Sony Ericsson Xperia Play (2011)

Sony Ericsson Xperia Play

Announced February 2011

It's a fact of modern life that people like to play games on their smartphones, so it would seem like a fair bet that if a company made a smartphone designed for gamers then it might be a success.. especially if that manufacturer is affiliated to one of the giant names in gaming.

Launched five years ago this month in an attempt to capitalise on this market, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play looked like a sure fire thing. Yes, it was a normal Android smartphone, but hidden under a sliding mechanism was a set of PlayStation-style controls and a secondary touchpad. Sony were busy porting games to the platform, and other manufacturers were free to write games that could use the secondary controls. And of course, it would do everything that every other Android phone would do too.

Sony had done something similar with the PSP Go gaming platform, so using some of the technology on a device like this should have been a winner. Except it wasn't.

The Xperia Play had several problems.. not big ones, but overall they added up to something that lacked desirability. For example, the single-core CPU was slow, the screen was adequate but not great, the camera wasn't as good as it could be, battery life was disappointing and the whole thing was bulky.

Sales were slow, and it was beginning to become apparent that Sony Ericsson didn't exactly love the device. A promised upgrade to Android 4.0 was canned, and the Xperia Play headed for the bargain bucket.

The Xperia Play remains the only dedicated gaming smartphone from a mainstream manufacturer. But it wasn't the end of the story, because a small but dedicated group of enthusiasts have continued to unofficially support the device with custom ROMs and ports of games from other platforms. One in good condition will set you back €100 or more, so they are still in demand.

It's doubtful that Sony would ever want to repeat this experiment.. but who knows?

Samsung Galaxy S II (2011)

The Samsung Galaxy S II is perhaps not an iconic device, but it is probably one of the most important smartphones ever made. It may be a slabby and rather dull device to look at, but the Galaxy S II started the trend towards smartphones with ever bigger screens and more powerful features that continues today.

Samsung had been making Android handsets for two years by 2011, but to a large extent they had been lagging behind rivals HTC when it came to features. But the Galaxy S II pushed Samsung to the top of the pile with a feature set that still looks pretty good five years on.

The most striking feature of the Galaxy S II at the time was the size of the screen - a then-massive 4.3" panel with a resolution of 480 x 800 pixels. The rival iPhone 4 had a higher resolution screen, but at only 3.5" in size it was significantly smaller.

Inside was a dual-core 1.2GHz CPU with 1GB of RAM, and on the back was an 8 megapixel primary camera with a 2 megapixel one on the front...  both much better than Apple's offering. Inside was 16GB or 32GB of storage, and crucially the Samsung came with a microSD slot too. There wasn't just a single version of the Galaxy S II, instead there a couple of dozen different versions of the device including one with support for LTE 4G data.

The Samsung Galaxy S II was a massive success, and along with a growing variety of other Galaxy smartphones in pursuit it allowed Samsung to knock Apple off the number one smartphone vendor spot. But Apple were not happy with the Galaxy S II as they claimed that it copied many of the concepts included in the iPhone and this ended up in a series of lawsuits that continue even into 2016.

After the Galaxy S II, Samsung launched a new Galaxy S flagship every year with the upcoming Galaxy S 7 being just round the corner. Along with the iPhone, the Galaxy S range has been the device that every other manufacture has tried to beat. Not a bad legacy for a dull black slab, is it?

Motorola Xoom (2011)

Motorola Xoom (2011)

Announced January 2011

The Motorola Xoom was Moto's attempt at competing with the Apple iPad, a device that had been announced almost exactly one year previously. Announced at CES in January 2011, the Xoom was slightly better than the original iPad in terms of hardware specifications, and it was a bit cheaper.

It also introduced Android 3.0, which had been especially designed for tablet devices. On top of that, it was a sleek looking device, so you might have expected it to be a success. Unfortunately, the Xoom wasn't the success that Motorola had hoped.

The Xoom had a 10.1" 1280 x 800 pixel display, a 5 megapixel primary camera and a 2 megapixel secondary one on the front. Inside was a dual-core 1GHz CPU with 1GB of RAM. It was a little heavier than the iPad, but overall everything was at least as good as the Apple product, if not better.

Perhaps the software wasn't as polished as the iPad, but then surely it would appeal to the growing army of Android smartphone users? Lots of press coverage and advertising would surely help as well. Well.. not really, it turns out.

Over the time the Xoom was on sale, it shipped perhaps 1.5 million units or so. But over a comparable period, the iPad shipped 15 million units. But the Xoom wasn't alone in lacklustre sales - interest in Android tablets overall remained low. Market researchers could speculate as to the reason why, but perhaps it boiled down to the fact that the Xoom cost quite a lot of money.. and people just preferred to by an iPad with that cash instead.

Also, although the Xoom launched against the original iPad, the iPad 2 was announced in March 2011 which was thinner, lighter and faster than the original. This eroded the advantage that the Xoom originally had. The launch of the Xoom 2 in November 2011 brought a better product to market, but still it wasn't the breakthrough that Motorola had hoped. The Xoom 2 was Motorola's last attempt at a tablet.

