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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

#11

Post by Fnoord »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #5

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.

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 ;-)

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#12

Post by zibzab »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #5

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.

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.

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#13

Post by mnmmn123456 »

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.

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#14

Post by kokey »

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.

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#15

Post by amarsahinovic »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #5

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.

This might be interesting (although it does not tick all of your boxes) https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transforme...

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#16

Post by fsflover »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #5

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.

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....

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#17

Post by antris »

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.

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.

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#18

Post by dagw »

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.

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.

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#19

Post by BuildTheRobots »

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.

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).

Re: Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

#20

Post by amelius »

fsflover wrote: post #16
tannhaeuser wrote: post #5

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.

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.
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