12 ms·

Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

189 points by samizdis 5y ago

pedrocr 5y ago
Was the Communicator ever really influential? I was in a Nokia dominated market at the time and pagers and then blackberrys seemed to be what actually drove that side of the market. The Communicator was seen as a curiosity.
- zelos 5y ago
  I don't think so. I worked on software on the (later model) 9500 and it was awful. Sure, it had a browser, but even over wifi it took minutes to render pages. Anyone I showed the hardware to laughed at it. Series 80 was a dead end too I think? Edit: I hadn't realised how much earlier the 9000 was. I guess in '96 it might have made more impact? I can't remember ever seeing one in use, though.
  - Fnoord 5y ago
    A friend of mine worked at a bank and used early Nokia Communicator to remotely administer machines including AS/400. He could do it from his bed while on standby, or while on the go. An absolute game changer. That it had a browser is more of an afterthought. And of course it is slow; GPRS is slow. But if you use the text-based part, and were good with CLI, it was great. I never got to like very small keys, but for me a 'full' qwerty keyboard is a huge upgrade over T9. I never liked nor used T9 much. I avoided it as much as I could. I own a Planet Cosmo Communicator which is a homage to the Nokia Communicator (as well as Palm devices). I also purchased the successor, the Planet Astro Slide, which has a slideout keyboard like the (patented) Nokia N900 (among others, like Symbian-based). The keyboard of these devices is, like the Planet Gemini's, great. That said, I believe a smartphone like Nokia N95 was more of a game changer for the general consumer. And Nokia became popular because of their iconic dumbphones (and their networking pioneering, hence their name reference to town in Finland); not so much their smartphones.
- shapefrog 5y ago
  It changed the world as clinging to this form and function when it came to 'smart phones' is ultimately why Nokia ended as a viable mobile phone maker.
- tannhaeuser 5y ago
  Idk if we go by Hollywood's idea of a hacker device, that would be a PDA with separate foldable keyboard (as in Die Hard 4.0).
  - gpas 5y ago
    Val Kilmer in The Saint used the first gen Nokia Communicator. Loved everything about that movie when I was a kid.
- marban 5y ago
  I owned every generation of it and so did many of my colleagues. Can't recall it being regarded a curiosity. More like, serious business machine.
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    I had the 9110, 9210, and 9500. None of them really made sense as connected devices because data services were so slow. Web pages would literally take minutes to load, and for heavy use you were paying by the byte. The main benefit was a nice(ish) keyboard for texts and emails. I once wrote and emailed in a consultancy report from the back garden of a pub, just to prove I could. But it's not something I'd have been happy doing regularly. If Psion had somehow added mobile data to their Organisers they'd have killed this market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5 The main thing these devices did was normalise ARM and pocketable form factors for serious mobile use. But they were really micro laptops and not large mobiles. They were more like very early versions of the MacBook or Air. The iPhone - rightly - went in a different direction.
    - dejv 5y ago
      Back in early 2000s I worked at company doing pharma CRM for emerging markets in rural places like central Africa, Mongolia and east Russia. We used Nokia commnicators as a client nodes for field representives. The platform was really limited, app development was tricky, but at the end it did the job and there were very few alternatives. We actually ended up using emails as our sync mechanism: internet connectivity in places we served were as limited as you can imagine and also because of device limitation. It worked in a way that changes in data were serialized and sent to server that merged the data into the master and sent you changes back via email as well.
    - fredoralive 5y ago
      Seeing as Symbian descended from EPOC32, the later Nokia Commicators are kinda Psion Series 5s with radio. Of course the mad multiple UI layers Symbian had means they aren't software compatible...
- antris 5y ago
  It was a high-end device for businesses. The price range made it almost completely out of the question for regular consumers, and it was never meant as a consumer device. But when it was introduced in 1996, sending e-mail and fax and being able to browse the web on mobile was definitely a huge thing for businesses. Mind you, the dial-up internet just had started booming a couple of years earlier. The communicator predated Blackberries, but continued as a product line until 2007. So while the products coexisted in the market, we're still talking about different eras here.
  - ollifi 5y ago
    I find it interesting that phones never got cheaper but now they are more useful so large number of people actually consider 1000$ to be ok price to pay for one.
    - sofixa 5y ago
      They did, there are completely usable phones in the 100-200euros segment, which do at least 2/3 of what the 1k ones do, albeit more slowly.
      - Pyramus 5y ago
        Yes, it's a great example of a Pareto distribution where 20% of the price gives you 80% of the features.
      - ollifi 5y ago
        Sure there are decent smart phones that only costs 100 euros, but I was referring to the fact that in 1996 communicator was deemed too expensive for consumer market, but now top of the line iphones sell huge volumes.
        antris 5y ago
        Phones have become so important in our lives. In 1996, you never needed the internet to do anything, as our society was based on other technologies. People could live their lives without the internet, or even without a mobile phone and it would be no problem at all. Now the internet, and increasingly mobile internet is becoming the default way of accessing almost any service, so having a phone that works for you is something that people are ready to pay for. You end up using it so much, that people feel like it's not a waste of money.
- dagw 5y ago
  You have to remember how ahead of its time the Communicator was. The first blackberry device was 3 years away and the first one that could make calls was 6 years away when the Communicator was released. It might not have been a huge sales success, but it did show where the mobile phone market was headed years before anybody else.
- BuildTheRobots 5y ago
  I knew a handful of blind communicator users who loved the device. Apparently text to speach combined with a query keyboard made it significantly more usable than other phones of the time (eg for sms or cli).
  - Pyramus 5y ago
    Yes - I knew someone who was deaf and mute, and he was an eager user because it became so easy to communicate in writing.
