21–30 of 147 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here you go: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5 and https://pine64.org/pinephone . FAQ about the first one: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque... .
How well do the Android apps run on it (using Anbox)? I'd need that for running my banking app.
Also, see the FAQ.
Interesting tech choices ( 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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here you go: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5 and https://pine64.org/pinephone . FAQ about the first one: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque... .
How well do the Android apps run on it (using Anbox)? I'd need that for running my banking app.
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
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
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.