back to article Slideshow: A History of the Smartphone in 20 Handsets

With the news that world smartphone usage total has passed the billion mark in 20 years, we present 20 of the most important smartphones from the past 20 years. From the very first devices - IBM's Simon and Nokia's Communicator - to the defining products from the major platforms - RIM's BlackBerry 5810, HP's iPaq h6315 and …

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  2. moonoi
    WTF?

    Nokia N-Gage?

    Come on why on earth was that heap of junk included. I made the sad mistake of purchasing one without realizing that the speaker and microphone were on the side of the device, making it look like an elephants ear every time you used it as a phone!

    Fond memories of the Nokia Communicator though :-)

    1. Robert E A Harvey

      Re: Nokia N-Gage?

      For the same reason they made it. It looked arresting.

    2. Milo Tsukroff
      FAIL

      Re: Nokia N-Gage?

      Hey, they included an iPAQ ... that too was an entire line of elephant dung. From start to finish. Ever see a "smart" phone corrupt its entire OS (and all subsequent backups) by simply loading a Word doc greater than half-a-meg in size? Way to go, HP! My brother bought the entire deal - bluetooth voice dialing, camera, Microsoft apps, everything - long before the iPhone came on the market ... and he said, he would never buy HP again. And he hasn't.

    3. jai

      Re: Nokia N-Gage?

      i guess the N-Gage does deserve to be here - it's a prime example of everything that was wrong with smart phone and why people weren't buying them, prior to the current golden age of Android and iOS devices

    4. Steve Evans

      Re: Nokia N-Gage?

      Good to see the 7650, still got one of those. I seem to remember the N-gage being nothing more than a standard Symbian phone with a different case. I think it was identical to the 6600 hardware (still got one of those somewhere too!).

  3. fixit_f
    Thumb Up

    I started with the Orange SPV

    This was the first Windows Mobile phone, and the first handset from HTC. Bloody awful thing, but quite a few people bought them, would have been worthy of inclusion I think. The Palm / Handspring Treo 600 to this day is one of the best phones I ever had, fantastic thing, so sad that Palm dropped the ball.

    1. Giles Jones Gold badge

      Re: I started with the Orange SPV

      It had very modest specs, the battery life was terrible too.

      But the later phones were good (HTC Typhoon aka Orange SPV500), the Windows Smartphone platform was a lot nicer than the touch screen version where you would lose all your data if the battery ran out (they didn't use flash memory storage until Windows Mobile 5).

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I started with the Orange SPV

      I smashed my first SPV jumping out of a tree. The roll I went into was awesome, except for the phone being on my belt. Smashed to pieces was an understatement, but the board still synced when plugged in. I still have the 2nd SPV (E200 iirc) and it still works nicely (as a phone).

      It was the transflective screen of the SPV that made it so utterly awesome. It is still to this day the only phone I've had that looked better in sunlight than out of it.

      1. Bush_rat
        Facepalm

        Re: I started with the Orange SPV

        "The roll I went into was awesome, except for the phone being on my belt."

        That story sounded cool, till the second half of this sentence.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Orange SPV

      I had a sudden Captain Scarlet flashback there...

  4. Bodestone

    The N-Gage, really. I remember the device being a complete flop so they made the software a pladform added to other phones. The N95 on the other hand.

    And yes, the SIII is awesome but what about the one that went from niche curiosity to kick starting interest in the large phone market as more than a niche. I speak of non other than the Note. I shall be sad to see mine go but the consolation will be all the shiny in its replacement.

    Before it does go I am going to try an experiment since I still have all of my others.

    I shall use the camera on my Nokia 6230 to take a photo of my first mobile (S.E. T29s), then use the Nokia 3250 to take a snap of the 3250 showing a picture of the t29, then the N95 of that then the N900 (seeing a pattern there) . Then of course my Note can take the Goodbye Nokia pic followed by the Note2 of the Note.

  5. QuinnDexter

    Wow - the Ericsson R380s - I used to work in Cable & Wireless in Warrington and used to get the same train as those who worked at Ericsson in Birchwood, and they all had these. There I was with my T18 with removable covers and programmable ring tones thinking I was the canine's conkers. Then suddenly there was this, this think of full-frontal monochrome beauty with a STYLUS and everything.