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  In History they have the concept of "The Great Man theory": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory Which ties everything that happened to some individual hero. We do that in tech for people too, but also devices. I think I'd be interested to read a smartphone (and indeed general computing history) that focused on the other elements like the relentless miniaturisation of tech, battery improvements, radio technology, societal adaptations etc. rather than "this obscure/famous person/device invented the future".
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- INTPenis 5y ago
  Here in Sweden Nokia was a lot more dominant than Blackberry. My older brother had a Communicator until the lid broke. Later he had another early smartphone from Spectronics, it was controlled with buttons on the sides that you had to learn but once you learned them they were very intuitive.
tannhaeuser 5y ago
I'd love to have a tin-foil hat device like that today, to make a stance in public against surveillance economy and mindless consumption. LCD, removable battery, GBA-like bulkiness, and other retro traits helping with power efficiency and sustainability would be a plus, too.
- mnmmn123456 5y ago
  GBA = Gameboy Advanced
  - frosted-flakes 5y ago
    Game Boy Advance
- Fnoord 5y ago
  Pinephone will have a hardware keyboard and has a user-replaceable, removable battery. PS: if you want to make a stance, go back to analog world ;-)
- zibzab 5y ago
  If openness is your thing, you can get a N900 and run a your own Linux on it. Or you can try getting the developers phone N950 on ebay, which has more recent hardware. If I was forced to use an old Nokia as my daily driver, I would probable use a 5800 instead.
- amarsahinovic 5y ago
  This might be interesting (although it does not tick all of your boxes) https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transformer/x/13646077#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transforme...
- fsflover 5y ago
  Here you go: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5 https://puri.sm/products/librem-5 and https://pine64.org/pinephone https://pine64.org/pinephone. FAQ about the first one: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Frequently-Asked-Questions https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque....
Maakuth 5y ago
Interesting tech choices (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator): Intel 80386 CPU, MS-DOS compatible base OS and GEOS shell. Later EPOC-based (which became Symbian) products had much less of a PC-like tech stack.
- Wildgoose 5y ago
  I had one of these. Sadly, there was only limited software available for it. It was very useful (at that time) to be able to receive faxes though.
- zokier 5y ago
  I didn't remember that the early models were DOS based, that puts them closer to my favorite 90s portable, the HP 200LX
mnmmn123456 5y ago
It didn't change the world. The iPhone did 10 years later. I guess the article is of interest because it has this wrong claim weaved in and even at it's time the "Nokia Communicator" wasn't a big success. Maybe we didn't know what FAANG-like success looks like at that time and everyone thought "Nokia is such a respectable, successful company in Scandinavia". Probably the article is of interest now because, we didn't see 2006 (year the iPhone came out) and all the years after. Shrinking a laptop to the size of a telephone wasn't the right thing to do.
- seba_dos1 5y ago
  We have all noticed that the world has changed with iOS and Android, and we're still trying to recover from that disaster.
  - mnmmn123456 5y ago
    We have a free marked and please just buy what you want. Did you buy a Nokia?
- asymptosis 5y ago
  I don't know why you're getting downvoted. The thought arises: what's the motivation for Deutsche Welle to suddenly post an article about a derelict Finnish proto-"smartphone"?
  - unixhero 5y ago
    At the time Nokia was not derelict. It is stated in the heading, it is now 25 years ago when Nokia started its path to become a global juggernaut.
    - asymptosis 5y ago
      When did I say Nokia was derelict? Please pay attention to what I really wrote.
kokey 5y ago
The problem really at that time and even with PDAs after that like the Palm Trio was that mobile data services really sucked in most locations where these devices would potentially have done really well. The Nokia had additional problems in that the first wifi model had terrible battery life and then Nokia started to ruin their operating system. Blackberry had the right timing with regards to mobile data and right solutions to these problems and more including the keyboard and Exchange integration so they did really well for a while until Apple disrupted it and Android followed.
raesene9 5y ago
This article kind of misses out the later Nokia N900, which had great hardware, but suffered from Nokia's lack of support (IIRC they stopped supporting it about 6 months after launch). If you like that kind of form factor/functionality, there's current devices too like the cosmo communicator https://store.planetcom.co.uk/products/cosmo-communicator https://store.planetcom.co.uk/products/cosmo-communicator
- fsflover 5y ago
  Or Pinephone with a keyboard addon: https://www.pine64.org/2021/08/15/introducing-the-pinenote https://www.pine64.org/2021/08/15/introducing-the-pinenote.
- swiley 5y ago
  It says debian support is "planned" but I wonder what exactly the plan is. Looking around it sounds like a bunch of drivers are missing for that SoC, is the plan to re-implement them? Wait for the community to re-implement them?
- hargv 5y ago
  I had an N900- for me one of the main downsides of it was the touchscreen, it was fine but with my colleagues all using the HTC hero it was frustrating to set their devices up for them and see how much nicer the experience was with multitouch. Very solid device otherwise- i went from an Xperia X1 to the N900.
- unnah 5y ago
  Another option is https://fxtec.com/ https://fxtec.com/ although it doesn't seem to have a second screen on the back.
  - swiley 5y ago
    At least that one has a PMOS wiki page: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/F(x)tec_Pro1_(fxtec-pro1) https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/F(x)tec_Pro1_(fxtec-pro1)
  - donio 5y ago
phpnode 5y ago
I still really prefer a hardware keyboard and miss my android G1 in many ways. I'm typing this on my touch screen phone and it's so much slower than texting was even on an ordinary numeric keypad with predictive text. For me touch screens ended productivity on phones and they solely became consumption devices
- pier25 5y ago
  I'm surprised nobody has implement something like the numpad + predictive text on a touch screen. It would make a lot of sense having less buttons to mis touch.
  - afavour 5y ago
    There are Android keyboards that replicate it. I tried a few but for whatever reason they still couldn't replicate the experience. I suspect it's the lack of hard buttons - I could type out an entire message without looking at the screen with a T9 keypad. I've ended up switching to a swipe keyboard which I find efficient but it in an entirely different way to T9.
    - FridayoLeary 5y ago
