11 ms·

There was a stretch where phone design went bananas

174 points by leephillips 4y ago

xbar 4y ago
I'd really like to take on a pi hack project on one of those Sony Ericsson Walkman phones.
dharbin 4y ago
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!
Izkata 4y ago
> "OK... what if instead of it flipping, it PIVOTED" Kinda like the LG Wing: https://www.lg.com/global/lgwing https://www.lg.com/global/lgwing
- wildzzz 4y ago
  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?).
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    You could stick a keyboard down there, if you're... I dunno, running a really wide text processor?
- Findecanor 4y ago
  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)
agilob 4y ago
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".
- Antrikshy 4y ago
  Hardware may be less interesting, but the software is way more dynamic than ever.
  - agilob 4y ago
    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.
- theriddlr 4y ago
  Second-hand phone shops now show the back of the phone in the display case because they all look the same from the front.
- gardenhedge 4y ago
  Well when companies try do something different - like a notch - they get shit on these days
- eternityforest 4y ago
causality0 4y ago
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.
- Izkata 4y ago
  > 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+.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    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).
    - SnooSux 4y ago
      Sounds like the buttons are all real, there are just only 10 of them.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        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.
shubhamjain 4y ago
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. [1]: https://twitter.com/shubhamjainco/status/1406338323531010050 https://twitter.com/shubhamjainco/status/1406338323531010050
- bradknowles 4y ago
  Samsung squits out like 50+ phone models a year. That's like one every week. How can any of them be any good? How can any of them ever get any useful time in the spotlight?
  - pc86 4y ago
    You're right, if they had any business sense they'd be making more than a piddling $1B/month - https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/26/22902283/samsung-earnings-q4-2021-record-revenue-galaxy-s22 https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/26/22902283/samsung-earnings...
- mhaberl 4y ago
  > The genius of Steve Jobs was in showing that you can have whole company focus on making a brilliant device that works for everyone 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-duckies/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...
RajT88 4y ago
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.
- bombcar 4y ago
  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.
- wirthjason 4y ago
  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.
  - bitwize 4y ago
    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.
- raynr 4y ago
  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.
UI_at_80x24 4y ago
I miss the Nokia N900 form factor (although, larger would have been nicer). It combined touch-screen AND a full keyboard.
- thriftwy 4y ago
  It also had stylus and a kickstand! It could broadcast in FM!
alex_c 4y ago
Somewhat related - I feel like we're in the middle of a general trend of boring, monochrome design. Car colors come to mind: https://www.thedrive.com/news/37001/this-graph-shows-how-car-paint-colors-have-gotten-more-boring-over-the-years 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 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!
Markoff 4y ago
Yeah, good times and now we would be happy if they offered at least smaller rectangle instead of those huge bricks or remote controls.
woopwoop 4y ago
> They literally designed this entire thing for dads that couldn't get the hang of T9 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.
- rob74 4y ago
  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.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  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.
- aivisol 4y ago
  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.
aimor 4y ago
This was the one I picked: https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/nokia-7705-twist-verizon https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/nokia-7705-twist-verizon 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.
themenomen 4y ago
Some of these in action from Michael Fisher's "When Phones Were Fun" playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOZi-7V11k8&list=PLwd8abTO4vh2smuMzykXDOPNnsxhHC4Oh https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOZi-7V11k8&list=PLwd8abTO4v...
SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
Remember sidetalking? (a Nokia N-Gage meme) https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sidetalking-n-gage https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sidetalking-n-gage https://www.globalnerdy.com/2022/07/09/sidetalking-makes-a-slight-comeback/ https://www.globalnerdy.com/2022/07/09/sidetalking-makes-a-s...
- evv 4y ago
  Even if this thread is fake, for me this is the most memorable thing about that phone https://twitter.com/cooperlund/status/1185243122210656261 https://twitter.com/cooperlund/status/1185243122210656261
