20 years of GSM digital mobile phones Twenty years ago today, on 9 November 1992, Nokia launched the world's first commercially available GSM digital mobile phone - the Nokia 1011 - strengthening consumer interest in the world of mobile connectivity. The candybar device - which weighed a whopping 475g and could sustain a conversation for no more than 90 minutes - …
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Agreed, the formative years/rise of the smartphone seems to have been glossed over. Could have easily written another 2 pages.
Where's the section about HTC providing telco branded smartphones, Windows Mobile was surely a big kick start to the smartphone revolution with the various handsets HTC were building. I had about 5 Windows smartphones before iPhones and Android hit the shelves.
But Apple made the smartphone.... and Nokia started it...honest..... HTC weren't even a blip on the radar.....even though they produced phones with lots more features years before the competition (when they worked right. SPV c500 replaced 4 times to get a useable one).
I still have my HTC Universal somewhere..... such a great phone, the only phone where I wish they would just update the internals (and software) and re-release it.
Looking at this list http://www.windowsfordevices.com/c/a/Windows-For-Devices-Articles/Guide-to-HTCs-Windows-Mobile-smartphones/
there are a few phones there I would love to see updated.....oh and maybe the tytn II for another :D
I just read your post and thought "I've heard this before", but I couldn't think why. Then I remembered - it's reminiscent of the failure of the Amiga platform and the subsequent conversations that took place around that and particularly how Apple were felt by some to have reinvented history in their favour.
Is today's phone industry in a same place as the desktop computing market was in the late 90's? It feels like it might be, with companies that entered the business with a telecoms perspective now struggling to stay relevant against computer industry focused new entrants.
"while the oversized devices immortalised in Dom Joly's famous Trigger Happy sketch have all but died out"
No they haven't. Most phones are oversized nowadays. There was a time when having a small, well-built phone was a good thing. Now everyone apparently wants something that's too big to fit in your pocket, will get scratched by your keys if you try to, and will shatter if you drop it.
Oh, and the battery doesn't last an entire day.
Downvote away, fanbois.
Well the small, well-built phones that fit in your pocket and have a battery life measured in weeks can now be had even in your local supermarket for about £20 nowadays. They've certainly gotten less popular than the newer pocket computers you can fit in your pocket (just) but they're still available, so I'm not entirely sure I understand your gripe.
I still use a Nokia 6010. I'm an odd duck that uses a phone to (gasp) *make phone calls*.
The battery is getting a bit wimpy after all these years, so If I talk a lot, I may need to recharge once every 5 days. I can tolerate that, but wish I could still find new batteries for the phone.
It's been dropped in snow, onto carpeted, tile, wood, and concrete floors, and just keeps working. It's small enough to fit into a back pocket, it's got better reception than anything else I've tried.
There are still devices for those that just want a phone that makes calls, sends texts and lasts for days. You can pick them up for <£100 off-contract from any phone shop.
There are however some of us who don't really want that. There are some of us that want a device that's got an internet connection with the screen size and power to make proper use of it. Who want to listen to music in the car, watch films on planes and trains, play the odd silly game, browse the net away from home all in a device that fits in most pockets. We understand we need to be less than 24 hours away from a power socket. Some of us even own both and use them as appropriate.
Both markets are catered for. What's the problem? Why the snarky comment at the end of your post?
Does there exist a smart phone with a decent battery life?
By decent I mean more than 24 hours of occasional use.
I've yet to see a smart phone which lasts longer than about 8 hours.
My (non-smart) Nokia lasts 3-4 days if used for calls, about a week if not.
That's not quite as good as the older monochrome Nokia I used to have, but it is good enough.
Until smart phones can last the length of a business trip without needing a recharge, they are not up to the job, IMO.
I don't know what you're all moaning about . I find with a ruck sack full of about 30 lithium-ion external battery packs , rated 7000mAH each, and a charging lead, I can get my Android phone to at least last the same amount of time as my Nokia 6310i used too :-D .
(okay maybe I'm exageratting , the 30 battery packs on my Android phone almost lasts as long as my Nokia 6310i )
You can also get an extended battery pack for the S2 from Samsung (2000mAh) - comes with a new back matching the original but just a few mm thicker.. It still fits in the same case and tbh I think it's how the S2 should have come originally - forget trying to shave off a few mm and stick in a decent battery!
My Galaxy S3 typically lasts about 2-3 days before needing a charge.
Granted I leave it in power saving mode, which restricts CPU speed/cores etc., but unless your into playing games on your phone (which I'm not, got a decent PC and an XBox for that) it's still smooth and fast to use with all apps etc.
Looking at that horrific first phone and how most BlackBerry phones still look just as ugly I have to ask when they were ever considered cool. The touchscreen few without keyboards may have been awful but they looked far better.