    1. Bassey

      R380s

      I had one of these - indeed, it was my first phone. I'm not one for talking so didn't see the point in a mobile but had used PSIONs and other organisers for years. As soon as I heard they were making a device that (sot of) combined the two I was hooked. And I BELIEVE I'm correct in saying this was the first device to be marketed under the term "smartphone".

      However, it was only a smartphone in the way the first iPhone was. You couldn't actually install native software on it. But the PDA stuff was well implemented and the Box came with a full copy of Lotus Notes for synching your data! It also came with a combined dock/charging cradle and a leather carry case with a belt clip!

      However, its absolutely best feature was that the physical keypad wasn't electronic. Each button had a little nipple underneath it. When you pressed the button, the nipple touched the screen underneath which triggered the required action. It was genius. It also meant you could remove the keypad completely (the box had a little tool for doing this) and just use the virtual key-pad on the touchscreen - which I did for about five minutes before switching back.

  6. Robert E A Harvey

    6315

    I had an Ipaq that I used for a couple of years, but it had to be rebooted daily to keep it working. What is the point of a phone that might not ring?

  7. Alan Brown Silver badge

    Nokia 9000

    I have a (non-working) Nokia 9000 sitting in a display cabinet. As a piece of industrial art it was extremely cool when new and remains attention getting today among the geekerati.

    You missed the Motorola A1000 - it ran Symbian UIQ2 like the Sony phones. I retired mine last year (7 years old!) after android phones finally matched the featureset, plus the old one's buttons wore out.

    HP Ipaqs were available as phones in the early 2000s. They weren't too bad even though they ran WinCe, however most Windows phones of the day were utterly dire (I had one which ended its life in small pieces after being thrown out a window in frustration.)

    1. Piro Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      Re: Nokia 9000

      UIQ!

      I have a Sony Ericsson P900 and P990.

      UIQ was like having an early version of today's smartphones right there in your hand. A bit thick, but not as offensive as those Nokia Communicators. They didn't have touchscreens, and were just downright house-brick like.

      You could even load up ScummVM on those old UIQ devices and play Monkey Island perfectly well with the stylus!

      1. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

        Re: Nokia 9000

        UIQ was great. It's just all the Symbian software seemed to be written for the Nokia branch, at least when I started looking. Great idea about fighting off Microsoft by combining forces on one shared platform. Shame about the bit where they couldn't bring themselves to actually share...

        The P800 had the same weird button presses touch screen going on. Although it was only a number pad, for quick dialling, writing needed the stylus to press the tiny onscreen keyboard or do handwriting recognition. The P900 had a flip down keyboard, but I'm not sure if that was doing the same thing, or electronic.

        I took my keypad off, and used my fingers. The P800, and my old tablet PC, are probably the only gadgets I've had where people have been surprised and interested, and wanted a demo or play. The original iPad also got lots of attention, but people'd all seen the hype and knew what it was.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Nokia 9000

        Communicators had fully QWERTY keyboards that were very usable (especially on the 9210). The 9110 could be booted into DOS (it ran GEOS on top of DOS). A proper computer indeed.

        1. David Haig

          Re: Nokia 9000

          Had every Communicator from 9000 to 9500, still have them, and their boxes (I'm that kind of geek) loved them all. Missed out on the e series - no fax, how do you install mfp's without testing the fax - until the E7-00 belle. Usable, good looking, great screen but no a Communicator.

          Ps once got pulled by the police with a 9000 in my jacket pocket- they classed it as an offensive weapon!

    2. Christian Berger

      Was to early

      The Nokia communicators would have been awesome devices back then if data transmission wouldn't have been so expensive back then. Of course todays version would probably either have an Atom inside or run Maemo/Meego/Debian by default

  8. Steve Todd
    WTF?

    Non of the early HTC Windows Mobile devices?

    Branded as the XDA range over here by O2

    1. Bodestone

      Re: Non of the early HTC Windows Mobile devices?

      We still have a few of them in our office and several in active service out in the field due to a piece of software that only runs on Windows mobile 6.5.

    2. Clive Galway

      Re: Non of the early HTC Windows Mobile devices?

      Agreed - the HTC TyTn II (AKA Kaiser / O2 XDA Stellar / T-Mobile MDA Vario III) was one of the most amazing devices ever: 4-row QWERTY keyboard with a tilt screen.