      For some inexplicable reason new Nokias seem to have ditched T9. The one feature that gives 'dumb' phones an edge over touchscreens has been abandoned. The replacement is a horrid, crappy and eminently useless home - grown editor that is worse in every way. It seems Nokia execs enjoy shooting themselves in the foot. But anyway, their phones are irrelevant, it's just a pity that they seem to be going backwards.
      - molofaha 5y ago
        The Microsoft-Nokia didn't want to maintain the old OSs so went with a licensed clone of Series 30, and then post-Microsoft went with KaiOS (though newer ones seem to be back on the Series 30 clone, which is frankly a better experience than KaiOS was). Like, I was never a big fan of Series 30 or 40 but they had an awful lot of iterative improvement over the years and they just pissed that all away.
wombatmobile 5y ago
> 25 years since it changed the world Nokia’s Communicator may have been the most capable phone computer of the pre iPhone era, but it didn’t change the world. It was too expensive, too closed, and not well enough marketed to change much of anything. I’m surprised to see it glorified here, not because it wasn’t a nice piece of visionary tech, but because the company that made it had such little impact on changing the world despite pioneering the category.
- kevingadd 5y ago
  It feels a little far-fetched to suggest that one of the leading handset manufacturers putting out one of the very first "smart devices" had no influence on the future of smart devices that followed it, if you ask me. Yes, they weren't in the hands of every stylish adult or high-spending teen, but it wasn't for them. I'd guarantee it influenced the thinking of other people building products in that category for at least a few years. And in the long run the world changed due to that product category.
  - wombatmobile 5y ago
    The communicator was literally like a toy IBM PC. Blackberry innovated by shrinking the keyboard to thumb size, and making do with a smaller display so it could fit in a pocket instead of requiring a handbag. Those two innovations/ bold compromises over the Communicator enabled RIM to discover the first addictive euphoria of an always connected social device with the crack berry. I say “social” but it wasn’t really because the app was really just email. But RIM got it into the gossip columns through Paris Hilton and Janet Jackson, setting the stage for the blockbuster device that landed in 2007 when Steve Jobs showed everybody what a leap forward into a new category could be.
    - Zenst 5y ago
      Key for blackberry was as you say the one handed keyboard. That I would add - great battery life, robust (could drop it without expending upon some military tested grade case) and above all. They focused on the one internet application buisness needed - email on the go. That right there gave them a winner in those early days. Now what gave Blackberry there consumer base was the PIN messaging which was a basic chat system that was simple and effective, something a bit more for those that grew up on SMS to engage with and they did.
nabla9 5y ago
Nokia Communicator was insane. Telnet/ssh connection was a game changer. It was device for professionals, not for mass market. Selling same core concept to both mass markets and professionals * has made everything cheaper and more powerful, and * has decreased input ergonomics for heavy users. Communicator/Blackberry with hardware keyboards were in some sense peak in input ergonomics for accuracy and speed in thumb-typing. Now it's just less or more suck with touch screens. I don't even bother to install ssh terminal for iPhone because easier/faster to carry tiny laptop than suffer the experience.
zokier 5y ago
I think Nokias 7650 deserves also mention. Launched in 2001/2002 it arguably laid the foundation for mainstream smartphones, while Communicators were inevitably doomed to be niche devices. 7650 had also many of the hallmarks of modern smartphone, at least compared to Communicators which were more of evolutionary dead end.
- kiksy 5y ago
  Worked with someone who had a 7650. Watching what that could do blew me away at the time. First phone I saw that genuinely acted like a PC in your pocket. Bought a 6600 as soon as it was released and loved it. You could probably make an interesting article on how much a modern smartphone in 2021 differs from the 7650. Fundamentally I don't think it's as much as many would think.
aqsalose 5y ago
Question. I can believe Communicator didn't change "the world". However, Deutsche Welle is German broadcaster. How prominent Communicator was in Germany?
- dagw 5y ago
  The launch event for the Communicator was in Germany, exactly 25 years ago yesterday. I guess that in the Germany connection here.
noipv4 5y ago
I see a lot of features re-used from the N900 in Android and iOS. I think Maemo/N900 changed the world far more.
- ddalex 5y ago
  I see the software keyboard layouts of Maemo everywhere :)
- hargv 5y ago
  I would say if you were going to elevate anything after the 9000 it should be the Symbian devices- i had a 6600 and a friend had a 6630 and those will to me always be the first "Smartphones" We played downloaded multiplayer games over Bluetooth in school, and though mine didn't have official mp3 functionality I downloaded the app used on later devices and used mine as an mp3 player. Even downloaded a bunch of roms for the ngage that ran just fine. In the end though the peak for me was Windows mobile, everything up to 6.5 was literally just a pc in your pocket, after that they made the mistake (imo) of trying to compete with apple and android for user experience and failed miserably. For my part I never wanted the improved UX- a start menu style system with a stylus was great for me. Nokias N900 was great, but in the end too niche to compete with HTC and Apple when they were pumping out androids and iPhones. I handled purchases at my work for smartphones and gave the HTC hero as suggestion for my colleagues since it was simpler and got a N900 for myself, and though I liked it a lot android certainly went a lot further in the end.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    I kept using Symbian until the end, Symbian Belle was quite nice, and with PIPS and Qt, Symbian C++ wasn't that bad. Also jumped into Windows Phones, as its development experience was miles ahead (still is) from whatever comes out of Google. With exception of Android, I never needed a "gaming rig/server configuration" for mobile development. Anyway it is what it is.
    - neurostimulant 5y ago
      I remember picking up a secondhand hp ipaq pocket pc and got my mind blown when I realized how easy it is to make an app for it. It's basically just plain old winform apps.
crawsome 5y ago
“ugly but revolutionary” every damn tech author has it built in to hate on old tech and QWERTY. Screw them all, id take a snapdragon in an “ugly” but massively functional form factor (like the one on the right) over these garbage screen-bars with trash virtual keyboards.
- metafunctor 5y ago