yafbum 4y ago
Missing: the luxury-focused Vertu line, like: https://luxatic.com/boucheron-helped-create-the-360k-vertu-signature-cobra/ https://luxatic.com/boucheron-helped-create-the-360k-vertu-s...
yafbum 4y ago
Missing: the Danger Hiptop aka T-Mobile Sidekick, with its swivel-up screen revealing a full keyboard in landscape. https://amp.www.complex.com/pop-culture/2015/09/history-of-the-sidekick 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)
- jwilk 4y ago
  Non-AMP link: https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2015/09/history-of-the-sidekick https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2015/09/history-of-the-s...
- consp 4y ago
  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). My personal favourite but with shitty keyboard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Blue_Angel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Blue_Angel
- codethief 4y ago
  Its form factor is also reminiscent of the later T-Mobile G1, the first Android phone. :)
- tonywastaken 4y ago
  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.
  - yafbum 4y ago
    That hosted web interface even got famously hacked by a teenager then posted screenshots of Paris Hilton's info https://www.computerworld.com/article/2569592/paris-hilton-may-be-victim-of-t-mobile-web-holes.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2569592/paris-hilton-m...
abeppu 4y ago
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?
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  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".
  - karamanolev 4y ago
    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.
- bombcar 4y ago
  The end result is often called a "local maximum" and what you've pointed out happens time and time again. 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.
  - bitwize 4y ago
    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.
turtlebits 4y ago
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. https://www.pocket-lint.com/phones/reviews/sony-mobile/67352-sony-ericsson-p800-phone-pda https://www.pocket-lint.com/phones/reviews/sony-mobile/67352...
- WillPostForFood 4y ago
  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.
tweetle_beetle 4y ago
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.
- pavlov 4y ago
  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).
  - tweetle_beetle 4y ago
    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.
dec0dedab0de 4y ago
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.
arcade79 4y ago
I just wish we could get some smaller smartphones again. I absolutely loved the Nexus One (HTC Passion). Just the right size.
- nix0n 4y ago
  If you want an absolutely minuscule phone, there's Unihertz: https://www.unihertz.com/products/jelly-pro https://www.unihertz.com/products/jelly-pro
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    That's my daily-driver phone. I love everything about it except the camera.
  - smallerfish 4y ago
    I don't recommend Unihertz. My Atom XL is riddled with bugs, and tech support are useless.
xnx 4y ago
The Motorola ROKR phone had iTunes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_ROKR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_ROKR
rospaya 4y ago
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.
Sharlin 4y ago
The Nokia 8110 [1] was literally nicknamed "banana", at least in Finland, due to its shape and its being available in yellow. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_8110 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_8110
- moron4hire 4y ago
  Cellular, modular, interactivodular.
- philwelch 4y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_SPH-N270
  - Sharlin 4y ago
    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.
CommieBobDole 4y ago
I sort of miss when tiny phones were a thing. I had (and still have somewhere) a Nokia 8260, and that thing was absolutely minuscule. https://www.phonescoop.com/phones/phone.php?p=65 https://www.phonescoop.com/phones/phone.php?p=65
awkward 4y ago
Late Nokia phones had this feature where you could enter numbers and the phone would autocomplete based on the numeric character codes. So 4 [GHI] 3 [DEF] 5 [JKL] would give "Hello" as the first option, and so on. It's still the best typing experience I've had on a phone.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- atestu 4y ago
  Do you mean T9? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T9_(predictive_text) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T9_(predictive_text)
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  There are T9 phone keyboards on the Play Store and almost all phones (with Apple being the notable exception) also incorporate T9 into their dialers. T9 worked great for words in the dictionary. When your word wasn't in the (often limited) dictionary, though...
_spduchamp 4y ago
Nothing beats the Wasp T12 Speechtool!
blululu 4y ago