Eventually, Android did start to make inroads into the tablet market.. but a lot of that is based on the availability of very cheap devices. But when it comes to high-end premium tablets, Apple are still king.

The rapid rise and fall of BenQ-Siemens (2006)

Launched January 2006

By 2006, Siemens Mobile of Germany had been a major player in the mobile phone market for two decades. Various “firsts” for Siemens included the:

• Siemens S10 in 1998, the first phone to feature a rudimentary colour screen
• Siemens SL10 in 1999, the world’s first slider phone.
• Siemens SL45 in 2001, one of the first phones to feature an MP3 player and expandable memory.
• Siemens SL55 in 2003, a cute and very successful mini slider phone.
• Siemens MC60 in 2003, one of the first camera phones available in Europe.
• Siemens Xelibri fashion phone range, which ran from 2003 and 2004.

Their design department was probably one of the very best in the business, probably only second to Nokia when it came to attractive handset design, and coming up with blue-sky ideas.

But by the mid-noughties, market share had dropped steadily and the company was making enormous losses. A combination of poor reliability and lacklustre features meant that customers were looking elsewhere.

Over in Taiwan, electronics firm BenQ had been trying to break into the European market with little success. Although some carriers such as O2 had picked up BenQ devices (for example, the O2 X1i), whatever technical strengths their handsets may have had was let down by boring design.

Presumably taking some inspiration from the progress made by the rival Sony-Ericsson joint venture, BenQ and Siemens also agreed to merge their operations. But unlike the Sony-Ericsson deal with two equal partners, the BenQ-Siemens tie up basically involved BenQ taking over the German firm, receiving all of Siemens’s relevant patents AND getting an investment of a quarter of a billion euros from the Germans.

The agreement was signed in October 2005, and BenQ-Siemens launched officially in January 2006 with the launch of three handsets, followed by a raft of others. Some stand-out designs include the very elegant EF71, the fun AL26 “Hello Kitty”, and the surprisingly popular E61 music phone. And just to prove that they could make something very different, the EF51 looked more like a digital music player than a mobile phone.

But with a few exceptions, consumers remained indifferent to the BenQ-Siemens offerings. The vast amount of money being ploughed into R&D was not generating the sales that were needed, and the new company was bleeding red ink at a frightening rate. In September 2006, just nine months after the brand was created, BenQ announced that it was closing down the BenQ-Siemens operation in Europe at the cost of 3000 jobs in Germany.

The fallout was extraordinary. Siemens turned on its partner angrily and there were accusations that the whole thing had been conceived just to grab the Siemens patents. Siemens also created a €35m hardship fund for its former staff, including €5m that was redirected from management bonuses. But in the end, nothing could be done and the German operations were closed down.

The name didn’t quite die out. BenQ produced a couple of other phones under the “BenQ-Siemens” name in 2007 while also soldiering on with BenQ-only handsets in Asia. But in the end, that too failed with BenQ closing down mobile phone operations in 2008.. although in 2013 they introduced a line of Android smartphones with the BenQ A3 that continues to this day.

In the end, Siemens was just another once-successful mobile phone company that disappeared along with Sagem, Sharp, Sendo, Ericsson, Panasonic, NEC and even Nokia. BenQ and Siemens are still very much around, and employ hundreds of thousands of people between them.. but perhaps this particular episode is one that both companies would sooner pretend never happened.

Motorola StarTAC (1996)

Launched January 1996

Twenty years ago, mobile phones were big brick-like affairs. But in January 1996, Motorola changed people’s perceptions with the Motorola StarTAC clamshell phone – a device that was half the weight of the competition, and which would easily slide into your pocket.

Perhaps the first recognisable clamshell phone, the original GSM StarTAC weighed about 115 grams and set a form factor that became the standard for this type of device. Of course, this being the 1990s, the StarTAC didn’t have much in the way of features, but it was the small size and weight that got all the attention.

Unlike most later clamshell phones, the StarTAC squeezed both the keypad and monochrome screen onto one half of the inside which made everything rather cramped. There was no camera on the outside, but there was an easily removable battery and an extendable antenna.

The StarTAC was available on most networks, including GSM and CDMA plus the old AMPS analogue system. It was also sold in most major markets worldwide, which lead to significant sales. But it wasn’t cheap – originally costing between $1500 to $2000, the StarTAC was more expensive by weight than gold.

Despite the excellent hardware design, the phone was actually rather difficult to use. Motorola’s clumsy and clunky user interface was poorly thought-out, and even though rivals Nokia were still producing more brick-like handsets, they were at least much easier to use. And crucially, those Nokia phones had Snake on as well.

Motorola didn’t really have another hit on the same scale as the StarTAC until it created the RAZR in 2004, a handset which had many of the same innovations and flaws as the StarTAC itself.

AT&T Unix PC (1985)

AT&T Unix PC - Image Credit

Launched 1985

Thirty years ago, things were beginning to develop quite quickly in the microcomputer marketplace. The Apple Macintosh was a year old, Microsoft released Windows 1.0 and both the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga were gaining fans too.

