Nokia X7: the beginning of the end (2011)

Announced April 2011

For years and year the Symbian operating system had been a cash cow for Nokia. Even five years ago with the iPhone and Android smartphones being firmly established in the market, Symbian was still outselling any other mobile OS at the end of 2010.

Symbian had a loyal fan base, it was an established platform with a wealth of applications and Nokia had a wide variety of high-quality devices to run it on. But the roots of Symbian lay in the 1990s and although it was well-suited to relatively simple smartphones, more powerful hardware meant that the much more powerful iOS and Android platforms could simply do more.

Nokia wasn't sitting around doing nothing though, and they had been slowly developing the Linux-based Maemo operating system which was fundamentally very similar to iOS and Android and certainly had the potential to be every bit as good. But Nokia hadn't made a Maemo phone since 2009 and development along that path had stalled with a disastrous attempt at merging the platform with Intel's Moblin to create MeeGo. By 2011 MeeGo was looking like a dead duck.

With no high-end devices in the pipeline the strategic situation was looking grim, but sales were still pretty buoyant. But then in one probably the most controversial decision in Nokia's history, CEO Stephen Elop announced that Nokia were to phase out Symbian, discontinue MeeGo and move all smartphones to the Windows platform.

The idea was that Symbian would be phased out gradually over a number of years, but customers had different ideas and sales of Symbian devices started to collapse. Worse still, Nokia didn't actually have any Windows phones and it wouldn't until the end of 2011. It was the beginning of the end for Nokia, who as of 2016 are no longer in the mobile phone business.

Launched in the path of this oncoming storm was the Nokia X7 (strictly called the X7-00). It was an unusual device with tapered-off edges, a large 4.0" 360 x 480 pixel display, 8 megapixel camera plus all the usual smartphone features that you'd expect and even the operating system had been spruced up. Although the pricing was broadly similar to a midrange Android of the time, the specifications were struggling to keep up. The fact that it was one of the best Symbian devices ever could did not seem to matter to consumers who suddenly lost interest in the dead-end product line. Symbian was essentially dead a year later.
Today, prices for the Nokia X7 are pretty high with decent unlocked models coming in at about €100 or so which is actually more than a contemporary iPhone 4. It seems that this obsolete device still has a few fans after all.

Nokia N93 (2006)

Announced April 2006

Nokia's N-Series range of high-end smartphones had been making waves for a year by the spring of 2006, with several interesting devices coming to market. April 2006 saw the launch of the unusual N93 clamshell phone, launched alongside the forgettable N72 and popular N73.

The main selling point of the N93 was the camera module, installed in the hinge (as found on the N92 and N90 phones). This 3.2 megapixel unit had Carl Zeiss optics, could capture VGA resolution video at 30 frames per second and most unusually for a phone it has a 3X optical zoom. Presumably all of this made the N93's camera quite bulky, hence it was hidden in the hinge with a twistable screen to make it usable.
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The Nokia N93 was a Symbian device, making it a smartphone.. although the 2.4" 240 x 320 pixel display wasn't a touchscreen. It supported both 3G and WiFi connectivity, could output directly to a TV, came with expandable memory, Bluetooth, a multimedia player and even had an FM radio.

It was a well-specified but chunky device, coming in at 180 grams and over an inch (28mm) thick when closed. It was expensive too, priced at €550 before tax and subsidy. Despite the apparent desirability of the N93, it was only a moderate sales success. Eight months later a slimmed down version was produced, the N93i.. but THAT device was announced just one day before the original iPhone which ended up getting all the attention.

Because it is such an unusual device, both the N93 and N93i tend to be relatively expensive these days, with prices ranging between €50 to over €600 depending on condition. A good unlocked example of either model can cost around €200.

IBM 3800 Laser Printer (1976)

IBM 3800 Printing Subsystem

Announced April 1976

Announced forty years ago this month, the IBM 3800 was the world's first commercially available laser printer. In one form or another the 3800 was in production for a decade-and-a-half and revolutionised high-volume computerised printing.