Sure, you can sit around Twitter all day whining about how Apple won't make your favorite phone or you can get on AliExpress and send $20 USD for a brand new Ferrari Phone: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256802047473717.html?spm=a2g0o.detail.1000014.6.7f60db17pFwxbC&gps-id=pcDetailBottomMoreOtherSeller&scm=1007.40000.267768.0&scm_id=1007.40000.267768.0&scm-url=1007.40000.267768.0&pvid=97300323-6331-48a7-9cbd-ccb57c5d3f65&_t=gps-id:pcDetailBottomMoreOtherSeller,scm-url:1007.40000.267768.0,pvid:97300323-6331-48a7-9cbd-ccb57c5d3f65,tpp_buckets:668%232846%238110%23336&pdp_ext_f=%7B%22sku_id%22%3A%2212000030450325766%22%2C%22sceneId%22%3A%2230050%22%7D&pdp_npi=2%40dis%21USD%2125.99%2121.83%21%21%21%21%21%402101d1ad16684437454604537e4af0%2112000030450325766%21rec https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256802047473717.html?spm=a2g...
- blululu 4y ago
  Also comes in flip phone form factor: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2251832310833680.html?spm=a2g0o.detail.1000014.3.313b73fbJmfKet&gps-id=pcDetailBottomMoreOtherSeller&scm=1007.40000.267768.0&scm_id=1007.40000.267768.0&scm-url=1007.40000.267768.0&pvid=11c42d02-d7a2-43df-87f9-46d0b7ff27e4&_t=gps-id:pcDetailBottomMoreOtherSeller,scm-url:1007.40000.267768.0,pvid:11c42d02-d7a2-43df-87f9-46d0b7ff27e4,tpp_buckets:668%232846%238110%23336&pdp_ext_f=%7B%22sku_id%22%3A%2264525712526%22%2C%22sceneId%22%3A%2230050%22%7D&pdp_npi=2%40dis%21USD%2131.2%2124.65%21%21%21%21%21%402101d1b216684444644288665e2023%2164525712526%21rec https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2251832310833680.html?spm=a2g... Not into cars. That's fine. How about a phone for people who really like soda: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2255799830362840.html?spm=a2g0o.detail.1000014.7.313b73fbJmfKet&gps-id=pcDetailBottomMoreOtherSeller&scm=1007.40000.267768.0&scm_id=1007.40000.267768.0&scm-url=1007.40000.267768.0&pvid=11c42d02-d7a2-43df-87f9-46d0b7ff27e4&_t=gps-id:pcDetailBottomMoreOtherSeller,scm-url:1007.40000.267768.0,pvid:11c42d02-d7a2-43df-87f9-46d0b7ff27e4,tpp_buckets:668%232846%238110%23336&pdp_ext_f=%7B%22sku_id%22%3A%2212000030330758029%22%2C%22sceneId%22%3A%2230050%22%7D&pdp_npi=2%40dis%21USD%2112.53%2112.53%21%21%21%21%21%402101d1b216684444644288665e2023%2112000030330758029%21rec https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2255799830362840.html?spm=a2g... Once you drop the giant screen requirement that all smart phones cater to as their design center you can kind of go nuts on the ID. A relatively modest amount of NRE will let you spin up your own absurd vision into a feature phone. (Though you may end of losing a quarter million dollars just for the pure joy of having a rotary dial mobile phone with eInk display).
BuildTheRobots 4y ago
I've got fond memories of trying to order from the Farnel website with a Nokia 6800 back in 2006ish... I think via wifi. The entire experience was awful and infuriating on a number of levels, but it did actually get on with it. Might have been running Opera as a java app. Thanks for the post - I've been trying to remember what that was and failing to google for a couple of weeks now. Some of the ire and sarcasm seems undeserved and seems to miss the point of some of the handsets - I wonder if the author is old enough to remember them first hand in the wild (eg for the k800 no one downloaded MP3s through their phone, but having a 2gb SD card and a USB connection was extremely handy). Edit: to clarify what I meant; I didn't meant to disparage anyone's age. Merely that I remember some of this tech making sense in the context of the time, though looking back from today, I can see why it wouldn't.
- johnwalkr 4y ago
  I have fond memories of the WAP internet. In 2001 in Canada it was really expensive to get any kind of data plan, and you might only get 5MB per month. I had a plan with no data at all, but you could use the WAP browser to access a handful of things for free, on the provider's website. It was things like weather, very limited news and movie times. One day I was messing around in there, and a 404 page had a link to google. I bookmarked the link and from that day had unlimited WAP internet access (and google had a built-in gateway to WAPify any web page). My next phone was not a flip phone, had a real (bad browser), and had a prominent web browser button that worked from any other screen. However you could only exit the browser by navigating menus. It also had a tendency to reset in your pocket, which of course turned off the keylock. So at least once a day you'd end up pocket-googling and using up your precious megabytes.
Eric_WVGG 4y ago
I almost bought one of those "lipstick" phones. I figured, if all I'm doing is making calls, why _not_ have the smallest phone possible? The only thing that really stopped me is that I never figured out if it would work on American cell networks. https://twitter.com/GerryMcBride/status/1591908903964622848 https://twitter.com/GerryMcBride/status/1591908903964622848
pavlov 4y ago
I miss the Nokia 7700 which was a high-resolution touchscreen phone in 2003 and looked like a prop from "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7700 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7700 This was the high point of Nokia design's plastic fantastic insanity. It had side-talking and everything.
webdoodle 4y ago