The Mac, Windows, ST and Amiga all represented a leap forward in usability over earlier generations. But despite their pretty interfaces, they were still pretty basic in terms of raw power compared to Unix, the operating system of choice for many businesses and academic institutions.

By 1985, Unix had been around for a decade and a half. Developed by AT&T Bell Labs (now part of Alcatel-Lucent), Unix could run on a variety of larger computers (and with a wide variety of variants) but typically a Unix user would be timesharing on a box run by somebody else, using a dumb terminal.

In academic circles and large corporations, Unix was starting to become the dominant operating system of choice. However, the growth of Unix was under threat from low-cost and simple computers that people could stick on their desk and do with what they liked.

In order to compete in this new world, AT&T commissioned a company called Convergent (now part of Unisys) to develop a personal computer capable of running Unix. What they designed was innovative and elegant... but also slow, noisy and rather expensive. The AT&T Unix PC was born.

Based on a 10HMz Motorola 68010 CPU (pretty similar to the processor in the Mac) with 512MB of RAM as standard, the AT&T Unix PC also typically came with a 10MB or 20MB hard disk and a 348 x 720 pixel resolution monochrome monitor. You could share your Unix PC with other users hooked up via terminals, and it also supported Ethernet and dial-up networking. Also, the Unix PC had its own optional graphical user environment which could be used with a three-button mouse.

Starting at over $5000 for a basic model, the Unix PC was roughly competitive with IBM’s PC AT which was much less capable, but rather more popular. In the end, the AT&T Unix PC was not a success, despite all its high-end capabilities.

Unix never actually became popular on desktop or laptop computers, with Windows having about a 90% market share. However thirty years on it turns out that Unix and Unix-derived systems such as Linux, Android and iOS have the lion’s share of the smartphone, tablet, web server and supercomputer markets.

The AT&T Unix PC is a very rare device today and seems to be highly sought-after by collectors.

Further reading:

• oldcomputers.net - AT&T Unix PC
• old-computers.com - AT&T Unix PC
• unixpc.taronga.com - AT&T 3B1/7300 (UNIX PC) Information
• toastytech.com - The AT&T PC 7300 "Unix PC"
• Wikipedia - AT&T Unix PC

You can see the Unix PC in action in the videos below:

AltaVista (1995)

Launched December 1995

It’s difficult to imagine now, but once upon a time finding stuff on the web was *hard*.  In the early 1990s, the number of web sites grew from 623 at the end of 1993 to a quarter of a million in mid-1996.. but there was no reliable way to search for information on all those thousands of websites all at once.

In early 1994, the web directory Yahoo! was founded which attempted to catalogue the web by category. If you wanted to research a topic, you would have to drill down through Yahoo!’s categories in much the same way as using a library.

In mid-1994 the world’s first “full text” search engine was launched, called WebCrawler. But it only indexed a small part of the rapidly growing web, and the results were extremely hit-and-miss.

But in December 1995 the first recognisably modern search engine was launched. Predating Google by several years, Digital’s AltaVista service made the first real attempt to index a large part of the ever-growing web, and made a good effort to sort search results in a way that was meaningful to users. Originally the site was hosted at altavista.digital.com, only moving to altavista.com in 1998.
 The effect was dramatic. It no longer took hours to find a piece of information on the web, but instead AltaVista could give the answer in a few seconds (usually) and the result you were looking for was usually on the first page.. or first few pages. AltaVista had some pretty advanced search functions which allowed users to tailor their results further.

The effect was dramatic. It no longer took hours to find a piece of information on the web, but instead AltaVista could give the answer in a few seconds (usually) and the result you were looking for was usually on the first page.. or first few pages. AltaVista had some pretty advanced search functions which allowed users to tailor their results further.

As is the case today, AltaVista made it easy to find obscure or precise bits of information, but was less good when it came to general topics. This meant that most users would use a combination of AltaVista and Yahoo! when researching topics.

Built in part to showcase Digital’s Alpha-based processors,  AltaVista temporarily transformed the stuffy old Digital Equipment Corporation into a major player.. for a short time.

But AltaVista had a significant flaw. The search engine results were initially based almost entirely on “on-page” factors (such as the title, headings and word density of a page) which meant that the the search engine could be easily manipulated, leading to a rise in search engine spam. When rivals Google came to market they used a fundamentally different approach which leaned heavily on “off-page” factors such as PageRank.

AltaVista grew quickly and in 1999 the majority was sold to an investment firm which valued the site at over $2.7 billion. A combination of the collapse of the Dot-Com Boom and the rise of Google severely dented AltaVista and after being passed around various owners it shut down completely in 2011.

For a generation of early internet  users, AltaVista transformed the way they used the web. Without doubt it helped to make the early web accessible and contributed to its phenomenal growth in the late 1990s. But sadly in the post-Google world, AltaVista has largely been forgotten as the great pioneer it once was,.