The original sidekick is the earliest pivot phone I can think of. The Samsung Juke came out several years later but I don't think it sold that well because of how tiny it was. I don't expect any pivot phones to sell that well. For that LG phone, what are you supposed to do with the bottom screen? It's wasted on media controls, how often do you need a fully unobstructed view of a video while you are pausing or fast forwarding? Games make sense, the DS took advantage of a second screen but this requires games to develop just for this second screen. Video editing makes the most sense as long as there's a video editor out there that can take advantage of the second screen but also document editing too (but who really wants to do this on a phone?).
The LG Wing feels like the spiritual successor to the Sharp Aquos 912SH, where you flipped and then rotated the top half.
(mentioned elsewhere while I was trying to remember its name)
An alternative is that every single phone looks the same. Black or grey square case with a touch screen. There's literally nothing to design or make interesting, just every second model change rounded corners to sharp corners and call it "new design".
Yes, when opening Google Play I'm presented with Games, Apps and Books. Games are designed by psychologists to keep us engaged with unnatural colours, actions and injecting ourselves with dopamine every 30 seconds, and apps? Apps also contains games, but also sponsored content, like I don't remember for how long Disney+ ad was there... since April at least. Very interesting. The other software? All my installed apps have updates about at least twice per month, but I never notice anything changing. Bugs aren't fixed, performance isn't improved, but now my banking app can access my location. Old phones had no "dynamic software" updates, everything worked and never needed updates or upgrades, unless.
We have throwaway hardware that looks the same, made with throwaway software where updates make no difference. We have fewer choices now. It's just Android vs iPhone, both look the same and copy each other design and functionality, both in hardware and software. We had games that were hard and required some planning on paper and hardware that was interesting and unique.
I wish phone makers weren't all designing down to the lowest common denominator. You can spend a thousand dollars on a "gaming phone" but you haven't been able to buy a phone with actual buttons for playing games in eleven damn years because god forbid anybody diverge from the "glass monolith" design.
> because god forbid anybody diverge from the "glass monolith" design.
A few years ago my building's elevators were breaking down and had to be completely replaced. The new ones have a touchscreen that only ever displays the floor numbers, and real buttons that only go up to 9 (in a grid like a phone) where you have to hit two of them to go to floors 10+.
I feel for you - those buttons will stop working very well quite soon and trying to enter "12" will get you 1, 2, and finally 12.
Check every elevator carefully, ADA regulations sometimes require at least ONE elevator in the building to have real buttons (for the blind, for example).
Yeah, which could be really annoying for someone who has a challenge pressing two buttons fast enough to trigger.
A hotel I stayed at had touchscreen "requests" for elevators (you put in your floor and it would call a elevator for you) and it was super annoying (trying to get floor 12 would doublebounce on 1 and 2 so you'd often get 11 and 22 before getting 12) until I found a pedestal out of the way that had real buttons for all floors.
The "hold your keycard up against the thing" is also really annoying when it is 5 feet off the ground; imaging having to wait for an elevator until someone comes along who can hold your card up there for you.
The physical buttons get in the way of day-to-day use. That's why brands like Asus and Razer design phones that are shipped with special cases containing things like joysticks, trigger, and other physical buttons (using USB-C ports or Bluetooth for transmissing buttons). Others still experiment. The ROG Phone 2 came with distance sensors on the side to function as analogue triggers.
Phones with buttons have been tried and failed. Same with using your phone's processor for a desktop environment by simply plugging it into a dock; Samsung's DeX comes closest, but very few people seem to use it.
In practice, the easiest way to combine phones and games is to either stick with the touch screen interaction all games are designed for, or to grab a Bluetooth controller. Works across many games, almost all phones, and you have a pick in the hand feel or button quality rather than being limited by the design choices of the phone designer.
If you're into playing games on the go, tools like the Steam Deck or one of the more recent cloud streaming handhelds are probably better.
Actually, I love this. I remember having a teeny tiny phone back then (not quite a Zoolander size), and it was a lot of fun. Now everything is a boring rectangle of glass. Bring back the fun!