I had the first edition Compaq Ipaq pocket pc phone, running on windows. It had a dedicated keyboard and built in 28.8k modem. It was the first 'smart' phone, in that I could somewhat browse the web, but it was mostly useful for email. The modem also functioned as a fax, so I could send and receive faxes, though not all that practical. It didn't have a camera, and was nearly as big as a brick, but it was the first portable, internet connected device that was small enough to carry. Came with a stylus thing to function like a mouse, sort of. It only got about a days use before needed a recharge. Google didn't exist at the time, but Lycos did. I smuggled my brand new phone into a local pub triva night, and with all my new tech powers, ensured our team won that night. $20 of beer was our prize, and the concept of smartphone was firmly embedded in culture.
- moron4hire 4y ago
  I had a coworker that had one of those, while I had only an IPaq PDA. They were roughly the same size, with the phone being slightly thicker and also an antenna nub on the top. I found my IPaq while moving a month ago. The footprint is significantly smaller than my Google Pixel 6. Though the Pixel is significantly thinner, I find that also makes it more uncomfortable to hold. Like, imagine taking it to an extreme and the phone becomes as thin as a piece of glass. Even without sharp edges, it'd still be very uncomfortable to wrap your hand around such a thing. I don't understand the obsession with thinner and thinner phones. Thickness is not universally bad. It would at least give us more room for battery. There aren't any other, similarly-sized objects that I wrap my hand around completely. Small books, digital cameras, handheld game consoles, I hold gripping the edge of the device. But you can't do that with a smartphone because one of the two largest faces of the rectangular solid is reactive to any part of your skin. My laptop touchpad can tell when I wrest my wrist on it while typing on the keyboard versus just touching it with my fingertips. Why can't smartphones reject grabbing the side of the screen and only react to fingertip touches?
  - theriddlr 4y ago
    This! Candybar phones have more secure grip and room for battery. The iPhone 4 while heavier is more comfortable to hold than the iPhone 6 / SE3 which I now use.
JofArnold 4y ago
And then there's the Nokia Goatse phone https://twitter.com/cooperlund/status/1185243122210656261 https://twitter.com/cooperlund/status/1185243122210656261
pwinnski 4y ago
@dang can we update the link to https://twitter.com/GerryMcBride/status/1591907714208518145 https://twitter.com/GerryMcBride/status/1591907714208518145 please?
silexia 4y ago
I would love a phone with pre-built grips on it... I bought a Pixel 6 Pro earlier in the year and the first one cracked then turned into a brick, while using the Google case for it. My second one cracked in my pocket while using the top Amazon case. I would like a rugged and sturdy phone that won't crack sitting in your pocket and is not slick as snot.
euroderf 4y ago
I worked at a mobile commerce startup in Helsinki in the late 90s and I remember seeing some of these in the hands of business acquaintances. It just amazes me that Nokia cranked out so many oddball designs and that basically they all disappeared without a trace. I wonder if any of them actually were seriously studied by academics for their UIs.
FunnyBadger 4y ago
flanbiscuit 4y ago
I had the Motorola V70 (the one that "PIVOTED") and I loved it! https://twitter.com/GerryMcBride/status/1591909798488178688 https://twitter.com/GerryMcBride/status/1591909798488178688 It was my 2nd to last pre-smartphone era phone, the last being the RAZR. I get that the swiveling piece was unique but I wouldn't put it in the same "bananas" categories as some of the other ones
agentwiggles 4y ago
I had a Samsung Alias for a while, which was a genuinely cool phone. It could flip open either vertically (in the normal RAZR style) or it could be flipped open horizontally. The keypad had e-ink displays in each key, and if you had it open vertically, it would display a number pad for dialing. If it was open horizontally, you got a full keyboard instead. I could text faster than all my friends. I also had a Motorola Hint, which was a neat little device - smaller than your average phone at the time, and almost square. You could slide out a little keyboard. Keyboard phones were neat. Bring em back I say!
bingo-bongo 4y ago
not mentioning the 8110 is bananas!
hitpointdrew 4y ago
Disappointed there wasn’t just a picture of a banana phone.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pipeline_peak 4y ago
I miss when phones were ambitiously diverse. It never felt like all the flipping, flopping, and twisting ever solved anything, but it was exciting. In 2007, Apple perfected the smartphone, thus killing off anything with a pen or a handle bar. I can’t say I miss 1000 different incompatible Java powered tamagotchi looking things having their own calculator, calendar, browser etc. But in solving that, resulting in these 5 inch black slabs, there’s really nothing to talk about these days in the phone world. Oh wow faster, bigger storage, sharper camera woop de do! That just means we need to put that creativity somewhere else.
xtiansimon 4y ago
Is it a phone? Is it a phone + camera? Is it a phone + text device? Of course the answer was not design, but electronic engineering (to get all the parts into small form factor) and software. Who knew?