Beating rivals Xerox to market by a year, the IBM 3800 was a massive device that could typically print about 167 pages per minute. Today, even a high-end device such as the Ricoh Pro 1357 would struggle to keep up. Crucially though, the IBM 3800 used continuous stationery rather than cut-sheet paper which must have helped with the throughput. The print resolution was about 160 dpi.

It wasn't cheap - even the 1987 model cost a staggering $175,000, but then you would hook it up to an IBM mainframe which would have cost you a couple of million dollars. Strictly an enterprise computing component, the 3800 must have been a welcome relief from the deafening noise of banks of impact printers.

It wasn't until the mid 1980s that laser printing because remotely affordable on the desktop, with the breakthrough product being the original HP LaserJet. IBM span off the printing business as Lexmark in 1991, which still exists today.

Today you can pick up a new small laser printer for less than €50, with typical very high volume systems coming in at €35,000 or more.

Image credit: IBM Archives

MOS Technologies KIM-1 (1976)

Launched April 1976

These days, single-board computers such as the Raspberry Pi and Arduino are all the rage. These small and inexpensive devices are ideal for hobbyist and industrial application, but of course this is not a new idea. Forty years ago one of the most important single-board computers was launched: the MOS Technologies KIM-1.

MOS Technologies had produced low-cost 6502 processor the previous year, but (as today) the problem was getting it into the hands of people who could actually DO something with it. So, the KIM-1 was produced as a basic bare-boned system that people could adapt, at the relatively affordable price of $295 (equivalent to around $1050 today).

It was a primitive device. The 8-bit 6502 CPU came with 1K of RAM, a small LED display, and a hexadecimal keypad. It had a couple of expansion ports and pair of serial interfaces, which meant that it could be paired with a teletype for output or a cassette recorder. Later independently-produced expansion modules included a video board.
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The design was adapted and expanded by other manufacturers too, and the KIM-1 and its derivatives became a significant success and helped to establish the 6502 as one of the key processors of the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the end, MOS Technologies ended up being bought up by Commodore, and the ideas behind the KIM-1 were expanded and eventually developed into the Commodore PET.

In Europe, the KIM-1 is a very rare device indeed. They are occasionally available in the US with prices ranging between $300 to $1000, with a typical price of around $700. Of course, in order to get it the best out of it you would need a whole pile of obsolete equipment to go with it, or alternatively you can bamboozle yourself with this Javascript KIM-1 emulator.

Image credits [1] [2]

Palm Pilot 1000 and 5000 (1996)

Introduced March 1996

Before “always connected” smartphones and tablets, there were PDAs. And for a long time the name synonymous with PDAs was “Palm Pilot”. Twenty years ago this month, the first Palm Pilot devices were launched, the Pilot 1000 and Pilot 5000.

With a form factor and weight that was quite similar to a modern smartphone, the Pilot was powered by two AAA batteries that could keep the device in use for weeks. It had a 160 x 160 pixel monochrome display with an area underneath for handwriting recognition (using a stylus) plus some buttons for application control.

Inside was a Motorola 68328 “Dragonball” processor, with 128Kb of RAM for the Pilot 1000 and 512Kb for the 5000 versions. The only connectivity offered was a serial connection to a PC or Mac, allowing data to be synchronised between the two.

The built in applications were pretty basic – a calendar, address book, to-do list and memo taker, but for 1996 that was pretty impressive in a device this small. The basic Pilot 1000 model was $299 in the US, with the 5000 coming in at $369. For a pocket computer, that was pretty good value.. but for a fraction of the price you could buy a Filofax instead, and that was almost infinitely customisable.

Despite its limitations, the Pilot and it successors were a huge success in the late 1990. But rivals such as Nokia had a different vision, and devices such as the original Nokia Communicator combined PDA function with a mobile phone, although without initially gaining much success.

Palm ended up owning the market, and other models followed with improved features, including the ability to sync email which could be read and replied to offline. But it took Palm a long time to understand that people wanted more than a PDA and it wasn’t until 2003 that they released their first smartphone, the PalmOne Treo 600.. and only then because they had bought a rival company called Handspring.