I did some investigation around this. At their peak, Nokia launched 46 models a single year [1]. I believe Apple has launched somewhere <35 models of iPhone in the fifteen years of its existence. Part of the problem was, companies like Nokia couldn't conceive thinking that there could be one model that's good for everyone. Like music? You need to get a music phone like XpressMusic. Business person? Get N97. Low on budget? Get the simple 1108. The proliferation of models just spread expertise, and marketing dollars, and ended up diluting both. Instead of making one awesome phone, you have tons of mediocre models.
The genius of Steve Jobs was in showing that you can have whole company focus on making a brilliant device that works for everyone. I still don't get why companies are so much focused on launching hundreds of different models instead of one and leveraging economies of scale.
Exactly - market segmentation was huge and every phone was basically "identical" - storage space, processor speed, connection speed, even screen size, these things really didn't "matter" much yet.
So I am not the only one who thinks their deluge of models was ridiculous. To be fair, most of them - for better or for worse - had the same guts (they only used a handful of bseband chips most probably from TI internally named UPP8M, UPPWD2, UPP2M); from service manuals you can tell the most often varied thing was the RF section. But still, NRE, tooling and certification would cost millions per model. Injection molds would cost serveral hundred grand alone.
It's like when you go to the cheap lunch restaurant that have 70 items on their menu vs the fine dining place that has a set three course menu for the evening. Quantity signals cheapness.
The genius of Steve Jobs was simply that he had enough taste, vision and authority that the company was actually focused on delivering _products_.
The state of the average enterprise, like Microsoft and Google, is that various business units and departments have devolved into cargo culting process to satisfy the petty career needs of their managers and workers.
It's not complicated. The people in charge not only do not understand product development, but they fundamentally don't care and will get uncomfortable if you try to make them care. It is far too tall an order, and too much work.
The genius of Steve Jobs/Apple was recognizing that phones should become computers. And that people would be willing to sacrifice battery life for that to happen.
It’s really that simple. People keep forgetting but the iPhone wasn’t the first Apple designed phone. The Motorola Rokr was. And it was a failure because it was an Apple designed Phone.
The iPhone, OTOH, was a computer in your pocket, of which one function was a phone. When the iPhone came out the RIM guys thought it was gonna be a massive failure because it had such terrible battery life and such a terrible typing experience.
But it turned out people didn’t care as much about battery life (also, Apple had gained a lot of experience with optimizing battery life through years of tuning OSX to be able to build the most energy efficient laptops) as they did about the massive screen.
Typing was a poorer experience, but auto-correct was good enough.
The phone guys who spent all their time trying to make longer lasting phones with a better physical keyboard simply could not conceive that those factors might not even be all that important for consumers.
Finally, what really blew up the iPhone was the App Store, and it’s hard to see anyone else doing it, because very few companies had the experience building up a high quality developer platform the way Apple had. Very few other companies had the developer following which would build apps for them despite the massive constraints Apple was imposing on them.
I don't think Apple really designed the Rokr. It was a Motorola E398 with a terrible version of "iTunes" and a horrible 100 song limit as to not cut into the sales of the iPod.
Phones as computers was already out there as an idea and Handspring and others had been trying to make it work.
The iPhone was more limited as a computer than a competing Palm OS or Windows Mobile device but it was more slick and in some ways polished (although lacking in others). And of course they still had the bulk of then DRM locked digital music/video sales they could leverage to make it appeal to consumers.
I miss the days when you had bonkers phones like this. I agree with most people that life is a little dull with our iPhone clones. It's nice for watching videos (which I don't do too much), and less nice for typing (which I do rather more). The E90 form factor is still my dream phone.
If you think the Nokia phones were nuts, you should dig up stuff coming out of Japan 2000-2010, like the Hitachi WOO Ketai H001 (yes, that's a real name). All kinds of flip/fold/swivel/etc. with TV tuners and DVR functionality, digital cameras, music players, etc. Sharp Aquos 912SH is another one which comes to mind.