174 points by leephillips 4y ago

xbar 4y ago

I'd really like to take on a pi hack project on one of those Sony Ericsson Walkman phones.

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!

Izkata 4y ago

> "OK... what if instead of it flipping, it PIVOTED" Kinda like the LG Wing: https://www.lg.com/global/lgwing https://www.lg.com/global/lgwing

wildzzz 4y ago
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?).
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  You could stick a keyboard down there, if you're... I dunno, running a really wide text processor?
Findecanor 4y ago
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)

agilob 4y ago

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".

Antrikshy 4y ago
Hardware may be less interesting, but the software is way more dynamic than ever.
- agilob 4y ago
  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.
theriddlr 4y ago
Second-hand phone shops now show the back of the phone in the display case because they all look the same from the front.
gardenhedge 4y ago
Well when companies try do something different - like a notch - they get shit on these days
eternityforest 4y ago

causality0 4y ago

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.

Izkata 4y ago
> 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+.
- bombcar 4y ago
  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).
  - SnooSux 4y ago
    Sounds like the buttons are all real, there are just only 10 of them.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      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.

shubhamjain 4y ago

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. [1]: https://twitter.com/shubhamjainco/status/1406338323531010050 https://twitter.com/shubhamjainco/status/1406338323531010050

bradknowles 4y ago
Samsung squits out like 50+ phone models a year. That's like one every week. How can any of them be any good? How can any of them ever get any useful time in the spotlight?
- pc86 4y ago
  You're right, if they had any business sense they'd be making more than a piddling $1B/month - https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/26/22902283/samsung-earnings-q4-2021-record-revenue-galaxy-s22 https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/26/22902283/samsung-earnings...
mhaberl 4y ago
> The genius of Steve Jobs was in showing that you can have whole company focus on making a brilliant device that works for everyone 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-duckies/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...

RajT88 4y ago

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.

bombcar 4y ago
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.
wirthjason 4y ago
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.
- bitwize 4y ago
  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.
raynr 4y ago
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.

UI_at_80x24 4y ago

I miss the Nokia N900 form factor (although, larger would have been nicer). It combined touch-screen AND a full keyboard.

thriftwy 4y ago
It also had stylus and a kickstand! It could broadcast in FM!

alex_c 4y ago

Somewhat related - I feel like we're in the middle of a general trend of boring, monochrome design. Car colors come to mind: https://www.thedrive.com/news/37001/this-graph-shows-how-car-paint-colors-have-gotten-more-boring-over-the-years 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 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!

Markoff 4y ago

Yeah, good times and now we would be happy if they offered at least smaller rectangle instead of those huge bricks or remote controls.

woopwoop 4y ago

> They literally designed this entire thing for dads that couldn't get the hang of T9 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.

rob74 4y ago
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.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
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.
aivisol 4y ago
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.

aimor 4y ago

This was the one I picked: https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/nokia-7705-twist-verizon https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/nokia-7705-twist-verizon 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.

themenomen 4y ago

Some of these in action from Michael Fisher's "When Phones Were Fun" playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOZi-7V11k8&list=PLwd8abTO4vh2smuMzykXDOPNnsxhHC4Oh https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOZi-7V11k8&list=PLwd8abTO4v...

SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago

Remember sidetalking? (a Nokia N-Gage meme) https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sidetalking-n-gage https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sidetalking-n-gage https://www.globalnerdy.com/2022/07/09/sidetalking-makes-a-slight-comeback/ https://www.globalnerdy.com/2022/07/09/sidetalking-makes-a-s...

evv 4y ago
Even if this thread is fake, for me this is the most memorable thing about that phone https://twitter.com/cooperlund/status/1185243122210656261 https://twitter.com/cooperlund/status/1185243122210656261

yafbum 4y ago

Missing: the luxury-focused Vertu line, like: https://luxatic.com/boucheron-helped-create-the-360k-vertu-signature-cobra/ https://luxatic.com/boucheron-helped-create-the-360k-vertu-s...

yafbum 4y ago

Missing: the Danger Hiptop aka T-Mobile Sidekick, with its swivel-up screen revealing a full keyboard in landscape. https://amp.www.complex.com/pop-culture/2015/09/history-of-the-sidekick 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)

jwilk 4y ago
Non-AMP link: https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2015/09/history-of-the-sidekick https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2015/09/history-of-the-s...
consp 4y ago
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). My personal favourite but with shitty keyboard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Blue_Angel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Blue_Angel
codethief 4y ago
Its form factor is also reminiscent of the later T-Mobile G1, the first Android phone. :)
tonywastaken 4y ago
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.
- yafbum 4y ago
  That hosted web interface even got famously hacked by a teenager then posted screenshots of Paris Hilton's info https://www.computerworld.com/article/2569592/paris-hilton-may-be-victim-of-t-mobile-web-holes.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2569592/paris-hilton-m...

abeppu 4y ago

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?