      Along a similar line was the HTC Touch Pro: A 5-row QWERTY keyboard - Personally I would sell my own left testicle for a 5-row QWERTY android phone.

  9. simmondp

    Motorola Accompli 008

    Motorola Accompli 008 - a product before it time, only really sold in Asia, not available in Europe or USA.

  10. Chris Miller

    Handspring Treo 180g

    Palm OS - which meant good sync with your desktop and a wide range of apps - plus a decent phone. The first real smartphone in my opinion and certainly more significant than the Treo 650.

    1. captain veg Silver badge

      Re: Handspring Treo 180g

      Agreed. Had the colour 270, and it was great.

      I never actually wanted a phone, that was just a by-product of the mobile data aspect. Even so, it worked brilliantly as a mobe, even for this luddite who hadn't the faintest idea how to work one. I still can't type on a numeric keypad.

      The hardware wasn't fantastic, it was the software that made it. Such a shame that PalmOS was allowed to die of neglect.

      -A.

  11. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

    Happy memories of the Sony/Ericsson P800 here. It was well built, and mine lasted for years. I had it for 2 or 3, then passed it on, after a year in the drawer, to someone who'd broken theirs. He was still using it a couple of years ago.

    It was severely limited as to what it could do, because it was UIQ not Nokia's S60 version of Symbian. So every time I saw a brilliant new app in PCW, it would turn out I couldn't run it. I never successfully got Bluetooth to work, although back then this was nothing unusual - and just as likely to be the other devices as the phone. The stylus was horrible to hold, because it was a flat, plastic thingy. But that was OK, because I got a pen with black, blue and stylus nibs. Being Sony, it was also encumbered with Memory Stick. Except not the full size one, that wasn't that much more expensive than SD cards - but Memory Stick Duo (now I think called mini), where you had a smaller card and full-sized adaptor. They were over twice the price of SD cards, which were horrifically expensive at the time.

    Still it was amazing for the time, and quite impressively easy to use. You had a flip down keypad, that had little pins behind each key, which simply pressed an electronic version on the touch-screen behind it. So I took that off, and it was lovely to use. You only had to resort to the stylus when you got into more complicated operations, even some menus were just big enough to operate with your finger. And I think I had proper handwriting recognition, instead of the fake letters you had to learn with Palm (although theirs were probably still faster).

    The P900s were even better, a friend had one. But I decided on dumb phones, and I think I moved to a Motorola V3 RAZR, which on balance is probably my favourite phone ever. It was only 2 years ago that I jumped back into smartphone land, with a work HTC Wildfire. Clever, but frustrating. Now a Nokia Lumia 710 - Lovely to use, until you try do something complex, then annoying that you can't.

    I still think the early iPhones looked much nicer than the later ones. I think the 4 onwards are ugly. The HTC Desire style ones are my current favourite, rubbery stuff on metal for toughness and good grip, and nice and rounded in the hand. Although the childish side of me likes the idea of a big Nokia 920, in bright, bright yellow.

    1. Thomas Whipp

      totally agree - I had a P800 which I managed to loose in my own car (god knows how I spent days looking for it) and then a P910 afterwards. They felt massively ahead of their time back then.

  12. BlinkenLights

    Mitac Mio a701

    Probably the first phone to include a GPS chip (SiRFstarIII).

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Mitac Mio a701

      I had one of those for 10 months, longest I'd kept a phone for back then. It was pretty good, although my work colleague who also bought one got a dud and never did get it working right.

      It was good as it came with all the charger and windscreen mounts.

  13. PeterI

    Needs one of the HTC range of windows mobile phones the Tytn was good in its day (I think I got it to tether as a wifi hotspot) and I still rather liked the Nike with it's slide out phone keyboard.

    In pure functionality terms my current android phone isn't much better (maps is the only biggy) than a tytn would be with a bigger screen (and seems to need to be rebooted more often than the Tytn) we don't seem to have moved on much.

    1. Andrew Peake

      Yeah I had a TyTn, it ended life being thrown against a wall after i had recalibrated the screen for the umpteenth time inside an hour. I have no idea why but mine just would not seem to hold on to the screen alignment settings and would drive me crazy.