I think it's kind of sad that we went from "let's see if we can add a phone to this" in the 90s/2000s to "lets see if we can add this to a phone" in the post-iPhone era.
Given the scarcity of phone connections I suppose it was inevitable, but man was it fun for awhile.
Japanese phones get left out of the conversation because these topics spin into nostalgia and the Western audience doesn’t have any experience with them. Likewise the JP discussion wouldn’t fondly remember all the Nokia variants.
On a side note I have a pet theory that Japanese cell phones helped push display technology forward. The English alphabet can be displayed very easily with limited pixels but kana and kanji cannot so there’s less pressure for Western manufacturers to innovate displays. For a phone to first be successful in Japan it needs a very high resolution display.
The same was true of computers. Japanese PCs had high-resolution graphics way before American PCs because of the need to draw kanji with enough detail. This led to a parallel universe of not quite PC compatible standards like the NEC PC88 and PC98 lines.
I thought the list was missing Japanese phones too! I went on holiday to Japan in the early 00s, and I remember thinking how all of the phones were way ahead of their time. Phones with flip-and-swivel screens, phones that looked sleek, metallic, sexy and modern, phones with full colour displays that were not some Palm monstrosity, phones that didn't look like phones and instead looked like some leather-and-metal accessory (only took calls), so many cool phones! I wanted them so bad.
I wonder why they never became popular overseas. The iPhone, sure, but there was a whole period before the iPhone where Japanese phones were way ahead of their time.
There was also the not insignificant cost of completely re-engineering the RF frontend and radios.
As back then (an partly still) Japan used cellular bands and technologies that ware completely different from other countries.
It kept the competition out, but also made it hard for them to compete abroad.
And then iPhone happened and many of those manufacturers are no longer in the biz.
I remember that one! The aughts were a truly a golden era in Japanese phone design. The technology was also waaay ahead of the west. We're just now starting to actually use the QR code thing, which was everywhere in like 2005. And 1seg? That was really fun tech. TV on my morning commute was truly like living in the future.
For iconic phones, though, I was always a big fan of the au Design phones like the infobar (2003) and Design Skin. The color schemes are legendary.
We all like crazy designs like these because they are a breeding ground for innovation. However they tend to flop unless one of their innovations proves truly revolutionary.
Early personal computers and even laptops had interesting and varied designs before everyone coalesced around the optimal desktop, tower, and notebook designs.
A big part of the problem is software. If a phone maker puts out a truly unique form factor today, they are stuck in a situation where most existing software was built assuming the user is on a giant rectangle.
Yup, I was a big fan of phones with actual keyboards, before and after the smartphone era, for exactly that reason. Transferring the muscle memory from typing on a PC keyboard to these mini-keyboards was surprisingly fast, and after that you could simply type without worrying about T9 fucking things up (one classic in German was that it turned "Frohe", as in "Happy Easter" or "Merry Christmas", into "Droge", as in illegal drugs). My collection includes the Nokia 5510 (also memorable for being one of the first phones with a built-in music player, although the memory was laughably small), the Nokia 6822 (I think this was the successor of the phone in the tweet - looks like quite a few "dads" must have bought one) and the Motorola Droid/Milestone.
It was actually aimed at the blackberry crowd that valued having a full keyboard at the time. I had one for a while in Nokia. It was great for things like email. Much lighter than the 9500/9300s it replaced. Those were heavy bricks. Different times of course but I do miss hardware keyboards.
I think we lost something with all those hardware form-factors converging on essentially the same design: a rectangle that barely fits in your pocket.
The author has no clue what he is talking about. I absolutely loved my Nokia 6822 - you could install a third party SSH client on it and that's how the remote work era really began for me. Next phone for me was obviously Nokia 9300 - also with full QWERTY keyboard. What came later was Android/iPhone which in a way was step back in terms of productivity due to lack of physical keyboard.
Small, had a keyboard, and cost less than $100. Also, the back of the top-half was a mirror. Oh, but most important: it felt GOOD to swivel out and snap shut.
