61–70 of 123 posts
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.
I just wish we could get some smaller smartphones again. I absolutely loved the Nexus One (HTC Passion). Just the right size.
If you want an absolutely minuscule phone, there's Unihertz: https://www.unihertz.com/products/jelly-pro
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...
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.
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-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)
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.
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.
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.
Phones with buttons have been tried and failed. Same with using your phone's processor for a desktop environment by simply plugging it into a dock; Samsung's DeX comes closest, but very few people seem to use it.
In practice, the easiest way to combine phones and games is to either stick with the touch screen interaction all games are designed for, or to grab a Bluetooth controller. Works across many games, almost all phones, and you have a pick in the hand feel or button quality rather than being limited by the design choices of the phone designer.
If you're into playing games on the go, tools like the Steam Deck or one of the more recent cloud streaming handhelds are probably better.
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.
T9 worked great for words in the dictionary. When your word wasn't in the (often limited) dictionary, though...