The Nokia 5110 (nk402 to me as an Orange customer at the time) was my first phone back in 1999. Clunky, huge, stubby aerial but it worked. I gave it to my mother after I upgraded and she has since gone on to become almost as big a mobile fanatic as I am.
If RIM would have gone all the way and opened up their protocols at least a bit, they would have had a chance. However the way they did it, you had to get a backend server from them which was expensive, or you had to rent capacity on one, which meant that all your e-mail was going unencrypted through another external party. If they just would have had a "portable screen-based"-terminal function with an open protocol they'd have a much greater market.
My Makita reciprocating saw isn't pretty either, but it's a goddamned tool and it does the job. I've never owned a Blackberry (because I dislike RIM's past aggressive litigation), but if I did I certainly wouldn't moan that it's not a Ming vase. They were designed to provide email on a small device, not be a fashion accessory.
Mind you, I recognize that fashion accessories can be tools as well, in some social contexts. But that shouldn't be the primary role of all phones, and it certainly shouldn't be the criterion for "cool" - which, when it means anything at all, probably refers to reception (of the social, not electromagnetic, sort).
Nothing about the T-Mobile/Sharp sidekick and the great bendover and take it they gave to their customers by selling off danger to Micro$oft. Great phone for the time. To bad they killed it. I really liked the switchblade action.
I still use my Motorola flip phone. I like my phones like I like my women, dumb but well suited for the purpose for which they were designed....
I remember the fun and games that it took to get different ring tones on my 6110 (?) in the late nineties. It generally invoved connecting to an SMSC somewhere Scandinavian, sending specially formed text messages and saying a little prayer to the hacker gods and hey presto you were rewarded with Star Wars, Rondo a la Turk or similar. Kids these days have it easy.
And the joy of my first mobile without a sticky out aerial. You could sit down with it in your jeans pocket and not stab yourself.
And the real fun was writing midlets for my first smartphone. They didn't do much but it was the achievement of getting the phone to depress me with how much I still owed on my mortgage etc.
Did you ever make your own logos and animated screens? I would frequently make them for myself, or save them from those dodgy ringtone sites and convert.
The sticky out aerial was great for stirring Tea in a pinch. Looking for a teaspoon I always mourn it's passing.
3310 and 3330 had the best nokia code.....*#67705646# Which I would get people to enter on their own phones AFTER spending £3+ on a operator logo. :D
...the sideburns.
Just look at at this photograph of a B-Netz (second generation analogue) base station.
http://www.oebl.de/B-Netz/Technik/SE62.JPG
Ohh and the early devices also solved the problem of number entry:
http://www.oebl.de/B-Netz/Geraete/TeKaDe/BSA21/BSA21b.jpg
Though later devices resorted to cheaper microcontroller-based solutions.
I still have a working one and lots of other Nokias, Siemens and Ericssons.
And you can still by a "phone only", but if you demand a device with all the features of to day it has to have a "big" screen and there is a price for that. Take it or leave it, they are different.
I would have liked a picture of the first Nokia bricks, the about 2kg ones.
.. but I never got round to fitting a diagnostics chip (the main reason for it being VERY popular in the London hacker scene).
It was actually quite an evil device to nuke the street creed of the Motorola brick carriers. Once the show-offs had done their "HELLO? YEAH, I'M ON MY MOBILE SO EVERYONE CAN SEE I HAVE ONE" routine, I asked them to ring my number, and then pull the much more sophisticated P3 out of my jacket.
Yes, I did go through an offensive phase :).
My first was the original Nokia Orange (2140) and other notable phones I've had include the Orange version of the 6110, the Motorola V3688 (first dual band - bought for my first business trip, to Sweden's frozen north) , Motorola L7089 (first tri-band - upgraded to for my first business trip states; Wichita of all places and also used as an IR modem to my Psion 5MX), Ericsson T68i (used with bluetooth module plugged into my Handspring Visor), Nokia 9210 (remember sending emails during my roller coaster taxi commute through Mumbai's suburbs on one of my more epic business trips).............
My longest lived phone? Easily the Ericsson T68i.
First (Analogue) phone was an OKI. It was £1/ minute - or part of a minute, if you went even one second over the minute, that was another squid. That'd be about £3 today.
Finally bought my first GSM (Nokia 2114 - 1800meg.) when my son was about to be born. (I was working at Nokia, Fleet at the time, and they didn't give their employees 'phones!). That was when Nokia Networks' workers - based in Stanhope Rd., or Admiralty Way, both in Camberley, were working 3 shifts. Still struggled to make enough basestations.
Roll onto now... I called my mate in UK from Finland yesterday, we talked for 10 minutes or so, and I know it'll cost me about the same as a small beer (€2-3).
Did piss me off today when I saw a graph of the N8's price. €450 when I got it, €200 now.
Should piss the shareholders of Nokia off, I thought, but then I realised I'm possibly one, in the form of a pension fund holder....
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