An iconic phone before the iPhone | Hacker News Reader

An iconic phone before the iPhone

juxtapoz.com

31 pointstodayiamme48 comments

I'd argue there are several really important telephones:

Automatic Electric 34/40 - First one without a subset - Western Electric 500 - First self compensating network - Western Electric 1500/2500 - First with TouchTone - Motorola StarTac - First Clamshell Phone - Apple iPhone - First Modern Smartphone.

Out of all of these landmarks, the AE 34/40, WE 500/1500/2500 and the Motorola StarTac are the most important ones.

The AE 34/40 was the first what we'd identify as a modern phone in appearance, the WE 500/1500/2500, is so iconic that anyone could identify it as a telephone, it also was a huge leap forward in transmission quality, and the StarTac was the first of billions of clamshell phone, the thing most identifiable as a cell phone to anyone shown an abstract drawing.

I'd argue that the 500 is more iconic however than anything to come before or after it.

IMO the Nokia-style "candy bar" phone is the iconic mobile phone design globally. I don't think I've ever seen a "generic cell phone" drawing that would be a clamshell design; usually it's something that looks vaguely like a late '90s Nokia with the antenna stub.

Fair, fair.

More specifically, I'd say that the Nokia 3210 [1] was one of the most iconic and recognisable mobile phones. It was the one that came with Snake and created the fad for comparing high-scores amongst friends.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_3210

right, when i saw "iconic phone" my first thought was the nokia 1100, but the 3210 is indeed more deserving of the title

I bought a 3210 almost entirely for the game "snake", and the ability to play it during the bus ride to school.

But overall it was a really good piece of kit. Robust, easy to use, etc.

It depends where you lived. In Europe the Nokia 3310 was king, but in Japan clamshell were all over the place.

I'm not ashamed to say that I'd be using a 3310 now but you can't get reliable batteries any more. That leaves only later Nokia dumbphones which are the same in spirit but inferior in usability.

I miss clamshell phones. I miss the satisfaction of ending a call by folding the phone shut. Where's the dramatism in ending an angry call with a gentle tap on a virtual button on a touchscreen?

I was just butt-dialed this morning (2am) by a friend at a concert in Morocco. Something that never happened with clamshells.

> Apple iPhone - First Modern Smartphone.

Depends on your definition of "modern".

The iPhone wasn't the first to support apps (Windows Mobile / CE handsets had been around for a while, but they weren't nice to use as a "phone". Also plenty of feature phones, eg most of Sony Ericsson's pre-Android range- supported apps too).

If you meant "the first smart-phone form-factor", then there were Nokia and sony handsets long before the iPhone. But they weren't all that great from many of the accounts I heard (which always put me off buying one). Blackberry and Palm (remember them) also had some great offerings for their era too.

If you meant the "first with capacitive touch screen", then LG beat Apple to the market with an iPhone-like device by a few months.

However Apple's iPhone is still the handset we all remember as being the groundbreaker. I don't know if that's because Apple PR team have done a wonderful job rewriting history; or because Apple happened to build the most successful product of that era that it made other products before it seem forgettable. Maybe a bit of both. But in any case, I think if you want to credit the iPhone for it's importance in history then it's only fair to credit the numerous other handsets which preceded it and pioneered the various different technologies and paradigms that Apple then went on and merge together so effectively.

Apple was the first one to put all of those things together in a single package that really worked well - thats what I mean by first modern :-P

Well that's now more a question of personal bias / preference than something that can be defined as cold, hard fact.

What worked for you might not have been someone else's preferred method of using a smart phone. As well polished as the iPhone was, I found many of its design implimentations worked against the way I liked to use a smart phone. And I think the fact that Symbian (amongst others) outsold iOS for the first few years of the iPhone's life would suggest that I wasn't alone.

So I think even by that measure, it's still unfair to exclude other handsets of the same generation which were just as popular.

But then I guess history is written by the victors, not the other pioneers who've since fallen by the wayside.

Apple took the smart phone from something used by technologists and other tech oriented people, and turned it into a mass market appliance accessible to everyone - every smart phone that has come since is related to it in form and function.

If Apple held a majority market share, then I might agree, but as I said before, Symbian et al had a larger market share so they must have had some degree of mass market appeal as well.

edit: just to clarify. I do agree that the iPhone deserve a place in the history books because it did change the landscape significantly. But my point was that the iPhone wasn't the first phone of it's ilk (probably the best all rounder and definitely best at specific criteria, but those are point I'm enjoying discussing here). In light of that, if the iPhone deserves a place then equally the handsets that pioneered much of the technology and paradigms which Apple beautifully combined, those other handsets deserves a mention too (like how scientific papers based on original research still need to draw from the pool of existing research and thus even new theories owe credit other publications)

Look at browser stats. Symbian was irrelevant compared to the iPhone is terms of popular usage as an actual internet device.

I accept that, but to a lot of people a smart phone is more than just a web browser.

Symbian had a larger market as Nokia were throwing it on as many devices as they could, irregardless of whether it worked well so they saturated the market. Plus they were commonly called featurephones and not smartphones.