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
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".
- karamanolev 4y ago
  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.
bombcar 4y ago
The end result is often called a "local maximum" and what you've pointed out happens time and time again. 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.
- bitwize 4y ago
  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.

turtlebits 4y ago

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. https://www.pocket-lint.com/phones/reviews/sony-mobile/67352-sony-ericsson-p800-phone-pda https://www.pocket-lint.com/phones/reviews/sony-mobile/67352...

WillPostForFood 4y ago
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.

tweetle_beetle 4y ago

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.

pavlov 4y ago
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).
- tweetle_beetle 4y ago
  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.

dec0dedab0de 4y ago

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.

arcade79 4y ago

I just wish we could get some smaller smartphones again. I absolutely loved the Nexus One (HTC Passion). Just the right size.

nix0n 4y ago
If you want an absolutely minuscule phone, there's Unihertz: https://www.unihertz.com/products/jelly-pro https://www.unihertz.com/products/jelly-pro
- aidenn0 4y ago
  That's my daily-driver phone. I love everything about it except the camera.
- smallerfish 4y ago
  I don't recommend Unihertz. My Atom XL is riddled with bugs, and tech support are useless.

xnx 4y ago

The Motorola ROKR phone had iTunes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_ROKR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_ROKR

rospaya 4y ago

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.

Sharlin 4y ago

The Nokia 8110 [1] was literally nicknamed "banana", at least in Finland, due to its shape and its being available in yellow. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_8110 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_8110

moron4hire 4y ago
Cellular, modular, interactivodular.
philwelch 4y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_SPH-N270
- Sharlin 4y ago
  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.

CommieBobDole 4y ago

I sort of miss when tiny phones were a thing. I had (and still have somewhere) a Nokia 8260, and that thing was absolutely minuscule. https://www.phonescoop.com/phones/phone.php?p=65 https://www.phonescoop.com/phones/phone.php?p=65

awkward 4y ago

Late Nokia phones had this feature where you could enter numbers and the phone would autocomplete based on the numeric character codes. So 4 [GHI] 3 [DEF] 5 [JKL] would give "Hello" as the first option, and so on. It's still the best typing experience I've had on a phone.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
atestu 4y ago
Do you mean T9? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T9_(predictive_text) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T9_(predictive_text)
jeroenhd 4y ago
There are T9 phone keyboards on the Play Store and almost all phones (with Apple being the notable exception) also incorporate T9 into their dialers. T9 worked great for words in the dictionary. When your word wasn't in the (often limited) dictionary, though...

_spduchamp 4y ago

Nothing beats the Wasp T12 Speechtool!

blululu 4y ago

Sure, you can sit around Twitter all day whining about how Apple won't make your favorite phone or you can get on AliExpress and send $20 USD for a brand new Ferrari Phone: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256802047473717.html?spm=a2g0o.detail.1000014.6.7f60db17pFwxbC&gps-id=pcDetailBottomMoreOtherSeller&scm=1007.40000.267768.0&scm_id=1007.40000.267768.0&scm-url=1007.40000.267768.0&pvid=97300323-6331-48a7-9cbd-ccb57c5d3f65&_t=gps-id:pcDetailBottomMoreOtherSeller,scm-url:1007.40000.267768.0,pvid:97300323-6331-48a7-9cbd-ccb57c5d3f65,tpp_buckets:668%232846%238110%23336&pdp_ext_f=%7B%22sku_id%22%3A%2212000030450325766%22%2C%22sceneId%22%3A%2230050%22%7D&pdp_npi=2%40dis%21USD%2125.99%2121.83%21%21%21%21%21%402101d1ad16684437454604537e4af0%2112000030450325766%21rec https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256802047473717.html?spm=a2g...

