Retro 5|10: November 2003 and 2008

We take a look back at some of the weird and wonderful handsets that were making the news five and ten years ago this month.

November 2003

One of the strangest (and arguably most beautiful) Nokia handsets ever and certainly one of the rarest, the Nokia 7700 was a deeply flawed attempt at a multimedia smartphone that looks quite unlike anything else ever made. This strikingly designed handset never made it beyond a handful of engineering samples. Nokia have never been big on clamshell phones, but the Nokia 7200 added a unique twist with the addition of fabric covers. The Nokia 3200 came with printable covers which enabled owners to make a completely unique designs.

Nokia 7700

Nokia 7200

Nokia 3200

The Nokia 6600 was an advanced device for its time but was rather podgy looking. And with yet another unusual design, the Nokia 6810 and Nokia 6820 phones came with a fold-out QWERTY keyboard which never really caught on.

Nokia 6600

Nokia 6810

Nokia 6820

3G phones were still few and far between, but the Motorola A835 was quite popular if only because it was actually available. Ten years ago manufacturers were still producing Windows smartphones with number pads, and the rather unattractive HTC-built Orange SPV E200 was one of them.

Motorola A835

Orange SPV E200

The Panasonic X70 clamshell phone is a reminder that this Japanese company was once a major player in the European market, and the Sony Ericsson Z600 was that joint venture's first attempt at a clamshell phone.

Panasonic X70

Sony Ericsson Z600

November 2008

Remembered now for being a notable flop, the BlackBerry Storm 9500 was RIM's first attempt at a touchscreen device, but it was poorly implemented and initial negative reviews dented sales. Rather more successful was the BlackBerry Curve 8900 which brought a useful feature set to a budget BlackBerry.

BlackBerry Storm 9500

BlackBerry Curve 8900

BlackBerry's influence was apparent in the Nokia E63 which competed directly against the Curve with an arguably better feature set. The rather anonymously named Nokia 6260 Slide brought N95-class specifications into an elegant sliding device. Designed as an inexpensive music phone, the Nokia 5130 XpressMusic had front-facing speakers and an appealing design.

Nokia E63

Nokia 6260 Slide

Nokia 5130 XpressMusic

The Sony Ericsson W705 was the 28th "Walkman" branded phone from Sony Ericsson, and in our view marked something of a crisis in the history of the firm. The Samsung Tobi was a colourful phone aimed at children, but at a time when the whole issue of mobile phones and children was becoming a hot health topic. Aiming a completely different market the Sonim XP3 Enduro was a pleasingly chunky and very rugged device designed for hostile environments.

Sony Ericsson W705

Samsung Tobi S3030

Sonim XP3 Enduro

The LG KC560 was an unspeakably foul slider phone with gold accents, aimed mostly at Russia. Five years ago manufacturers were still trying to put TVs into phones, and the LG KB770 with DVB-T used the same standards as used in normal digital TVs, but takers were few and far between.

LG KC560

LG KB770

Biggest handset disasters.. Part 1

We recently covered the ten best and most influential 3G and GSM devices ever, but not every handset is destined for greatness, and it turns out that there have been more than a handful of disasters and catastrophes along the way. This list is our top ten handset disasters, but there are many more to come.
 
And despite being failures, some of these handsets are quite collectable, so we have included a buyers guide in some cases as well.

1. Microsoft KIN (2010) In our view the most disastrous mobile phone product launch ever, the Microsoft KIN was the wrong product at the wrong time, but that was only half the story.   While the world was waiting for Windows Phone 7 to come along and do battle with the iPhone and Android handsets, Microsoft were also working on the KIN feature phone. Part of the problem was that feature phones were dying off, and the KIN was just too limited to be accepted by consumers. But what was worse is that the software was slow and buggy, so even if you did buy one (and hardly anyone did) the chances were that they'd send it back.   But the KIN was a double disaster. The team that created it were largely from a Microsoft subsidiary called Danger who developed the T-Mobile Sidekick. Because of the drain of talent and resources, Danger suffered a catastrophic systems failure which was an early example of what happens when cloud storage goes wrong. Effectively, this mess-up killed the successful Sidekick line.   It rapidly became clear that the KIN product was not selling and the whole thing was cancelled. And then for good measure, Microsoft closed down the entire division responsible for the fiasco. Just to be on the safe side.