  Functional software is, I believe, what you would be missing. It’s amazingly rare (and I’m not trying to make the point that current incumbents always have great software).
- nine_k 5y ago
  I suspect that the majority of users are not fans of typing in any form. Many of them immediately press the dictation button and tell the phone what they'd like to see. Many people's idea of cool or fun is totally not an office in their pocket, but rather a TV / music player / camera / game console. Plus a phone, of course, for talking by voice. The target audience of Nokia 9000, people like you or me, are long since not the target audience of flagship smartphones. Bluetooth keyboards, 11" laptops, or some highly custom and expensive hardware are the choices for a proper "mobile office" today.
neals 5y ago
As a kid, this phone was like my dream gadget, I still remember really wanting one and staring at it at the store. To be honest, I don't know what I wouldv'e done with it, being 12 years old. Anybody remember those "organizer" gadgets, with a screen and a calander and notes, but not a phone? I got one of those and didn't really use it for anything useful. I did now just order de Fold 3. Comparable.
- bald 5y ago
  yes!! big time Casio Business Navigator BN-40A fan when I was 12 years old. had it for like 2 weeks before selling it to my best friend because my excitement had dropped off. But so cool to have something that looked like a super small laptop and such a wide screen.
- jon-wood 5y ago
  I have Dyslexia, which in me mostly surfaces as confusion of the various theirs, and a writing speed which would result in me never completing any class work. I dealt with that by learning to type, after which all my work was done on organiser type devices, first an Amstrad NC100, and then later on a Psion Series 5mx. The Psion was such a lovely device, it would fit in a large pocket, but had a proper keyboard that you could comfortably type at a decent speed on. It was also my introduction to programming, and so probably indirectly responsible for me coming out of school with reasonable grades (having been able to actually finish work), and a career I'm still in twenty years later.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  Yeah, me and a friend of mine got one from a shop, I think they were like €15 or €25,- at the time - pretty steep for pocket money, but not impossible. I mean we didn't actually use it much and since it only had a two line LCD screen, entering e.g. school schedules and contact information into it was a bit painful, but it was a neat gadget to have. I have it in the drawer near my PC at the moment, I think I put in a battery the other day, still works. Later on I bought a secondhand Palm V from the internet, I think it was €25,- that thing was pretty cool and more of the 'smartphone' functionality than the organizer; you could install apps on it and the like, so Sudoku was a favorite.
- 5y ago
rcarmo 5y ago
I used to work as product manager in a major telco and had one of every single model of those, and they were some of the best hardware I ever used. The peak was, I think, when I accessed Excel over Citrix while sitting in the airport waiting for a flight. In comparison, the N900 I have sitting in the bottom of a storage box someplace was a major disappointment--Maemo never came close to delivering half the functionality I had in a 9500, even though the design principles were pretty advanced for that time. (I strongly recommend reading "Operation Elop" for an idea of what that later stage in Nokia's life was like, and why Maemo tanked: https://asokan.org/operation-elop https://asokan.org/operation-elop) But the 9000 series was definitely something I wish we had today in some usable, non-niche form.
- tyingq 5y ago
  >The peak was, I think, when I accessed Excel over Citrix while sitting in the airport waiting for a flight. I never had a N900, but I have a similar memory of fixing a work problem while traveling in the late 90's. I used a terminal on a Palm Pilot over a dial-up modem, typing into a shell using the "graffiti" handwriting. It was...painful and triumphant all at once :)
  - rcarmo 5y ago
    Yes, but I was doing that on a 9110, I think. Had a decent terminal if I wanted to use telnet :)
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    In the early 2000's, I did my company's payroll using a Sony phone (maybe an M600c — the one from the James Bond film), while on a hydrofoil between Hong Kong and Macau. At the time I thought, "The future is finally here!"
  - jareklupinski 5y ago
    Ah, making me remember trying to monkey patch a script over ssh on my Blackberry Storm... At that time I felt the future of system administration meant taking the manual things I could do over a smartphone and abstracting them into lists of tappable buttons, like "Provision Web Server" and "Set Up New Developer".
svdree 5y ago
Ah, nostalgia settles in my brain. Old times = good times, at least most of the time.
cherselle 5y ago
It's quite a trip on the memory lane when I am still using Nokia as my phone. The times when Nokia was the giant of the phone industry. But due to the rapid technological advancements, they struggle in the smartphone revolution, and since then, there has been a power shift in the industry.
markstos 5y ago
I remember around 1997 I was reading my raw web site logs and saw the Nokia 9000 user agent appear. I knew what it was but never saw one in person. I wondered what some rich person was doing reading my website, probably about skateboarding back then.
- sumedh 5y ago
  It was probably the rich guy's son.
marcodiego 5y ago
Nokia 9000 may be a landmark but nothing impressed more than the day I saw N900 running OpenOffice. I knew it was not a good idea, but that deeply impressed me.
- fsflover 5y ago
  Librem 5 smartphone runs a desktop GNU/Linux with desktop apps. You can even connect a keyboard and screen to it.
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    Yes. But it was not available more than a decade ago.
ajklsdhfniuwehf 5y ago
i have a web scrapper going to gsmarena.com every day and checking if there's a new android phone with keyboard :) years ago it allowed me to buy the blackberry priv and key2. two awesome devices with real keyboards (which also act as touchpads) But their marketing sucked and both tanked. I think the company that licensed the blackberry brand (why?) flopped and there will be no more models. priv was the best one, but is stuck on android 5 or 6 now. Key2 is still being sold and receiving security updates for android 8.
erhk 5y ago
Calling the nokia 9000 the first smartphone is disingenuous. It fits perfectly the modern connotation of a "dumb" phone.
macintux 5y ago
> The article was updated on August 16,2021. The orginal text said the Communicator line was discontinued after thge 9210 model, which was wrong. It’s depressingly impressive that the correction at the end of the article has three typos.
callidus 5y ago
Oh wow. I got one of these second hand as a kid from a family friend who upgraded from this model. I was the coolest kid in the neighborhood until they realized it didn't do anything "fun".