blululu 4y ago
Also comes in flip phone form factor: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2251832310833680.html?spm=a2g0o.detail.1000014.3.313b73fbJmfKet&gps-id=pcDetailBottomMoreOtherSeller&scm=1007.40000.267768.0&scm_id=1007.40000.267768.0&scm-url=1007.40000.267768.0&pvid=11c42d02-d7a2-43df-87f9-46d0b7ff27e4&_t=gps-id:pcDetailBottomMoreOtherSeller,scm-url:1007.40000.267768.0,pvid:11c42d02-d7a2-43df-87f9-46d0b7ff27e4,tpp_buckets:668%232846%238110%23336&pdp_ext_f=%7B%22sku_id%22%3A%2264525712526%22%2C%22sceneId%22%3A%2230050%22%7D&pdp_npi=2%40dis%21USD%2131.2%2124.65%21%21%21%21%21%402101d1b216684444644288665e2023%2164525712526%21rec https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2251832310833680.html?spm=a2g... Not into cars. That's fine. How about a phone for people who really like soda: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2255799830362840.html?spm=a2g0o.detail.1000014.7.313b73fbJmfKet&gps-id=pcDetailBottomMoreOtherSeller&scm=1007.40000.267768.0&scm_id=1007.40000.267768.0&scm-url=1007.40000.267768.0&pvid=11c42d02-d7a2-43df-87f9-46d0b7ff27e4&_t=gps-id:pcDetailBottomMoreOtherSeller,scm-url:1007.40000.267768.0,pvid:11c42d02-d7a2-43df-87f9-46d0b7ff27e4,tpp_buckets:668%232846%238110%23336&pdp_ext_f=%7B%22sku_id%22%3A%2212000030330758029%22%2C%22sceneId%22%3A%2230050%22%7D&pdp_npi=2%40dis%21USD%2112.53%2112.53%21%21%21%21%21%402101d1b216684444644288665e2023%2112000030330758029%21rec https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2255799830362840.html?spm=a2g... Once you drop the giant screen requirement that all smart phones cater to as their design center you can kind of go nuts on the ID. A relatively modest amount of NRE will let you spin up your own absurd vision into a feature phone. (Though you may end of losing a quarter million dollars just for the pure joy of having a rotary dial mobile phone with eInk display).

BuildTheRobots 4y ago

I've got fond memories of trying to order from the Farnel website with a Nokia 6800 back in 2006ish... I think via wifi. The entire experience was awful and infuriating on a number of levels, but it did actually get on with it. Might have been running Opera as a java app. Thanks for the post - I've been trying to remember what that was and failing to google for a couple of weeks now. Some of the ire and sarcasm seems undeserved and seems to miss the point of some of the handsets - I wonder if the author is old enough to remember them first hand in the wild (eg for the k800 no one downloaded MP3s through their phone, but having a 2gb SD card and a USB connection was extremely handy). Edit: to clarify what I meant; I didn't meant to disparage anyone's age. Merely that I remember some of this tech making sense in the context of the time, though looking back from today, I can see why it wouldn't.

johnwalkr 4y ago
I have fond memories of the WAP internet. In 2001 in Canada it was really expensive to get any kind of data plan, and you might only get 5MB per month. I had a plan with no data at all, but you could use the WAP browser to access a handful of things for free, on the provider's website. It was things like weather, very limited news and movie times. One day I was messing around in there, and a 404 page had a link to google. I bookmarked the link and from that day had unlimited WAP internet access (and google had a built-in gateway to WAPify any web page). My next phone was not a flip phone, had a real (bad browser), and had a prominent web browser button that worked from any other screen. However you could only exit the browser by navigating menus. It also had a tendency to reset in your pocket, which of course turned off the keylock. So at least once a day you'd end up pocket-googling and using up your precious megabytes.

Eric_WVGG 4y ago

I almost bought one of those "lipstick" phones. I figured, if all I'm doing is making calls, why _not_ have the smallest phone possible? The only thing that really stopped me is that I never figured out if it would work on American cell networks. https://twitter.com/GerryMcBride/status/1591908903964622848 https://twitter.com/GerryMcBride/status/1591908903964622848

pavlov 4y ago

I miss the Nokia 7700 which was a high-resolution touchscreen phone in 2003 and looked like a prop from "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7700 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7700 This was the high point of Nokia design's plastic fantastic insanity. It had side-talking and everything.

webdoodle 4y ago

I had the first edition Compaq Ipaq pocket pc phone, running on windows. It had a dedicated keyboard and built in 28.8k modem. It was the first 'smart' phone, in that I could somewhat browse the web, but it was mostly useful for email. The modem also functioned as a fax, so I could send and receive faxes, though not all that practical. It didn't have a camera, and was nearly as big as a brick, but it was the first portable, internet connected device that was small enough to carry. Came with a stylus thing to function like a mouse, sort of. It only got about a days use before needed a recharge. Google didn't exist at the time, but Lycos did. I smuggled my brand new phone into a local pub triva night, and with all my new tech powers, ensured our team won that night. $20 of beer was our prize, and the concept of smartphone was firmly embedded in culture.