2. Motorola ROKR E1 (2005) The Motorola ROKR E1 is the phone that Apple would like you to forget. Why? Because the ROKR was a failed collaboration between Motorola and Apple and was designed to bring iTunes to a mobile phone.   The device was hotly anticipated, with many rumours of iPod style phones and other exotic creations circulating. But when the ROKR leaked out it was almost crushingly boring, being a twice warmed-over version of a handset called the E390. Worse still, it was limited to just 100 tracks and it only had a slow USB 1.1 connector, making it a pain to transfer music to the handset.   Despite a significant marketing campaign, the ROKR was a FLOPR and got a lot of negative publicity, although in reality it's quite a nice device to look at and the music playback is not bad. But Apple learned from their mistakes and came back a couple of years later with the world-changing Apple iPhone instead.   Buyers guide: if you collect esoteric Apple-related devices, these can be had for about €30 but they don't come up for sale very often.

3. BlackBerry Z10 (2013) Not all product disasters are because of bad products. The problem with the BlackBerry Z10 was that it was at least two years too late, and although it was a polished product with a lot of nice features there was basically no market, leading to a nearly billion-dollar stock writeoff and the firing of their CEO.   It had taken BlackBerry over five years to come up with a product that was in any way competitive with the iPhone and other similar smartphones. These delays weren't an isolated incident, as we were pointing out the dangers for BlackBerry all the way back in 2009.   Had the Z10 been launched in 2010 or 2011 perhaps it would have been in with a chance, but the Z10's 2013 launch was far too late to salvage BlackBerry's fortunes.

4. Apple iPhone 4 (2010) Despite the name, the Apple iPhone 4 was really the start of the second distinct generation of iPhones and it was a major improvement over previous generations.   But a basic flaw in the antenna design led to widespread complaints which it took a while for Apple to acknowledge, and for a long time the iPhone 4 struggled under the weight of negative publicity.   Apple fans are quick to forgive though, and although the iPhone brand quickly recovered this is still another bodged product launch that Apple would like you all to forget.

5. Nokia 7600 (2003) The Nokia 7600 was Nokia's second 3G phone, but it was the first one to be widely available. But the weird lozenge-shape and difficult to use keypad were completely nuts. Customers stayed away in droves.   In any case, the market wasn't really ready for 3G and the Nokia 7600 wasn't alone in failing to set the market alight. It took another four years or so for the technology in 3G phones to match up with their promises. Buyers guide: these are pretty common, prices typically range from €20 to €50.

6. Siemens Xelibri series (2003 - 2004) The Siemens Xelibri range consisted of eight highly unusual fashion phones that were designed specifically to be used as secondary devices that you could take with you on a night out. Designed more for style than function, the Xelibri range never really caught on (despite a massive marketing campaign) and was canned after just two generations. Perhaps one of the key problems was price.. they were no cheaper than a standard phone of the time. But in these days of incredibly expensive and brittle smartphones, the idea of having a high-fashion secondary phone doesn't seem such a daft idea after all.   Buyers guide: the Xelibri 1 is the rarest, the Xelibri 6 is the most widely available. Prices range from €20 to €50.

7. Siemens SX1 (2003) Both Siemens and Nokia were companies that could produce a weird looking handset. Although at first glance the Siemens SX1 Symbian smartphone looked normal, a closer inspection showed that the number keys were arranged up the side, making it rather awkward to use for any kind of text input.   There have only been a few successful non-Nokia Symbian devices. The SX1 was not one of them, but it was at least a good looking mobile phone. Buyers guide: the SX1 never sold very well, but does come up for sale sometimes. Price range is around €30.

8. BlackBerry Storm 9500 (2008) BlackBerry's first attempt to counter the iPhone was the BlackBerry Storm, launched in 2008. But it had a poor screen and buggy software. Early negative reviews proved a major embarrassment  and the product bombed.   Despite the failure of the Storm, BlackBerry posted impressive growth figures over the next couple of years, but it could never match the iPhone which led to the firm's decline.