189 points by samizdis 5y ago

Was the Communicator ever really influential? I was in a Nokia dominated market at the time and pagers and then blackberrys seemed to be what actually drove that side of the market. The Communicator was seen as a curiosity.

zelos 5y ago
I don't think so. I worked on software on the (later model) 9500 and it was awful. Sure, it had a browser, but even over wifi it took minutes to render pages. Anyone I showed the hardware to laughed at it. Series 80 was a dead end too I think? Edit: I hadn't realised how much earlier the 9000 was. I guess in '96 it might have made more impact? I can't remember ever seeing one in use, though.
- Fnoord 5y ago
  A friend of mine worked at a bank and used early Nokia Communicator to remotely administer machines including AS/400. He could do it from his bed while on standby, or while on the go. An absolute game changer. That it had a browser is more of an afterthought. And of course it is slow; GPRS is slow. But if you use the text-based part, and were good with CLI, it was great. I never got to like very small keys, but for me a 'full' qwerty keyboard is a huge upgrade over T9. I never liked nor used T9 much. I avoided it as much as I could. I own a Planet Cosmo Communicator which is a homage to the Nokia Communicator (as well as Palm devices). I also purchased the successor, the Planet Astro Slide, which has a slideout keyboard like the (patented) Nokia N900 (among others, like Symbian-based). The keyboard of these devices is, like the Planet Gemini's, great. That said, I believe a smartphone like Nokia N95 was more of a game changer for the general consumer. And Nokia became popular because of their iconic dumbphones (and their networking pioneering, hence their name reference to town in Finland); not so much their smartphones.
shapefrog 5y ago
It changed the world as clinging to this form and function when it came to 'smart phones' is ultimately why Nokia ended as a viable mobile phone maker.
tannhaeuser 5y ago
Idk if we go by Hollywood's idea of a hacker device, that would be a PDA with separate foldable keyboard (as in Die Hard 4.0).
- gpas 5y ago
  Val Kilmer in The Saint used the first gen Nokia Communicator. Loved everything about that movie when I was a kid.
marban 5y ago
I owned every generation of it and so did many of my colleagues. Can't recall it being regarded a curiosity. More like, serious business machine.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  I had the 9110, 9210, and 9500. None of them really made sense as connected devices because data services were so slow. Web pages would literally take minutes to load, and for heavy use you were paying by the byte. The main benefit was a nice(ish) keyboard for texts and emails. I once wrote and emailed in a consultancy report from the back garden of a pub, just to prove I could. But it's not something I'd have been happy doing regularly. If Psion had somehow added mobile data to their Organisers they'd have killed this market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5 The main thing these devices did was normalise ARM and pocketable form factors for serious mobile use. But they were really micro laptops and not large mobiles. They were more like very early versions of the MacBook or Air. The iPhone - rightly - went in a different direction.
  - dejv 5y ago
    Back in early 2000s I worked at company doing pharma CRM for emerging markets in rural places like central Africa, Mongolia and east Russia. We used Nokia commnicators as a client nodes for field representives. The platform was really limited, app development was tricky, but at the end it did the job and there were very few alternatives. We actually ended up using emails as our sync mechanism: internet connectivity in places we served were as limited as you can imagine and also because of device limitation. It worked in a way that changes in data were serialized and sent to server that merged the data into the master and sent you changes back via email as well.
  - fredoralive 5y ago
    Seeing as Symbian descended from EPOC32, the later Nokia Commicators are kinda Psion Series 5s with radio. Of course the mad multiple UI layers Symbian had means they aren't software compatible...
antris 5y ago
It was a high-end device for businesses. The price range made it almost completely out of the question for regular consumers, and it was never meant as a consumer device. But when it was introduced in 1996, sending e-mail and fax and being able to browse the web on mobile was definitely a huge thing for businesses. Mind you, the dial-up internet just had started booming a couple of years earlier. The communicator predated Blackberries, but continued as a product line until 2007. So while the products coexisted in the market, we're still talking about different eras here.
- ollifi 5y ago
  I find it interesting that phones never got cheaper but now they are more useful so large number of people actually consider 1000$ to be ok price to pay for one.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    They did, there are completely usable phones in the 100-200euros segment, which do at least 2/3 of what the 1k ones do, albeit more slowly.
    - Pyramus 5y ago
      Yes, it's a great example of a Pareto distribution where 20% of the price gives you 80% of the features.
    - ollifi 5y ago
      Sure there are decent smart phones that only costs 100 euros, but I was referring to the fact that in 1996 communicator was deemed too expensive for consumer market, but now top of the line iphones sell huge volumes.
      - antris 5y ago
        Phones have become so important in our lives. In 1996, you never needed the internet to do anything, as our society was based on other technologies. People could live their lives without the internet, or even without a mobile phone and it would be no problem at all. Now the internet, and increasingly mobile internet is becoming the default way of accessing almost any service, so having a phone that works for you is something that people are ready to pay for. You end up using it so much, that people feel like it's not a waste of money.
dagw 5y ago
You have to remember how ahead of its time the Communicator was. The first blackberry device was 3 years away and the first one that could make calls was 6 years away when the Communicator was released. It might not have been a huge sales success, but it did show where the mobile phone market was headed years before anybody else.
BuildTheRobots 5y ago
I knew a handful of blind communicator users who loved the device. Apparently text to speach combined with a query keyboard made it significantly more usable than other phones of the time (eg for sms or cli).
- Pyramus 5y ago
  Yes - I knew someone who was deaf and mute, and he was an eager user because it became so easy to communicate in writing.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
In History they have the concept of "The Great Man theory": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory Which ties everything that happened to some individual hero. We do that in tech for people too, but also devices. I think I'd be interested to read a smartphone (and indeed general computing history) that focused on the other elements like the relentless miniaturisation of tech, battery improvements, radio technology, societal adaptations etc. rather than "this obscure/famous person/device invented the future".
deleted 5y ago
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INTPenis 5y ago
Here in Sweden Nokia was a lot more dominant than Blackberry. My older brother had a Communicator until the lid broke. Later he had another early smartphone from Spectronics, it was controlled with buttons on the sides that you had to learn but once you learned them they were very intuitive.