      It made me swear I'd never buy another HTC device, which I broke with the Desire and regretted very quickly.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    I started with the 7650 and then went through a 9210 and a 6260 along the way. I've used Symbian, Windows Mobile, Blackberry for work, Windows Phone, iOS and now Android. I think the only one I've never touched is Palm's OS.

    I think my fondest memories are of the 9210. It was friggin' lovely and apps available for it just rocked. Even now, there's no calendar app on any platform that comes close to it. I miss my 9210 a lot. I miss Symbian too; the community was great (big shout out to www.allaboutsymbian.com) and the apps were innovative. What happened Nokia? You used to push the boat out with every new model! At least it beat Bill Gates' Windows Mobile (too bad JPZR!)

    Symbian made me feel warm :) I always wanted a P800 though, they looked so happy!

    Windows Mobile just crashed a lot; it was all hat and no cattle.

    iPhone? I thought that was great until I looked through the Apple bubble (after my 3GS) and saw the competition was actually a bit better in many areas.

    Windows Phone (I had the HTC HD7) was great, I liked that a lot but ended up feeling Microsoft wasn't doing too much with the Windows Phone 7 platform. I didn't know how right I was.

    Android now, through and through!

    Great piece, totally loved seeing the pictures :)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      It's a shame Android isn't really innovating, just basically copying iOS and all of the other mobile platforms of old.

      If you want to see innovation it is Microsoft and RIM now. Both have thought about how people use phones and built user interfaces to make these common actions quick and easy.

      With Android and iOS it's "launch an app", "switch to another app" etc. Tiresome.

    2. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

      Old Windows mobile could be great, when it didn't crash. The combination of, calendar, diary, phone and satnav was great - back in 2004/5. Shame about the occasional hard resets... If MS hadn't taken their eye off the ball, they could still be big in mobile, rather than sprinting to catch up with WinPho 8.

      My old P800 remembered that it was a phone first. And then did all the other stuff. Which I'm not sure I'd say for any smartphone I've used since, though Win Pho 7 is the closest to that. But it's 2 button presses (one button's quite small as well) to get to a phone keypad. I've never used Palm, Blackberry, or Nokia's flavour of Symbian, so don't know what they're like. If WinPho 8 can improve on 7, without buggering things up, I think I'll stay that route, otherwise I'll probably head back to Android - as I think the iPhone is too expensive. £550 for a handset you've got to use in the rain, and might drop...

  15. Nev

    Look at the variety/innovation...

    ...and look where we've ended up:

    Large touch-screen slabs with icon driven GUIs and no buttons to control volume or answer/hang-up a call.

    Makes everyone look like Dom Joly or an 80s throwback.

    (I waited for the Sendo-X but settled on a Panasonic X700 as my first "smart" phone.)

  16. Paul Hampson 1

    HTC windows mobile should defintiely be included (HTC universal is a good example) and the iconic blackberry bold

  17. David Gosnell

    Predictably...

    .... quite a lot of curved corners even in the early models.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What about the Orange SPV M500/M600

    And Windows mobile 2003, stylus fun?

  19. Craig Vaughton
    Coat

    Palm 600

    Palm Treo 600 as the title, with a photo of a Treo 650? I'll get my coat.

    I had a 600, 650s and two 680s, all great phones, though a tad heavy in your pocket! Used to love PalmOS and Graffiti, despite a few glitches they never really fixed. Shame HP bought Palm and WebOS got lost somewhere along the way.

  20. Shaha Alam

    O2 XDA

    what about the XDA's? And the other window mobile phones??

  21. Matt Devney

    Nokia 7650

    I remember buying one of these, and getting one for my wife as well as no-one else we knew had one at the time and we needed someone to send the photo messages to! 0.3 mega pixels!

    It looked lovely, and I liked the solid feel to it, but our network was crap and expensive so we hardly used the photo msg functionality.

    At least the slidey cover was swish and was well engineered - unlike more recent samsung and htc mobiles I could mention...

    1. Dapprman
      Thumb Up

      Re: Nokia 7650

      I had a 7650 for 5 days. Was a lovely phone to use but I wanted Bluetooth, which either it did not have, else did not have for voice, so it went back to Vodafone. About 18 months later I got my P900 - partly because smart phones had (to me) become usable, but also a lot down to the fact I just did not get along with Graffitti 2 on my Palm Tungsten T2 (loved my Palm Xv and Psion MX before that) and was close to throwing it against a wall.