9. Motorola RAZR2 (2007) The original Motorola RAZR had been a massive hit (despite its awful software), but it was strictly a fashion phone.. and fashions change. However, Motorola kept pumping out RAZR variants in an attempt to regain some of the old magic and the Motorola RAZR2 was a high-profile attempt that failed.   Despite the name "RAZR2", there had been a dozen or so variants of the original RAZR by the time this came out, and even more afterwards. But while Motorola were warming over the same old formula, Apple was busy redefining mobile handsets with the iPhone.

10. Palm Pre (2009) The rise and fall of Palm over the years is a complicated story of an early innovator being outpaced by upstart rivals. By 2009 it was in terminal decline, and is a last ditch-attempt to reverse its fortunes it piled all of its resources into the WebOS-based Palm Pre, an interesting touchscreen device that could have been a world leader if they'd announced it a couple of years beforehand.   Sales weren't very great, and eventually the company was taken over by HP leading to the failed Pre 3 in 2011. Cutting their losses, HP killed the entire WebOS product line and effectively killed Palm's legacy dead.

Retro 5|10: October 2003 and 2008

We take a look back at some of the handsets that were making the headlines five and ten years ago in October 2003 and October 2008.
 

October 2003

Nokia noticed that people like to play games on their mobile phones - so it would seem logical to make a handset for the job, and the Nokia N-Gage was a memorable but ultimately doomed attempt at a handheld gaming device. The Nokia 3660 was an early Symbian smartphone, replacing the 3650 which had a weird rotary-style keypad, but it still retained the unusual and somewhat bulky shape of its predecessor.

Nokia N-Gage

Nokia 3660

Sendo were a British manufacturer that are best remembered these days for cheap and cheerful pay-as-you-go phones. However, they were also involved in smartphones and the Sendo X was an attractive Symbian device which made Nokia rivals look rather basic. But Sendo never intended to go into the Symbian market at all as they did some pioneering work with Windows, however a massive row with Microsoft alleging the leak of trade secrets to HTC killed that project off. HTC got to market before Sendo, and HTC's second Windows smartphone was called the HTC Himalaya, sold in the UK as the O2 XDA II. The Himalaya was a touchscreen device with a specification not a million miles away from the original iPhone that hit the market four years later.

Sendo X

O2 XDA II

Early Windows phones were not all touchscreen devices, and the Motorola MPx200 was an attempt to put Windows Phone into a traditional clamshell design, something that seems rather quaint and pointless today. Motorola had a reputation for making attractive (but hard-to-use) clamshell phones, and the Motorola V300 was an attractive low-cost phone that was quite popular with consumers.

Motorola MPx200

Motorola V300

NEC were one of the early leaders in 3G phones, and the NEC E616 was a very popular early handset on the Hutchison 3 network. But most owners were only really interested because the 3 network was very cheap, rather than being interested in the capabilities of the phone itself. The Samsung E700 was an attractive and sleek clamshell phone, and is arguably one of the few Samsung phones that is actually memorable for its design. Nokia weren't the only company that could come out with a striking design.. Siemens could too. And the Siemens MC60 is one example of a manufacturer that could come up with something rather more interesting than a traditional brick.

NEC E616

Samsung E700

Siemens MC60

October 2008 Nokia had been an early pioneer in touchscreen phones but had given up because of consumer indifference. But the launch of the iPhone had made Nokia's devices look rather old-fashioned, so the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic was created which managed to please a lot of Nokia fans, but it didn't quite offer the elegant user experience as the Apple did. The Nokia N85 was a two-way slider which was an early adopter of OLED screen technology, and shared several design characteristics with the then-popular Nokia N95. The Nokia N79 wasn't radically different from the sort of Symbian smartphones that Nokia were making five years before. It seems obvious to us that this type of device was dying in favour of touchscreen devices, but it didn't seem that way at the time. Nokia 5800 XpressMusic Nokia N85 Nokia N79 This is what happens when Motorola engineers have too much time on their hands.. the beautiful but completely bonkers Motorola AURA combined precise engineering with novel features such as a circular display, and came with a price tag that was sure to make it a very exclusive device. And this is what happens when a company loses its way.. the Motorola KRAVE appears to have been created by a team that has vaguely heard of the iPhone but has never seen one. It took Motorola nearly a whole year after this to come up with an Android device instead. Motorola AURA Motorola KRAVE HTC were still a Windows-only manufacturer back in 2008, and the HTC Touch 3G showed that it was possible to make a Microsoft-based phone that actually looked nice. Symbian was still the leading smartphone OS at the time, and the Samsung i7110 was a pretty rare non-Nokia Symbian device. Although Samsung had proven several times that it was possible to build a better Nokia than Nokia, it wasn't enough to get Nokia fans to switch. LG pioneered the black slabby look with the original PRADA touchscreen phone, and the LG PRADA II added a keyboard. But as other manufacturers have found, collaborating with a fashion house does not necessarily lead to a device that consumers will buy. HTC Touch 3G Samsung i7110 LG PRADA II

