71–80 of 147 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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 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).
I see a lot of features re-used from the N900 in Android and iOS. I think Maemo/N900 changed the world far more.
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.
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
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)
But the 9000 series was definitely something I wish we had today in some usable, non-niche form.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 functional…
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 :)
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
Another option is https://fxtec.com/ although it doesn't seem to have a second screen on the back.