  22. brainbone

    Missing, like most "smart phone histories", is the LG Prada before the iPhone in 2007

    Is it that hard to remember?

    1. Antidisestablishmentarianist

      Re: Missing, like most "smart phone histories", is the LG Prada before the iPhone in 2007

      Bought one for my wife. It was crap - and for that reason we try not to remember it.

  23. Dapprman
    Thumb Up

    I still have my P900 some where

    Possibly one of the best smart phones I've had - though wireless technology moved on. Shame they screwed up on the P990.

    To me since the P900/910 day smart phones have become dumber and dumber until now they are little more than application launching phones. The PIM/PDA these days feels like disjointed add-ons designed by people who'd not normally use them. it's not as if apps are a new concept or an invention from Apple. Used to be lots for UIQ, not only on Handango App Store, but also else where around the web, just not as well centralised.

  24. Robert Grant

    Not an Apple chap but...

    Surely the peak iPhone was the 3GS? So far ahead of its competition, in a way subsequent phones haven't been.

  25. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Why isn't the Apple iPhone 5 at the top of the evolutionary ladder?

    says a troll in a mask

  26. Tim Walker
    Meh

    Must... resist... mustn't... post...

    ...no, I can't stop it: really, no Nokia N95?

    Granted, it seems inconceivable that a "smartphone" launched only five years ago (in the same year as the first iPhone, indeed), could've possessed hardware number-keys and no touchscreen, but the N95 packed 3G data and a 5-megapixel stills/VGA video camera, when it's easy to forget the first iPhone lacked either. (And before the fanbois flame on, yes, the iPhone has caught up somewhat over the years... ;-) )

    I'm not going to gloss over the initial software issues - I got my N95 in 2007, so I lived through them - but the device was arguably one of the most capable smartphones of its time, even if the iPhone quickly became the standard for other mobiles to follow (influencing my current Nokia N8... oh, the irony).

    Otherwise, interesting feature, not least to see how far we have come in so little time.

    1. Antidisestablishmentarianist

      Re: Must... resist... mustn't... post...

      Ah yes, the fond memories of this forum and all the 'my N95 can do this, my N95 can do that, my N95 was doing that years ago' posts when the iPhone came out. Very entertaining.

  27. Johan Bastiaansen
    Coat

    I started about 10 years ago...

    with an iPAQ 3970. That was still Compaq then. And you're right, it was a PDA, not a smartphone. But I put a GSM/GPRS sleeve on it (developed by Option) and I had a TomTom GPS mouse in my car. So it had all the functionality that modern devices had, but it was quite a bit thicker. In every meaning one of the word, because it was running Pocket PC = Windows. So Microsoft was involved and it was unstable.

    And it often failed to pick up incoming calls.

    But it would pick up your stress levels so when you were in a hurry, you would have to wait extra long for a GPS-fix.

    And it weighed a ton so you couldn't carry it around in the pocket of a summer jacket.

    But I was young then ! ! !

    And people were impressed when I put that brick on the table.

  28. Dave Fox
    Go

    Another vote for the Sony Ericsson P800/P900 range here!

    Glad to see the Sony Ericsson P800 and P900 ranges made the grade here.

    I had both, and they were fantastic phones - in my opinion these devices running the UIQ flavour of Symbian were the true successors to the Psion Series 5 devices, and it was such a shame that Nokia ruined Symbian by hamstringing ti with such useless UI's as their "Series <whatever>" interfaces.

    Whenever I hear some revisionist tosser talking about how Apple "invented" the smartphone, I think back to my P800/P900 phones and sigh!

    1. Enjibenji
      Stop

      Re: Another vote for the Sony Ericsson P800/P900 range here!