The ten most influential 3G and GSM phones.. ever?

2013 is Mobile Gazette's tenth anniversary, so it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look back at what we think are the ten most influential devices of the past decade (plus a bit more). Some are obvious, but we hope that a few of our choices will surprise you!

1. Apple iPhone 3G (2008) An obvious choice perhaps, but why would we choose the Apple iPhone 3G over the original 2007 iPhone? The answer is that the original iPhone was pretty dire - it didn't have 3G or GPS and you couldn't download third-party applications, which are all essentials in a modern smartphone, and it was often very slow as well. The 3G also started to sell in really significant numbers, quickly eclipsing the first-generation device and it really started to eat into the market share of its competitors.   Of course, the 2009 iPhone 3GS is even better, but the 3G was the first time the iPhone didn't have to come up with a string of excuses as to why vital features were missing.   In terms of influence.. well, it should be obvious. Although touchscreen smartphones existed long before the iPhone came out, Apple's offering popularised a certain look-and-feel of both the hardware and software which led to many copycats.. and many legal disputes with rivals. In terms of mobile phone history there is a very clean "before iPhone" and "after iPhone" period when you look at the products on the market.

2. Motorola RAZR V3 (2004) The Motorola RAZR V3 may be nearly a decade old, but it was one of the first handsets to sell purely on design rather than features. Following on what seemed to be the incredibly tiny Motorola StarTAC, the RAZR V3 was incredibly thin and carefully engineered from aluminium. And when it was launched it was very, very expensive.   The RAZR demonstrated that consumers wanted something more that just a brick to make phone calls on, and the handset was an enormous success. However, beneath the pretty exterior was a pretty dreadful handset which put a lot of consumers off. In the end, the RAZR nearly killed Motorola as the firm kept trying to remix the same tired old formula instead of innovating, as a result Motorola eventually lost its independence and is now a subsidiary of Google.

3. Nokia N95 (2007) The Nokia N95 and it's successor, the N95 8GB competed directly against early iPhones, but came with 3.5G data, GPS and a first-rate camera plus access to a large library of third-party applications.. all the things that the original iPhone lacked.   The relatively large QVGA display wasn't a touchscreen, but it was a lot better than most devices on the market. This combination of features created a new class of mobile phone that all other manufacturers had to beat, and even six years on these old Nokias are still quite useful.   The competitive advantage of the N95 and it successors was quickly eroded when Apple added many of the missing features to their range of smartphones, and it took Nokia until 2009 to come out with a touchscreen device to compete, with the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic.

4. Nokia 6310i (2002) Launched in 2002, the Nokia 6310i became the quintessential business phone. It was easy to use, had a long battery life, Bluetooth, a really loud ringtone and was robust enough to handle to odd knock and bump.   You could even look at WAP pages on it (which nobody did) and play Snake (which probably everybody did). And one reason why it remained popular for years and years was that many business users had car kits designed just for this phone.   The 6310i understood its market completely. It didn't have a colour screen, because it wouldn't add anything of real value. It didn't have a camera because frankly the cameras of the day were useless, and in some businesses and organisations cameras are not permitted on site. It was a perfectly tailored device for its target market, and Nokia could never quite repeat the trick with any of its successors.