tannhaeuser 5y ago

I'd love to have a tin-foil hat device like that today, to make a stance in public against surveillance economy and mindless consumption. LCD, removable battery, GBA-like bulkiness, and other retro traits helping with power efficiency and sustainability would be a plus, too.

mnmmn123456 5y ago
GBA = Gameboy Advanced
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
  Game Boy Advance
Fnoord 5y ago
Pinephone will have a hardware keyboard and has a user-replaceable, removable battery. PS: if you want to make a stance, go back to analog world ;-)
zibzab 5y ago
If openness is your thing, you can get a N900 and run a your own Linux on it. Or you can try getting the developers phone N950 on ebay, which has more recent hardware. If I was forced to use an old Nokia as my daily driver, I would probable use a 5800 instead.
amarsahinovic 5y ago
This might be interesting (although it does not tick all of your boxes) https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transformer/x/13646077#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transforme...
fsflover 5y ago
Here you go: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5 https://puri.sm/products/librem-5 and https://pine64.org/pinephone https://pine64.org/pinephone. FAQ about the first one: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Frequently-Asked-Questions https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque....

Maakuth 5y ago

Interesting tech choices (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator): Intel 80386 CPU, MS-DOS compatible base OS and GEOS shell. Later EPOC-based (which became Symbian) products had much less of a PC-like tech stack.

Wildgoose 5y ago
I had one of these. Sadly, there was only limited software available for it. It was very useful (at that time) to be able to receive faxes though.
zokier 5y ago
I didn't remember that the early models were DOS based, that puts them closer to my favorite 90s portable, the HP 200LX

mnmmn123456 5y ago

It didn't change the world. The iPhone did 10 years later. I guess the article is of interest because it has this wrong claim weaved in and even at it's time the "Nokia Communicator" wasn't a big success. Maybe we didn't know what FAANG-like success looks like at that time and everyone thought "Nokia is such a respectable, successful company in Scandinavia". Probably the article is of interest now because, we didn't see 2006 (year the iPhone came out) and all the years after. Shrinking a laptop to the size of a telephone wasn't the right thing to do.

seba_dos1 5y ago
We have all noticed that the world has changed with iOS and Android, and we're still trying to recover from that disaster.
- mnmmn123456 5y ago
  We have a free marked and please just buy what you want. Did you buy a Nokia?
asymptosis 5y ago
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. The thought arises: what's the motivation for Deutsche Welle to suddenly post an article about a derelict Finnish proto-"smartphone"?
- unixhero 5y ago
  At the time Nokia was not derelict. It is stated in the heading, it is now 25 years ago when Nokia started its path to become a global juggernaut.
  - asymptosis 5y ago
    When did I say Nokia was derelict? Please pay attention to what I really wrote.

kokey 5y ago

The problem really at that time and even with PDAs after that like the Palm Trio was that mobile data services really sucked in most locations where these devices would potentially have done really well. The Nokia had additional problems in that the first wifi model had terrible battery life and then Nokia started to ruin their operating system. Blackberry had the right timing with regards to mobile data and right solutions to these problems and more including the keyboard and Exchange integration so they did really well for a while until Apple disrupted it and Android followed.

raesene9 5y ago

This article kind of misses out the later Nokia N900, which had great hardware, but suffered from Nokia's lack of support (IIRC they stopped supporting it about 6 months after launch). If you like that kind of form factor/functionality, there's current devices too like the cosmo communicator https://store.planetcom.co.uk/products/cosmo-communicator https://store.planetcom.co.uk/products/cosmo-communicator

fsflover 5y ago
Or Pinephone with a keyboard addon: https://www.pine64.org/2021/08/15/introducing-the-pinenote https://www.pine64.org/2021/08/15/introducing-the-pinenote.
swiley 5y ago
It says debian support is "planned" but I wonder what exactly the plan is. Looking around it sounds like a bunch of drivers are missing for that SoC, is the plan to re-implement them? Wait for the community to re-implement them?
hargv 5y ago
I had an N900- for me one of the main downsides of it was the touchscreen, it was fine but with my colleagues all using the HTC hero it was frustrating to set their devices up for them and see how much nicer the experience was with multitouch. Very solid device otherwise- i went from an Xperia X1 to the N900.
unnah 5y ago
Another option is https://fxtec.com/ https://fxtec.com/ although it doesn't seem to have a second screen on the back.
- swiley 5y ago
  At least that one has a PMOS wiki page: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/F(x)tec_Pro1_(fxtec-pro1) https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/F(x)tec_Pro1_(fxtec-pro1)
- donio 5y ago

phpnode 5y ago

I still really prefer a hardware keyboard and miss my android G1 in many ways. I'm typing this on my touch screen phone and it's so much slower than texting was even on an ordinary numeric keypad with predictive text. For me touch screens ended productivity on phones and they solely became consumption devices

pier25 5y ago
I'm surprised nobody has implement something like the numpad + predictive text on a touch screen. It would make a lot of sense having less buttons to mis touch.
- afavour 5y ago
  There are Android keyboards that replicate it. I tried a few but for whatever reason they still couldn't replicate the experience. I suspect it's the lack of hard buttons - I could type out an entire message without looking at the screen with a T9 keypad. I've ended up switching to a swipe keyboard which I find efficient but it in an entirely different way to T9.
  - FridayoLeary 5y ago
    For some inexplicable reason new Nokias seem to have ditched T9. The one feature that gives 'dumb' phones an edge over touchscreens has been abandoned. The replacement is a horrid, crappy and eminently useless home - grown editor that is worse in every way. It seems Nokia execs enjoy shooting themselves in the foot. But anyway, their phones are irrelevant, it's just a pity that they seem to be going backwards.
    - molofaha 5y ago
      The Microsoft-Nokia didn't want to maintain the old OSs so went with a licensed clone of Series 30, and then post-Microsoft went with KaiOS (though newer ones seem to be back on the Series 30 clone, which is frankly a better experience than KaiOS was). Like, I was never a big fan of Series 30 or 40 but they had an awful lot of iterative improvement over the years and they just pissed that all away.