This thing's software is maybe more interesting than its form factor, due to it being a kind of proto-Android stack (Java VM equivalent with some amount of build-time bytecode preprocessing to accelerate it on devices)
That thing is from 2002, kind of ancient even by side-swipe-keyboard phone standards. Only got my first one when HTC started offering them on our market around the 2004/2005 time (with windows mobile 5, ymmv).
Danger also had a pretty nice App Store model and a nice developer and user community in their phpBB forums. The carriers that supported the Hiptop also had a hosted web interface where you could manage your email, calendar, notes, etc.
I'm friends with a few of the super early Danger employees. My buddy and I were trying to use that opportunity to get our app into that store. At the time, you kind of needed to know someone on the inside to get listed on stores, especially if your app wasn't a game or ringtone.
We built a small and simple bartender app that had a UX almost exactly like the hiptop address book. You could easily look up recipes for drinks and then we'd let you build a shopping list. It was a fun exercise that was about a month of development time for the both of us. Mostly, it was just cleaning up the recipe data and adding a few drinks on our own.
It turns out that T-Mobile wouldn't list the app because they didn't have the ability to make sure that everyone using the app was 21+. We fought with this for months over it and eventually gave up. It was a really frustrating experience.
Apple came along with the iPhone and their own store model and while people used to complain heavily about it, I kept thinking at least it wasn't T-Mobile.
By the way, the VM was the precursor to Dalvik, which eventually turned into what is now Android...
I had one of these in college, and it was awesome. It had AOL Instant Messenger built on, and the L/R shoulder buttons would let you slide between your conversations. So quick and satisfying.
Is there a more general framework for understanding when a sudden amount of variation is expected and perhaps rational? The analogy is very loose, but this makes me think a bit of the cambrian explosion, or periods when a sudden environmental shift is followed by a profusion of new species. When a new 'space' is opened, it seems like a range of things can try to fill it, until one strategy becomes dominant, at least until conditions change?
Glad to see this comment - the Cambrian explosion analogy was the exact one that came to mind for me, and I actually think, as you put it, the same dynamics are in play. Lots of different approaches are taken until it is clear that, after time, one is dominant and the best. I remember when the iPhone first came out the whole "tapping on glass" keyboard was highly controversial, but it soon won out (and, IMO, especially because it allows swipe typing).
As an aside, this comment from the tweet thread is genius: "I call this one the Shyamalan because of the unnecessary twist".
My impression is not that swipe typing is the winner, but because of configurability of the keyboard (different language layouts) and the option to use the screen estate for other purposes (e.g. when watching videos). The latter is particularly important, as the screen-to-body ratio is critical in those devices.
After the Model T there was still variety in style and design building on the basic formula... up until the present day when everybody seems to have settled on the same basic bean-shaped blob, specialty vehicles such as sports cars and pickups excepted. Bigger or smaller beans account for body variations from subcompact to crossover, and the name Cadillac, which once conjured images of limo-like luxury, today means a fancier bean.
Someone had a bunch of "parking lots from the ages" from the Model T era, the 50s, and to today, and what was interesting is how similar all the vehicles looked each time.
Check out the Cadillac Escalade. That is the Cadillac that is still used for limos and the high end models sure shoot for limo-like luxury. I have not been in one inside, so I don't know how well they hit that mark though. Not a bean shaped blob.
Arguably, the Model A is the first modern car, moreso than the Model T, which has a lot of quirks that would be unrecognizable to today's drivers. For example, it didn't even had a throttle pedal, and choosing the gears is done through a bizantine system that includes a "reverse pedal". In a Model T you get this distinct impression of riding on top of the car instead of inside it, and it has many other things like this. By comparison, the Model A is remarkably similar to the cars of today, except much more primitive of course.
This happens in the growth phase of an industry lifecycle. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/industrylifecycle.asp. During the growth phase, investors value companies not based on the money they can make today, but on the money they might make tomorrow. This encourages risk-taking, and results in large amounts of variation in the market.
It is followed by maturity, a feature of which is consolidation (incl reduction in choice and variation as the less profitable options are weeded out).