moron4hire 4y ago
I had a coworker that had one of those, while I had only an IPaq PDA. They were roughly the same size, with the phone being slightly thicker and also an antenna nub on the top. I found my IPaq while moving a month ago. The footprint is significantly smaller than my Google Pixel 6. Though the Pixel is significantly thinner, I find that also makes it more uncomfortable to hold. Like, imagine taking it to an extreme and the phone becomes as thin as a piece of glass. Even without sharp edges, it'd still be very uncomfortable to wrap your hand around such a thing. I don't understand the obsession with thinner and thinner phones. Thickness is not universally bad. It would at least give us more room for battery. There aren't any other, similarly-sized objects that I wrap my hand around completely. Small books, digital cameras, handheld game consoles, I hold gripping the edge of the device. But you can't do that with a smartphone because one of the two largest faces of the rectangular solid is reactive to any part of your skin. My laptop touchpad can tell when I wrest my wrist on it while typing on the keyboard versus just touching it with my fingertips. Why can't smartphones reject grabbing the side of the screen and only react to fingertip touches?
- theriddlr 4y ago
  This! Candybar phones have more secure grip and room for battery. The iPhone 4 while heavier is more comfortable to hold than the iPhone 6 / SE3 which I now use.

JofArnold 4y ago

And then there's the Nokia Goatse phone https://twitter.com/cooperlund/status/1185243122210656261 https://twitter.com/cooperlund/status/1185243122210656261

pwinnski 4y ago

@dang can we update the link to https://twitter.com/GerryMcBride/status/1591907714208518145 https://twitter.com/GerryMcBride/status/1591907714208518145 please?

silexia 4y ago

I would love a phone with pre-built grips on it... I bought a Pixel 6 Pro earlier in the year and the first one cracked then turned into a brick, while using the Google case for it. My second one cracked in my pocket while using the top Amazon case. I would like a rugged and sturdy phone that won't crack sitting in your pocket and is not slick as snot.

euroderf 4y ago

I worked at a mobile commerce startup in Helsinki in the late 90s and I remember seeing some of these in the hands of business acquaintances. It just amazes me that Nokia cranked out so many oddball designs and that basically they all disappeared without a trace. I wonder if any of them actually were seriously studied by academics for their UIs.

FunnyBadger 4y ago

flanbiscuit 4y ago

I had the Motorola V70 (the one that "PIVOTED") and I loved it! https://twitter.com/GerryMcBride/status/1591909798488178688 https://twitter.com/GerryMcBride/status/1591909798488178688 It was my 2nd to last pre-smartphone era phone, the last being the RAZR. I get that the swiveling piece was unique but I wouldn't put it in the same "bananas" categories as some of the other ones

agentwiggles 4y ago

I had a Samsung Alias for a while, which was a genuinely cool phone. It could flip open either vertically (in the normal RAZR style) or it could be flipped open horizontally. The keypad had e-ink displays in each key, and if you had it open vertically, it would display a number pad for dialing. If it was open horizontally, you got a full keyboard instead. I could text faster than all my friends. I also had a Motorola Hint, which was a neat little device - smaller than your average phone at the time, and almost square. You could slide out a little keyboard. Keyboard phones were neat. Bring em back I say!

bingo-bongo 4y ago

not mentioning the 8110 is bananas!

hitpointdrew 4y ago

Disappointed there wasn’t just a picture of a banana phone.

deleted 4y ago

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pipeline_peak 4y ago

I miss when phones were ambitiously diverse. It never felt like all the flipping, flopping, and twisting ever solved anything, but it was exciting. In 2007, Apple perfected the smartphone, thus killing off anything with a pen or a handle bar. I can’t say I miss 1000 different incompatible Java powered tamagotchi looking things having their own calculator, calendar, browser etc. But in solving that, resulting in these 5 inch black slabs, there’s really nothing to talk about these days in the phone world. Oh wow faster, bigger storage, sharper camera woop de do! That just means we need to put that creativity somewhere else.

xtiansimon 4y ago

Is it a phone? Is it a phone + camera? Is it a phone + text device? Of course the answer was not design, but electronic engineering (to get all the parts into small form factor) and software. Who knew?