wombatmobile 5y ago

> 25 years since it changed the world Nokia’s Communicator may have been the most capable phone computer of the pre iPhone era, but it didn’t change the world. It was too expensive, too closed, and not well enough marketed to change much of anything. I’m surprised to see it glorified here, not because it wasn’t a nice piece of visionary tech, but because the company that made it had such little impact on changing the world despite pioneering the category.

kevingadd 5y ago
It feels a little far-fetched to suggest that one of the leading handset manufacturers putting out one of the very first "smart devices" had no influence on the future of smart devices that followed it, if you ask me. Yes, they weren't in the hands of every stylish adult or high-spending teen, but it wasn't for them. I'd guarantee it influenced the thinking of other people building products in that category for at least a few years. And in the long run the world changed due to that product category.
- wombatmobile 5y ago
  The communicator was literally like a toy IBM PC. Blackberry innovated by shrinking the keyboard to thumb size, and making do with a smaller display so it could fit in a pocket instead of requiring a handbag. Those two innovations/ bold compromises over the Communicator enabled RIM to discover the first addictive euphoria of an always connected social device with the crack berry. I say “social” but it wasn’t really because the app was really just email. But RIM got it into the gossip columns through Paris Hilton and Janet Jackson, setting the stage for the blockbuster device that landed in 2007 when Steve Jobs showed everybody what a leap forward into a new category could be.
  - Zenst 5y ago
    Key for blackberry was as you say the one handed keyboard. That I would add - great battery life, robust (could drop it without expending upon some military tested grade case) and above all. They focused on the one internet application buisness needed - email on the go. That right there gave them a winner in those early days. Now what gave Blackberry there consumer base was the PIN messaging which was a basic chat system that was simple and effective, something a bit more for those that grew up on SMS to engage with and they did.

nabla9 5y ago

Nokia Communicator was insane. Telnet/ssh connection was a game changer. It was device for professionals, not for mass market. Selling same core concept to both mass markets and professionals * has made everything cheaper and more powerful, and * has decreased input ergonomics for heavy users. Communicator/Blackberry with hardware keyboards were in some sense peak in input ergonomics for accuracy and speed in thumb-typing. Now it's just less or more suck with touch screens. I don't even bother to install ssh terminal for iPhone because easier/faster to carry tiny laptop than suffer the experience.

zokier 5y ago

I think Nokias 7650 deserves also mention. Launched in 2001/2002 it arguably laid the foundation for mainstream smartphones, while Communicators were inevitably doomed to be niche devices. 7650 had also many of the hallmarks of modern smartphone, at least compared to Communicators which were more of evolutionary dead end.

kiksy 5y ago
Worked with someone who had a 7650. Watching what that could do blew me away at the time. First phone I saw that genuinely acted like a PC in your pocket. Bought a 6600 as soon as it was released and loved it. You could probably make an interesting article on how much a modern smartphone in 2021 differs from the 7650. Fundamentally I don't think it's as much as many would think.

aqsalose 5y ago

Question. I can believe Communicator didn't change "the world". However, Deutsche Welle is German broadcaster. How prominent Communicator was in Germany?

dagw 5y ago
The launch event for the Communicator was in Germany, exactly 25 years ago yesterday. I guess that in the Germany connection here.

noipv4 5y ago

I see a lot of features re-used from the N900 in Android and iOS. I think Maemo/N900 changed the world far more.

ddalex 5y ago
I see the software keyboard layouts of Maemo everywhere :)
hargv 5y ago
I would say if you were going to elevate anything after the 9000 it should be the Symbian devices- i had a 6600 and a friend had a 6630 and those will to me always be the first "Smartphones" We played downloaded multiplayer games over Bluetooth in school, and though mine didn't have official mp3 functionality I downloaded the app used on later devices and used mine as an mp3 player. Even downloaded a bunch of roms for the ngage that ran just fine. In the end though the peak for me was Windows mobile, everything up to 6.5 was literally just a pc in your pocket, after that they made the mistake (imo) of trying to compete with apple and android for user experience and failed miserably. For my part I never wanted the improved UX- a start menu style system with a stylus was great for me. Nokias N900 was great, but in the end too niche to compete with HTC and Apple when they were pumping out androids and iPhones. I handled purchases at my work for smartphones and gave the HTC hero as suggestion for my colleagues since it was simpler and got a N900 for myself, and though I liked it a lot android certainly went a lot further in the end.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  I kept using Symbian until the end, Symbian Belle was quite nice, and with PIPS and Qt, Symbian C++ wasn't that bad. Also jumped into Windows Phones, as its development experience was miles ahead (still is) from whatever comes out of Google. With exception of Android, I never needed a "gaming rig/server configuration" for mobile development. Anyway it is what it is.
  - neurostimulant 5y ago
    I remember picking up a secondhand hp ipaq pocket pc and got my mind blown when I realized how easy it is to make an app for it. It's basically just plain old winform apps.

crawsome 5y ago

“ugly but revolutionary” every damn tech author has it built in to hate on old tech and QWERTY. Screw them all, id take a snapdragon in an “ugly” but massively functional form factor (like the one on the right) over these garbage screen-bars with trash virtual keyboards.