You nailed it. This had to happen. As phones got smarter, no one knew how to optimize the UI for so many new features. Everyone knew that a certain form factor would win out eventually, but no one knew what it was. Everyone knew that whoever got it right first might dominate the market. The only logical thing was to iterate constantly, and blindly. Much the same thing happened with the personal computer market from the late 70s until the mid 90s or so.
My favorite phone ever is still the Sony Ericsson P800. It had a full touchscreen, jog dial and detachable stylus. The number pad was just an overlay on the bottom half of the touch screen and could be flipped open or removed.
I got so much flak as it cost as much as an iPhone, but in 2003.
I had one and thought it was pretty cool - first phone I owned that could run an SSH client. I miss the tactile controls (jog dial) that compliment touch screens.
I actually had the Nokia 7600 pictured at the top of the thread. It's often ridiculed, but I don't know anyone else who had one who can fairly pass judgement. It had genuinely good ergonomics - not disimilar to the fancy split keyboard philosophy. Each thumb had clear acces to specific buttons and the distance between them was maximised, easing strain on the wrists. In the era of T9, it was great. It was also hand friendly for phonecalls - remember them?
In response to sibling comment, comparing it to the iPhone is silly. The iPhone OS 1 was half a decade away when th 7600 was launched and started at $499. This was a cheap, fun phone using well trodden software on a budget. Nokia dominated the market and market segmentation is a natural strategy in that situation - especially before touchscreens allowed customisation/personalisation in software.
I had the 7600 too, and enjoyed the “lemon” form factor!
But it certainly wasn’t a cheap phone when it launched. The typical Nokia cost around $150. This was the high-end model of Nokia’s feature phone range, and they highlighted it in ads with fashion brands. (The fashion touch was a leather strap you could attach to the lemon phone’s corner.)
The 7600 did include technical innovation: it was the first Nokia model ever to include 3G, and IIRC it was also the first European phone to shoot video (stamp-sized 144p clips).
That's interesting, I stand corrected. I was on a budget at the time and definitely wouldn't have had lots of disposisble income to spend on a phone. Maybe I bought it as it was being phased out.
I have a cat s61, which has a tiny bump out at the top of the standard cellphone rectangle shape for the IR camera. People always ask me what it is, because this minute detail stands out so much when everything else looks the same.
Bananas? I call it interesting, brave and fun times. My two year old phone can do practically everything that can be done with today's flagship, but back then the difference between a year would be GPS, 4x storage, megapixel camers, interesting hardware. Changes were massive and manufacturers weren't afraid to experiment.
It was used in The Matrix with a spring-load mechanism because, IIRC, the Wachowskis thought it would be cool if the phone worked like the slide release on a handgun. For the sequels, they managed to convince Samsung to design a phone with a similar spring-loaded mechanism that you could actually buy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_SPH-N270
Nokia also introduced an actual spring-loaded model already in 1999: the 7110, which also, incidentally, was the first mobile phone to include a WAP browser.
122 comments
[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 92.5 ms ] threadKinda like the LG Wing: https://www.lg.com/global/lgwing
We have throwaway hardware that looks the same, made with throwaway software where updates make no difference. We have fewer choices now. It's just Android vs iPhone, both look the same and copy each other design and functionality, both in hardware and software. We had games that were hard and required some planning on paper and hardware that was interesting and unique.
What matters is the rugged case selection, but unfortunately they don't seem to focus on that as much as they could.
A few years ago my building's elevators were breaking down and had to be completely replaced. The new ones have a touchscreen that only ever displays the floor numbers, and real buttons that only go up to 9 (in a grid like a phone) where you have to hit two of them to go to floors 10+.
Check every elevator carefully, ADA regulations sometimes require at least ONE elevator in the building to have real buttons (for the blind, for example).
A hotel I stayed at had touchscreen "requests" for elevators (you put in your floor and it would call a elevator for you) and it was super annoying (trying to get floor 12 would doublebounce on 1 and 2 so you'd often get 11 and 22 before getting 12) until I found a pedestal out of the way that had real buttons for all floors.