5. Ericsson R380 (1999) One of the last handsets to come out under the "Ericsson" brand, the Ericsson R380 was a touchscreen Symbian smartphone that came out eight years before Apple really popularised the concept..   The R380 was a monochrome device with a flip down keypad, like the Sony Ericsson P800 and P900. Although it was restricted in what it could do (you couldn't install apps, for example) it demonstrated what was possible, and for a long time Sony Ericsson were the clear leaders in smartphone technology and helped to set the benchmark for what a smartphone should do.   Back in the 20th century, the R380 looked like a James Bond gadget.. indeed, a mock-up of a closely related phone (called the JB988) appeared in the movie Tomorrow Never Dies.

6. HTC Wallaby (2002) Back at the turn of the century, standalone PDAs were still popular with the two main platforms being Palm's PalmOS and Microsoft Windows CE. Windows CE was very popular, but unlike smartphones these devices couldn't make phone calls or access the internet on the move.   Combining a PDA with a phone seems to us to be obvious, but by 2002 there were very few examples. The HTC Wallaby was one of the earliest recognisable examples of what we would regard as a modern touchscreen smartphone, and rapid improvements came afterwards which eventually established HTC as one of the key players in the smartphone market.   The Wallaby was never sold under its own name, instead being marketed at the O2 XDA, T-Mobile MDA, Siemens SX56 and Qtek 1100 plus many other names. And although both Windows and HTC have had their ups-and-downs since then, the Wallaby and the handsets that came afterwards helped to shape the concept of the modern smartphone.

7. Samsung Galaxy S II (2011) By the time the Samsung Galaxy S II came to market, Android smartphones had already been around for several years, but the S II represented a significant upgrade to screen size and processing power and put some clear blue water between Samsung and Apple.. at least in technical terms.   But despite the Galaxy S II having all the design charm of a cheap but reliable microwave oven, Apple took objection to this rather dull slab of a smartphone and tried to block it in the courts.   While the Samsung Galaxy S II is certainly no design icon (indeed, has there ever been an iconic Samsung phone?) it certainly represented an escalation in the specifications arms race between major manufacturers.

8. BlackBerry 7230 / 7290 (2003 / 2004) It's hard to say exactly what device is the definitive BlackBerry, but we'd suggest that the BlackBerry 7230 is probably one of the best candidates. The 7230 was tightly focussed on messaging with an efficient compact keyboard, an unusual but very low power transflective display, excellent integration with corporate mail systems, some decent PIM tools with a fairly decent library of downloadable applications.. and even some games.   The BlackBerry 7290 added Bluetooth, but other features took a long time to come to the BlackBerry platform, especially modern essentials such as 3G, WiFi, GPS and even a camera. But the 7230 helped to popularise messaging on the move, even if consumers eventually defected to touchscreen rather than QWERTY devices.

9. Motorola FONE F3 (2007) The elegant but very basic Motorola FONE F3 may not be a top-of-the-range smartphone, but it has a significant claim to fame as being the first consumer device to feature an electronic ink display.   Off the top of our heads we can list exactly two phones with an e-Ink display, the FONE and the as-yet-unreleased YotaPhone, although Samsung did experiment with an e-Ink keyboard.  Some manufacturers are experimenting with e-Ink displays in smartphone and tablet cases, but the biggest growth area has been electronic book readers such as the Amazon Kindle range, where the simple but low-power display is exactly what is needed.   To a large extent, the rather crude display in the FONE demonstrated that it was certainly possible to include this type of screen in a low-cost consumer device, and in this respect it was a pioneering handset.

10. T-Mobile G1 / HTC Dream (2008) The T-Mobile G1 (also sold as the HTC Dream) was the first rather clunky attempt at an Android smartphone. Where the contemporary Apple iPhone 3G was an elegant device, the G1 was rather utilitarian and featured a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and a little trackball, two features that are essentially extinct today.   Although modern Android phones are quite different from the G1, the market had been long awaiting a true "iPhone killer" handset, and the G1 heralded what was to become the best-selling class of smartphone in the world.   But of course, the G1 and all the Android phones that came after it did not actually kill off the iPhone at all. But they did kill off Windows Mobile and then Nokia's Symbian platform.