      Shame they then went on to make the P990. One of the buggiest POS phone I have ever used. Obviously the lesson that SE took from trying to make phones more like computers was to have it crash all the time

  29. Mad Hacker
    Happy

    Samsung SPH-i500 (or SGH-i500)

    Sorry. The first phone that finally got me off of dumb phones ran Palm OS and was a flip form factor. The Samsung SGH-i500. I've never bought a phone on "opening day" except for that one. Back then you had to call around to the cell phone stores to find one in stock but if they had it you didn't have to stand in line outside. I loved that phone. I was going to replace it with the next gen SPH-i500 which had more mature hardware (faster, camera, external screen, etc) but Samsung dropped Palm OS phones just before its US launch so it never came to the US officially.

    Once I had gotten use to web browsing (yes, crappy as it was) and email on my phone I couldn't go back and eventually upgraded to a Treo 650 simply due to hardware needs (higher resolution screen, SD card slot, camera.) But even as I hold my iPhone 4S which is my 3rd iPhone I still miss the flip form factor of my i500.

  30. Dan Paul
    Devil

    Pictures should have been in Chronological order with circles and arrows

    Does anyone else think that this should have been done in complete chronological order, show every phone ever made and include blurbs on each phones specific technical features along with (at least) twenty seven 8 by 10 color glossy pictures with circles and arrows pointing to specific portions of the phones, all to provide dumbass patent attorneys a real guide on "Prior Art"??????????

    Unfortunately this is a case of American Blind Justice and Judge Koh doesn't want to look at the rounded corners or the music/media features of phones that aren't Apple.

  31. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I'd forgotten how good the maps on the original iPhone looked

    That's progress for you.

  32. ratfox
    Paris Hilton

    What, no Danger Hiptop? aka: Where is the Paris Hilton angle?

    Paris Hilton is most displeased that you forgot her phone. It even got a story in the Reg for being hacked: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/21/paris_hacked/

  33. gav_taylor
    WTF?

    no HTC TYTNII!?!

    how can you miss the TYTNII! my first toe dip into the smart phone world, touch screen, full desktop browsing (via Opera Mobile) yes it was Windows but before anyone had heard of the iPhone, these HTC devices were king of the smart phones giving Palm a good run for their money.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Htc_tytn_ii.jpg

  34. RobinHunter

    Innovation - where is it

    I had the r380, most people at the time couldn't understand the point of it I loved it. Look at most of the phones these days, innovation appears to have vanished. Maybe the current slab form factor is perfect

  35. ganymede io device

    My first smartphone - Sierra Wireless voq

    A curvy tri-band GSM handy with flip out qwerty keyboard, SD card memory expansion. Windows Mobile2003 but voqMail apps quite usable if not quite integrated and could even do VPN access

    They didn't do W-CDMA so did not succeed in the important US home market, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/03/sierra_sued_over_voq/

    Remaindered items were a eurozone bargain. Thanks expansys and other savvy importers.

  36. Be In My Solo

    Aside from the all-in-ones

    1999 deserves a shout out for the IrDA powered pairing of a Palm Vx & Nokia 8850. That combination got me addicted to mobile internet a couple of years before the PDQs, Treos and P800/900 came along.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Aside from the all-in-ones

      That took me back - I remember around 2001, infrared-pairing my phone of the time (a Nokia 6210(i?)) with my Psion Series 5mx to go online. OK, it was dog-slow - it made my home Internet (56K modem) feel speedy - but no matter... I could go online with my Psion, wherever I was (woo!).

      Still remember sending festive email greetings at Christmas 2001 to various folk (including my wife-to-be), from the Psion over an intermittent mobile Internet link which kept up just long enough to send short plain-text messages... how we've progressed in a decade, eh?

  37. daiakuma
    Thumb Up

    I had a P800. I remember it quite fondly. Definitely one of the phones that showed the way forward. The P910 continued the tradition, but then, for some reason, Sony Ericsson seemed to forget where it was going.

  38. Damothelawyer

    7710

    It's interesting that no one seems to have any love for the 7710; it was a brilliant phone but very much the red-haired stepchild of it's generation.

  39. Steven H Taylor
    Alert

    O2 XDA, indeed

    Far more worthy of inclusion than the flopped N-gage handsets, the first HTC Windows Mobile phone, the O2 XDA was at least as revolutionary as the first iPhone, only without the hype.

    It wasn't *my* first smartphone -- I jumped aboard with the O2 XDA II. It served me well for many years. The first in a long a still running string of relevant full touch-screen phones that spelled the end of the stand-alone PDA.

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