The "hold your keycard up against the thing" is also really annoying when it is 5 feet off the ground; imaging having to wait for an elevator until someone comes along who can hold your card up there for you.
Sounds like that can easily be fixed with enter and backspace buttons.
Phones with buttons have been tried and failed. Same with using your phone's processor for a desktop environment by simply plugging it into a dock; Samsung's DeX comes closest, but very few people seem to use it.
In practice, the easiest way to combine phones and games is to either stick with the touch screen interaction all games are designed for, or to grab a Bluetooth controller. Works across many games, almost all phones, and you have a pick in the hand feel or button quality rather than being limited by the design choices of the phone designer.
If you're into playing games on the go, tools like the Steam Deck or one of the more recent cloud streaming handhelds are probably better.
The genius of Steve Jobs was in showing that you can have whole company focus on making a brilliant device that works for everyone. I still don't get why companies are so much focused on launching hundreds of different models instead of one and leveraging economies of scale.
[1]: https://twitter.com/shubhamjainco/status/1406338323531010050
How can any of them be any good? How can any of them ever get any useful time in the spotlight?
No, it doesn't work for everyone.
He showed that there are enough people who can and are willing to pay for a premium device. He choose a niche.
Nokia uses a classic price segmentation strategy.
Read more here: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...
The state of the average enterprise, like Microsoft and Google, is that various business units and departments have devolved into cargo culting process to satisfy the petty career needs of their managers and workers.
It's not complicated. The people in charge not only do not understand product development, but they fundamentally don't care and will get uncomfortable if you try to make them care. It is far too tall an order, and too much work.
It’s really that simple. People keep forgetting but the iPhone wasn’t the first Apple designed phone. The Motorola Rokr was. And it was a failure because it was an Apple designed Phone.
The iPhone, OTOH, was a computer in your pocket, of which one function was a phone. When the iPhone came out the RIM guys thought it was gonna be a massive failure because it had such terrible battery life and such a terrible typing experience.
But it turned out people didn’t care as much about battery life (also, Apple had gained a lot of experience with optimizing battery life through years of tuning OSX to be able to build the most energy efficient laptops) as they did about the massive screen.
Typing was a poorer experience, but auto-correct was good enough.
The phone guys who spent all their time trying to make longer lasting phones with a better physical keyboard simply could not conceive that those factors might not even be all that important for consumers.
Finally, what really blew up the iPhone was the App Store, and it’s hard to see anyone else doing it, because very few companies had the experience building up a high quality developer platform the way Apple had. Very few other companies had the developer following which would build apps for them despite the massive constraints Apple was imposing on them.
Phones as computers was already out there as an idea and Handspring and others had been trying to make it work.
The iPhone was more limited as a computer than a competing Palm OS or Windows Mobile device but it was more slick and in some ways polished (although lacking in others). And of course they still had the bulk of then DRM locked digital music/video sales they could leverage to make it appeal to consumers.
It combined touch-screen AND a full keyboard.
If you think the Nokia phones were nuts, you should dig up stuff coming out of Japan 2000-2010, like the Hitachi WOO Ketai H001 (yes, that's a real name). All kinds of flip/fold/swivel/etc. with TV tuners and DVR functionality, digital cameras, music players, etc. Sharp Aquos 912SH is another one which comes to mind.
Given the scarcity of phone connections I suppose it was inevitable, but man was it fun for awhile.
On a side note I have a pet theory that Japanese cell phones helped push display technology forward. The English alphabet can be displayed very easily with limited pixels but kana and kanji cannot so there’s less pressure for Western manufacturers to innovate displays. For a phone to first be successful in Japan it needs a very high resolution display.
I wonder why they never became popular overseas. The iPhone, sure, but there was a whole period before the iPhone where Japanese phones were way ahead of their time.
There was also the not insignificant cost of completely re-engineering the RF frontend and radios. As back then (an partly still) Japan used cellular bands and technologies that ware completely different from other countries.
It kept the competition out, but also made it hard for them to compete abroad. And then iPhone happened and many of those manufacturers are no longer in the biz.