metafunctor 5y ago
Functional software is, I believe, what you would be missing. It’s amazingly rare (and I’m not trying to make the point that current incumbents always have great software).
nine_k 5y ago
I suspect that the majority of users are not fans of typing in any form. Many of them immediately press the dictation button and tell the phone what they'd like to see. Many people's idea of cool or fun is totally not an office in their pocket, but rather a TV / music player / camera / game console. Plus a phone, of course, for talking by voice. The target audience of Nokia 9000, people like you or me, are long since not the target audience of flagship smartphones. Bluetooth keyboards, 11" laptops, or some highly custom and expensive hardware are the choices for a proper "mobile office" today.

neals 5y ago

As a kid, this phone was like my dream gadget, I still remember really wanting one and staring at it at the store. To be honest, I don't know what I wouldv'e done with it, being 12 years old. Anybody remember those "organizer" gadgets, with a screen and a calander and notes, but not a phone? I got one of those and didn't really use it for anything useful. I did now just order de Fold 3. Comparable.

bald 5y ago
yes!! big time Casio Business Navigator BN-40A fan when I was 12 years old. had it for like 2 weeks before selling it to my best friend because my excitement had dropped off. But so cool to have something that looked like a super small laptop and such a wide screen.
jon-wood 5y ago
I have Dyslexia, which in me mostly surfaces as confusion of the various theirs, and a writing speed which would result in me never completing any class work. I dealt with that by learning to type, after which all my work was done on organiser type devices, first an Amstrad NC100, and then later on a Psion Series 5mx. The Psion was such a lovely device, it would fit in a large pocket, but had a proper keyboard that you could comfortably type at a decent speed on. It was also my introduction to programming, and so probably indirectly responsible for me coming out of school with reasonable grades (having been able to actually finish work), and a career I'm still in twenty years later.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
Yeah, me and a friend of mine got one from a shop, I think they were like €15 or €25,- at the time - pretty steep for pocket money, but not impossible. I mean we didn't actually use it much and since it only had a two line LCD screen, entering e.g. school schedules and contact information into it was a bit painful, but it was a neat gadget to have. I have it in the drawer near my PC at the moment, I think I put in a battery the other day, still works. Later on I bought a secondhand Palm V from the internet, I think it was €25,- that thing was pretty cool and more of the 'smartphone' functionality than the organizer; you could install apps on it and the like, so Sudoku was a favorite.
5y ago

rcarmo 5y ago

I used to work as product manager in a major telco and had one of every single model of those, and they were some of the best hardware I ever used. The peak was, I think, when I accessed Excel over Citrix while sitting in the airport waiting for a flight. In comparison, the N900 I have sitting in the bottom of a storage box someplace was a major disappointment--Maemo never came close to delivering half the functionality I had in a 9500, even though the design principles were pretty advanced for that time. (I strongly recommend reading "Operation Elop" for an idea of what that later stage in Nokia's life was like, and why Maemo tanked: https://asokan.org/operation-elop https://asokan.org/operation-elop) But the 9000 series was definitely something I wish we had today in some usable, non-niche form.

tyingq 5y ago
>The peak was, I think, when I accessed Excel over Citrix while sitting in the airport waiting for a flight. I never had a N900, but I have a similar memory of fixing a work problem while traveling in the late 90's. I used a terminal on a Palm Pilot over a dial-up modem, typing into a shell using the "graffiti" handwriting. It was...painful and triumphant all at once :)
- rcarmo 5y ago
  Yes, but I was doing that on a 9110, I think. Had a decent terminal if I wanted to use telnet :)
- reaperducer 5y ago
  In the early 2000's, I did my company's payroll using a Sony phone (maybe an M600c — the one from the James Bond film), while on a hydrofoil between Hong Kong and Macau. At the time I thought, "The future is finally here!"
- jareklupinski 5y ago
  Ah, making me remember trying to monkey patch a script over ssh on my Blackberry Storm... At that time I felt the future of system administration meant taking the manual things I could do over a smartphone and abstracting them into lists of tappable buttons, like "Provision Web Server" and "Set Up New Developer".

svdree 5y ago

Ah, nostalgia settles in my brain. Old times = good times, at least most of the time.

cherselle 5y ago

It's quite a trip on the memory lane when I am still using Nokia as my phone. The times when Nokia was the giant of the phone industry. But due to the rapid technological advancements, they struggle in the smartphone revolution, and since then, there has been a power shift in the industry.

markstos 5y ago

I remember around 1997 I was reading my raw web site logs and saw the Nokia 9000 user agent appear. I knew what it was but never saw one in person. I wondered what some rich person was doing reading my website, probably about skateboarding back then.

sumedh 5y ago
It was probably the rich guy's son.

marcodiego 5y ago

Nokia 9000 may be a landmark but nothing impressed more than the day I saw N900 running OpenOffice. I knew it was not a good idea, but that deeply impressed me.

fsflover 5y ago
Librem 5 smartphone runs a desktop GNU/Linux with desktop apps. You can even connect a keyboard and screen to it.
- marcodiego 5y ago
  Yes. But it was not available more than a decade ago.

ajklsdhfniuwehf 5y ago

i have a web scrapper going to gsmarena.com every day and checking if there's a new android phone with keyboard :) years ago it allowed me to buy the blackberry priv and key2. two awesome devices with real keyboards (which also act as touchpads) But their marketing sucked and both tanked. I think the company that licensed the blackberry brand (why?) flopped and there will be no more models. priv was the best one, but is stuck on android 5 or 6 now. Key2 is still being sold and receiving security updates for android 8.

erhk 5y ago

Calling the nokia 9000 the first smartphone is disingenuous. It fits perfectly the modern connotation of a "dumb" phone.

macintux 5y ago

> The article was updated on August 16,2021. The orginal text said the Communicator line was discontinued after thge 9210 model, which was wrong. It’s depressingly impressive that the correction at the end of the article has three typos.

callidus 5y ago

Oh wow. I got one of these second hand as a kid from a family friend who upgraded from this model. I was the coolest kid in the neighborhood until they realized it didn't do anything "fun".