Ultimately, Palm suffered the common fate of tech companies where it helped to define a market and then got left behind. The company’s byzantine history ended in 2011 as part of HP. Today, these original Palm Pilots are uncommon but inexpensive with prices as low as £35 / €32 / $35. Trying to USE one with a modern computer could be tricky, since you’d need an old-fashioned serial port too.. but it might just be worth it for the reaction when you pull one of these ancient devices out of your pocket!

Image credits: Palm

Samsung SGH-i310 (2006)

Announced March 2006

Some gadgets get it wrong. Sometimes really badly wrong, but thankfully for the companies involved most of them tend to vanish into obscurity. The Samsung SGH-i310 is one of those devices that gets everything wrong, so just for a moment we will shine a spotlight on it.

Announced ten years ago this month, the headline feature of the i310 was the amount of memory it had inside - a whopping 8GB of storage, making it the class leader of the time. But what was unusual was that this storage wasn’t flash memory, it was a tiny hard disk instead.

The list of devices that we can think of with hard disks (sometimes called “microdrives”) is very short indeed. Apart from the i310 there was its predecessor, the Samsung i300 and the slightly upgraded i300x. Nokia had the strange-but-capable N91 music phone and there was the rather obscure HTC Advantage. Other mainstream manufacturers skipped the idea completely and just used flash memory instead.

The rest of the i310’s specifications weren’t all that appealing. The operating system was the new Windows Mobile 5.0 which was pretty capable for its time, and this qualified the i310 as being a smartphone.. but the tiny 2” QVGA screen and lack of a touchscreen limited its usefulness even then. There was a basic camera, a memory slot, stereo music playback but frankly not much else. The i310 couldn’t even support 3G which was becoming standard for high-end devices.

A chunky and unappealing device, the i310 unsurprisingly crashed and burned having gotten almost every feature wrong. Less than a year later, Apple launched the iPhone and showed everybody how it should be done.

The Samsung i310 and the older i300 are marginally collectible because of the unusual storage technology, expect to pay around €50 or so for an unlocked version if you can find one. The rival N91 is more commonly available, but is much more expensive at between €80 to €350 depending on condition.

Second time around: Apple iPad 2 and Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 and 10.1 (2011)

Announced March 2011

The second generation of Apple’s successful iPad and Samsung’s less-than-successful Galaxy Tab range were announced in March 2011, giving consumers a choice of significantly improved products over the models from the previous year.

The Apple iPad 2 stole most of the headlines. Much slimmer and lighter than the old model, the iPad 2 was also much faster and also introduced iOS 4.3 which added even more features and polish to an already pretty good device.  The iPad 2 added a couple of low-resolution cameras (enabling video calling through FaceTime), something missing completely from the original, although the 9.7” 768 x 1024 pixel display remained. The simple but effective "Smart Covers" also enhanced the usability of the new iPad.

Apple iPad 2 (2011)

Samsung’s response was to create a tablet a little larger than the iPad 2, and one a little smaller. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 had originally been announced in February, but after the iPad 2 was announced, Samsung engineers redesigned it to be thinner and lighter. The 10.1” display had a 1280 x 800 pixel resolution, better than the iPad, it had much better cameras and was just about as powerful inside. The awful version of Android from the original Galaxy Tab had been dropped and the new Android 3.0 OS had been designed especially for tablets. Launched alongside it was an 8.9” version of the tablet, identical in most respects except it was smaller.

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (2011)

Out of the two, it was the Apple device that sold in huge quantities. Samsung had been stung by criticism of the original Galaxy Tab, and it was going to take some time before consumers would trust that they had a quality product. But these two Galaxy Tabs did show that Apple had some real competition.

The Apple iPad 2 is still a supported device today, supporting iOS 9.2.1. No matter if you like Apple products or not, they offer excellent support for their gadgets for many years after they were bought. Samsung on the other hand only provided updates until 2012, with a version of Android 4.0... and after that the devices rapidly became obsolete. These days a good used iPad 2 will still cost you around €140, with the Galaxy Tab 10.1 being worth just half of that.