I remember that one! The aughts were a truly a golden era in Japanese phone design. The technology was also waaay ahead of the west. We're just now starting to actually use the QR code thing, which was everywhere in like 2005. And 1seg? That was really fun tech. TV on my morning commute was truly like living in the future.
For iconic phones, though, I was always a big fan of the au Design phones like the infobar (2003) and Design Skin. The color schemes are legendary.
Early personal computers and even laptops had interesting and varied designs before everyone coalesced around the optimal desktop, tower, and notebook designs.
A big part of the problem is software. If a phone maker puts out a truly unique form factor today, they are stuck in a situation where most existing software was built assuming the user is on a giant rectangle.
Car colors come to mind:
https://www.thedrive.com/news/37001/this-graph-shows-how-car...
Winter is coming - that means a sea of black, dark blue, or dark brown winter coats everywhere.
Or the trends towards same-looking logos that have been discussed here before:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32040506
I guess all trends are cyclical, so looking forward to an explosion in colour in another 5-10 years!
I had a phone like this, although not that model. It was great, T9 sucked. In fact, it was much more pleasant to type on than a touch screen.
I think we lost something with all those hardware form-factors converging on essentially the same design: a rectangle that barely fits in your pocket.
Small, had a keyboard, and cost less than $100. Also, the back of the top-half was a mirror. Oh, but most important: it felt GOOD to swivel out and snap shut.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sidetalking-n-gage
https://www.globalnerdy.com/2022/07/09/sidetalking-makes-a-s...
https://twitter.com/cooperlund/status/1185243122210656261
https://luxatic.com/boucheron-helped-create-the-360k-vertu-s...
https://amp.www.complex.com/pop-culture/2015/09/history-of-t...
This thing's software is maybe more interesting than its form factor, due to it being a kind of proto-Android stack (Java VM equivalent with some amount of build-time bytecode preprocessing to accelerate it on devices)
https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2015/09/history-of-the-s...
My personal favourite but with shitty keyboard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Blue_Angel
We built a small and simple bartender app that had a UX almost exactly like the hiptop address book. You could easily look up recipes for drinks and then we'd let you build a shopping list. It was a fun exercise that was about a month of development time for the both of us. Mostly, it was just cleaning up the recipe data and adding a few drinks on our own.
It turns out that T-Mobile wouldn't list the app because they didn't have the ability to make sure that everyone using the app was 21+. We fought with this for months over it and eventually gave up. It was a really frustrating experience.
Apple came along with the iPhone and their own store model and while people used to complain heavily about it, I kept thinking at least it wasn't T-Mobile.
By the way, the VM was the precursor to Dalvik, which eventually turned into what is now Android...
https://medium.com/@chrisdesalvo/the-future-that-everyone-fo...
As an aside, this comment from the tweet thread is genius: "I call this one the Shyamalan because of the unnecessary twist".
Cars underwent something similar very early on, but by the time we got to the "Model T" era it was pretty much determined what they would look like.
It is followed by maturity, a feature of which is consolidation (incl reduction in choice and variation as the less profitable options are weeded out).
Until the next disruption...
I got so much flak as it cost as much as an iPhone, but in 2003.
https://www.pocket-lint.com/phones/reviews/sony-mobile/67352...
In response to sibling comment, comparing it to the iPhone is silly. The iPhone OS 1 was half a decade away when th 7600 was launched and started at $499. This was a cheap, fun phone using well trodden software on a budget. Nokia dominated the market and market segmentation is a natural strategy in that situation - especially before touchscreens allowed customisation/personalisation in software.
But it certainly wasn’t a cheap phone when it launched. The typical Nokia cost around $150. This was the high-end model of Nokia’s feature phone range, and they highlighted it in ads with fashion brands. (The fashion touch was a leather strap you could attach to the lemon phone’s corner.)
The 7600 did include technical innovation: it was the first Nokia model ever to include 3G, and IIRC it was also the first European phone to shoot video (stamp-sized 144p clips).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_8110
https://www.phonescoop.com/phones/phone.php?p=65