Nokia 9000 Communicator (1996)

Launched March 1996

Everybody knows what a smartphone is, right? A slabby thing which is basically a screen and maybe a couple of buttons on one side, and nothing much on the back other than a camera. But the vision of manufacturers twenty years ago was somewhat different, and the Nokia 9000 Communicator was an example of just how different these things were.

Originally announced in March 1996, the 9000 was a massive device even by the standards of the late 1990s. Weighing a shade under 400 grams or 14 ounces, the Communicator looked like an oversized conventional phone from the outside, but it opened up to reveal a 4.5" 640 x 200 pixel grayscale display and a full QWERTY keyboard. All the Communicator series phones had a tendency to be on the large size, giving them a nickname of "The Brick".

Underneath, the 9000 is even more strange to modern eyes. Inside is a 24MHz i386 processor with 8MB of flash storage, running the GEOS operating system. Despite being called a "Communicator", the options were strictly limited as it lacked any kind of packet data and had to rely on dial-up networking for email or very basic web browsing. There was a Telnet client and some personal information management tools, and one useful feature for any 1990s executive was the fact that the 9000 could send and receive faxes.

Various versions of the 9000 rolled out out in the next two years, making it a niche success against more mainstream rivals such as the Motorola StarTAC. In 1998, Nokia announced the much more compact 9110 Communicator and continued a line of phones that ended in 2007 with the Nokia E90.

Launched more than a decade before the iPhone defined the modern idea of a smartphone, the Communicator series was ultimately a dead end.. but it did show industry watchers that a mobile phone could offer features that rivalled full-blown computers. Thankfully though, we don't have to lug around a 400 gram brick these days..

Image Credits, Nokia and Wikimedia Commons

HP TouchPad, Pre 3 and Veer: Palm’s last throw of the dice

Announced February 2011

The history of Palm is a long and complex one, starting in the early 1990s and then going through a series of splits and mergers over the years, cumulating in HP’s takeover of the company in 2010. Palm fans hoped that HP’s resources would save the struggling company and its innovative webOS operating system, and hopes were buoyed by a launch of three related products in February 2011.

These three devices had dropped the “Palm” name, but they were still true to their roots. The HP TouchPad tablet, plus the HP Pre 3 and compact HP Veer smartphones added a significant layer of polish to preview webOS devices, and fans were encouraged by these new developments, especially the TouchPad.

HP TouchPad

The TouchPad had a 9.7” 768 x 1028 pixel display,  a dual-core 1.2GHz processor with 1GB of RAM and 16 or 32GB of storage. There was single front-facing 1.3 megapixel camera for video calling. Initially it was a WiFi-only device with a 4G version promised.

The Pre 3 had a 3.6” 480 x 800 pixel touchscreen and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, plus a 5 megapixel primary camera, 0.3 megapixel secondary one plus 8GB of storage and 512MB of RAM. The last of the trio was the Veer, which was pretty similar to the Pres 3 but with a 2.6” 320 x 400 pixel screen instead and a somewhat lesser feature set.

The Veer hit US retailers in May, the TouchPad hit the stores in July at a rather pricey $600 for the 32GB version and the Pre 3 was launched in the UK on 17th August 2011. But what happened next shocked both fans and observers alike.

It was always likely that the TouchPad would not sell as well as the iPad 2, but in fact sales were disastrous with only a few thousand units shipping in the first month. HP’s response was brutal. The day after the Pre 3 was launched in the UK, HP announced the cancellation of the entire line of webOS devices... forever. At this point, the TouchPad had been on the market for just 49 days and the Pre 3 had never even made it to the US.


HP immediately announced a fire sale of HP devices, slashing around 80% from the retail price. The result was that stock sold out almost immediately everywhere, any many retailers found their websites falling over under the sheet weight of traffic.

HP Veer and Pre 3

A strange situation developed – the TouchPad had become hugely popular device and to give HP credit, they supported it very well for several years. A decent range of applications were available and many people who were just looking for a cheap tablet found themselves very impressed by the elegant design of the webOS environment.

It didn’t take long for enthusiasts such as the crowd at Cyanogenmod to look at ways of porting Android to the TouchPad and it’s very high-quality hardware platform. As support for webOS began to wane, the only viable option was the sometimes complex process of installing a new operating system. But even today, these tablets are still viable devices if installed with a recent version of Android.

It was a dramatic end for Palm, and it was also a disaster for HP who had to write off the billion-dollar acquisition of Palm plus a loss of hundreds of dollars on each tablet and smartphone sold off at rock-bottom prices.

However, the story does quite end there. HP wondered what it could do with webOS, and after a great deal of deliberation they eventually sold it to LG where it ended up as an operating system in Smart TVs and other appliances. The Palm brand itself was bought by TCL (who make Alcatel-branded phones) who are looking at reviving it for a range of Android smartphones.*

So perhaps, it is just possible that the HP fiasco of half a decade ago isn’t the last time you might come across a Palm product..

* Just for another weird twist.. TCL use the Alcatel brand under licence from Alcatel-Lucent who dropped out of making phones, and that company recently came under the control of Nokia, another company that no longer makes phones. 

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.