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Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

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Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#81

Post by afavour »

pier25 wrote: post #74
phpnode wrote: post #28

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

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.

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.

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#82

Post by odiroot »

raesene9 wrote: post #27

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

N900 was absolutely my favourite out of all phones I owned. It felt like such a power-user device.

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#83

Post by rcarmo »

tyingq wrote: post #79
rcarmo wrote: post #75

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…

>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 :)

Yes, but I was doing that on a 9110, I think. Had a decent terminal if I wanted to use telnet :)

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#84

Post by y04nn »

pier25 wrote: post #74
phpnode wrote: post #28

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

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.

From Wikipedia:

> Such T9 formats for text entry therefore remain available in all latest [as of August 2020] iterations of LG keyboards, certain Samsung keyboards, and third party T9 keyboards such as Go keyboard for Androids and Type Nine for iPhones, as shown on this LG V60.

Also, there was another method of touch input that used swipe gestures to write words, I can't remember the name, but I remember that it was far from intuitive to use.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T9_(predictive_text)#Successor...

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#85

Post by ollifi »

sofixa wrote: post #52
ollifi wrote: post #32

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.

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.

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#86

Post by INTPenis »

pedrocr wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#87

Post by senko »

rcarmo wrote: post #75

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…

Maemo wasn't the problem, and in fact N900 had a dedicated cult following for years after.

Nokia spectaculary blew its own foot with deprecating Maemo after only a few months - either the stupidest move in history or result of internal power struggles - and force-marrying it with Intel's Moblin (itself a decent mobile OS) to create unholy mess that was Meego.

The book (btw awesome find, gonna read it at the first chance I get!) agrees with my recollection of the events:

> The operating system was named Maemo. As soon as it was permitted to be fitted on a phone, that first Maemo smartphone was a reasonable success. It attracted a community of open source developers who created Maemo apps. With 12,000 members, this was the largest mobile developer community in the world. Then Nokia did something remarkable. It partnered with the chip manufacturer Intel, and the two companies renamed Maemo to MeeGo.

Consider Maemo was Debian-based, using GTK, and Moblin was RedHat-based, using QT. It not only meant Nokia had to rewrite its proprietary UI and repackage everything, it also threw all the thriving dev community under the bus.

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#88

Post by ljf »

pier25 wrote: post #74
phpnode wrote: post #28

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

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.

No I loved those buttons, and find miss-touching a screen so much easier! I could bash out messages on my Nokia 8250 without looking at all, and could type away with the phone in my bag. I'd love to know what my typing speed was actually like back then, but it sure felt fast!

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#90

Post by bserge »

mnmmn123456 wrote: post #13

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…

Well, not the iPhone, but Apple's marketing. We had everything the iPhone did with Windows Mobile. Hell, even Symbian did fine. They were just aimed at "professionals" and completely ignored consumers.
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