really mature, or it might mark the point at which consumer indifference kills off the concept. Remember phones with 3D screens? They were launched with great hype, but they didn't sell. Smartwatches may still go the way of 3D phones.

A quick tour round the tech specs reveals a 1.3" 320 x 320 pixel plastic OLED display, a 1.2 GHz CPU, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of storate, a bunch of sensors including a compass, barometer and heart-rate sensor plus the whole package is dust and water resistant to IP67 standards.

The Watch Urbane is set to roll out to Korea this week, with major markets following this month, with the device available through the Google Play store at a price of around €400 to €420.

BlackBerry Pearl 3G 9100 / 9105 (2010)

BlackBerry Pearl 9105 (left) and 9100 (right)

Announced April 2010

Traditional BlackBerry devices have been quite wide affairs with a full-QWERTY keyboard underneath, but for several years BlackBerry also produced the "Pearl" range which looked a lot more like a standard mobile phone.

The BlackBerry Pearl 3G 9100 and 9105 were the final generation of Pearl devices, and were the first to support 3G which had been conspicuously missing from previous models. The 2.3" 360 x 400 pixel display wasn't big even by 2010's standards, but it was certainly good enough for messaging which is where the Pearl 3G excelled.

The difference between the versions was the keyboard - the 9100 had a sort of hybrid QWERTY/numeric keyboard which previous versions of the Pearl also had, the 9105 had a traditional mobile phone number pad.

One other strong feature with BlackBerry devices of this era was the long battery life, which the 9100 and 9105 also had, plus the Pearl weighed just 93 grams and was very easy to carry around.

The problem was that beyond these good features, the BlackBerry devices of this generation could be a pretty miserable experience. Web browsing was terrible and although there were many applications available, a lot of them were of very poor quality. And no matter how much polish BlackBerry tried to apply to the aging software platform, it was fundamentally clunky and out-of-date.

"Old school" BlackBerry devices such as this still have fans, however, and the full-QWERTY Curve smartphones are still in demand. Ultimately, the Pearl was the wrong sort of product for a market that was switching to full-touch devices and it reflected a general problem with BlackBerry's lack of vision at the time.

Microsoft KIN (2010)

Announced April 2010

Several years before Microsoft acquired Nokia's handset business and started branding them as their own, there were a couple of other Microsoft devices that the company probably hopes that people will forget.
 

The Microsoft KIN range is quite possibly the biggest handset disaster ever. A massively high-profile and very expensive launch was followed by miniscule sales and the entire product line was canned just a few weeks later. And then, just be on the safe side, Microsoft closed down the entire division that was responsible as well.
 

Launched in an era when smartphones were becoming the standard thing to have in your pocket, the KIN range were a pair of feature phones that you couldn't download apps onto. Odd-looking devices, the KIN One had a tiny touchscreen and even the bigger KIN Two was very limited compared to most of the competition.
 

Worse still, the software was slow and buggy. So slow in fact that you couldn't really do anything practical with it. Return rates were huge. And these sort of problems were not fixable, because essentially the hardware was not up to the job.
 

Once Microsoft had decided to kill off the product line, they also killed off the servers that supplied the KINs with cloud services. This crippled what little functionality the KIN range had, and made it even harder to shift the large inventory of unsold stock. The GSM version of the KIN was never launched, leaving only CDMA handsets made for Verizon in the US.
 

But there is more to this disaster than just the failure of the KIN product range. Some years previously, Microsoft had bought a firm called Danger who had developed the highly successful T-Mobile Sidekick range. Microsoft drained resources from Danger to work on the KIN, to the extent that they had a massive cloud outage that led to many users losing all their data, and this effectively killed off the Sidekick range of devices too.
 

It was the wrong product to launch up against the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S or Apple iPhone 3GS, it was badly implemented and overall it was just a huge distraction from the important work of creating Windows Phone 7.

Nokia 8800 (2005)

Nokia 8800

Announced April 2005

The Nokia 8000 series was the Finnish giant's range of "perfect" phones, including the elegant Nokia 8850, the tiny Nokia 8310 and the expensive Nokia 8910 and 8910i. In April 2005 Nokia announced the Nokia 8800, an exquisitely-designed but fundamentally flawed device which is still a desirable handset for collectors today.

The 8800 favoured elegant physical design over technical features. A fairly minimalist phone, the stainless steel cover slid down to reveal both the keypad on the front and the camera on the back. Nokia spent a lot of time engineering the sliding mechanism and case, but perhaps they should have spent rather more time on the other features of the phone.

Costing around €750 to €800 at launch, the Nokia 8800 was expensive, but underneath it was a pretty basic Series 40 feature phone. The 208 x 208 pixel display was similar to the Nokia 6230i but had an added scratch-resistant coating. Internal memory was 64MB and the Nokia 8800 was touted as being a music player.. but you couldn't expand the memory which meant that music space was limited. There was an FM radio to liven things up though.

The camera on the back was just 0.5 megapixels at a time when a midrange phone would have 1.3 megapixels or better. There was no 3G support, which was perhaps not important, but many people struggled with battery life, which is certainly important in a phone like this. The keypad design was also compromised according to one review.

Nokia were certainly capable of producing handsets that were technically better than this, for example with the Nokia N-Series launched a few weeks later, and indeed there were two later versions of the 8800 which improved things a lot.

"New old stock" of the original 8800 still appears to be available, in the price range of about €200 to €250. Buyers are urged to be cautious as there were also a number of fakes manufactured, so it is possible some of those are still about.

Perhaps one thing that the 8800 does is highlight Nokia's shortcomings in that era. They could do beautiful design, advanced features such as 3G and WiFi support, multi-megapixel cameras and touchscreen devices. But for some reason they couldn't put it all together in a single package, something that Apple did rather better just two years later when they launched the iPhone.