Good point.

As someone who had been using smartphones long before the iPhone (Windows Mobile, Treos etc), I think the iPhone was the first iteration of what is commonly viewed by a large market as a smartphone. Rich user interaction via a large capacitive touchscreen.

That's not knocking the pre-iPhone smartphones, but conceptually they were very, very different devices with very different aims, the iPhone moved the definition of a smartphone.

The mob is fickle and they're usually wrong about the facts.

The first iPhone didn't even have apps like the smartphones that came before it. That's not modern. They didn't have the first touchscreen on a phone. Apple has very good marketing and that goes a long, long way when it comes to dealing with the mob.

Apart for UI the other major factor was a browser and a browsing experience which did not suck.

I'd argue that the LG Prada beat the iPhone in terms of the first capacitive phone with a touch-centric UI. However I can't comment on how good it's browser was; but even the Prada aside, you make a very good point about how other handsets had terrible web browsers. In fact "terrible" is possibly being too kind.

Yeah, yeah, everyone stands on other people's shoulders. Everyone knows that. Apple built the phone everyone was waiting for. People had Palm Pilots, Blackberry's, Zaurus', etc. I also had a $600 Microsoft CE phone with a slide out keyboard. The first time that I tried to install Opera, the phone hung and I couldn't use the phone. I'm standing at my bus stop trying to call my ride and the freakin phone doesn't work, won't even reboot! Anyway, it would be really helpful if people like yourself understood what Apple does "right/better" so maybe others, like the open source community, could produce better products.

> Anyway, it would be really helpful if people like yourself understood what Apple does "right/better" so maybe others, like the open source community, could produce better products.

Slightly rude don't you think? Who are "people like [me]"? And why do you assume that we don't know what Apple does right?

Can we not discuss the contributions of businesses to technology without making cheap shots at one another?

Your comments indicate that you don't understand. You think Apple PR rewrote history? Seriously?

"I don't know if that's because Apple PR team have done a wonderful job rewriting history; or because Apple happened to build the most successful product of that era that it made other products before it seem forgettable."

I also said "or because Apple happened to build the most successful product of that era that it made other products before it seem forgettable" - it's called giving a balanced argument.

Can you answer why they built such a successful/memorable product? Also, consider that Android overtook iOS pretty quickly.

http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/chart3...

I already had - a few times in fact. Apple combined a lot of desirable technologies into a well polished and aesthetically pleasing product.

I've also repeatedly said they do deserve a place in the history books. I'm not trying to dismiss the quality of the iPhone, I'm only discussing whether it deserves to be defined as "the first modern smart phone" when there were lot's of other similar products before it. And if it does deserve that accolade, then do the other handsets deserve a footnote?

I don't understand why it's such a taboo to discuss the achievements of Apple and their competitors, but a lot of people seem to have reacted very negatively.

What value is there in deciding if Apple had the first modern smartphone? It's a highly subjective opinion, which will probably change several times over the next decade. Just a conversation that takes people in the weeds. Sorry, I don't want to have that nerd fight.

All you seem to be saying is that the iPhone was not the first smartphone. That's not controversial, and that's not what was said. The question is, how do we define _modern_ smartphone.

>LG beat Apple to the market with an iPhone-like device by a few months

Ok, I'm wasting my time.

The OP said "first modern smart phone"; not first nor modern, but "first modern". So the question I raised was to determine a measure of "modern" which of which other smart phones did not exist.

I'm not trying to be controversial nor argumentative. But if someone states something as being the "first modern x" then we need to establish what "modern" means before we can agree on whether it was the first of it's ilk.

> Ok, I'm wasting my time.

You've only posted one comment. Surely it would make more sense to at least wait for my response before jumping in with derogatory remarks about a pointless argument?

And what is it with people being over sensitive on this subject. I've had personal attacks and been down voted several times for just daring to have a balanced conversation about Apple. What the hell has happened to HN that we can't even have friendly conversations any more?

It's ok, you've convinced me. The LG Prada was the first modern smartphone.

I'd argue that the Motorola Razr V3 was iconic. In the middle 2000s, nothing else looked like it.

It's the same basic form as the StarTAC.

Fair enough. I think that the the Razr was just the epitome of clamshell stylistically.

>"the WE 500/1500/2500, is so iconic that anyone could identify it as a telephone" //

Went to museum this year, 8 year old: "what's that?" <pointing at rotary-dial telephone>. Even our home phone is a wireless candy-bar shape. I was surprised, definite 'OMG how old am I?'-moment.

AE34, http://www.telephonearchive.com/phones/ae/ae34.html, for anyone else who is curious.

As a complete novice to the topic, the AE34 seems to lead the form of the WE500, why do you feel the later is the more iconic? What tech gave it the "huge leap forward"?

Electrically the 500 is much much more important than the 34/40 - every modern landline phone has something in common electrically with the 500 set.

"first modern smartphone" is a reasonable description, but I would say that Blackberry was the first modern smartphone and iPhone was the first mainstream smartphone.

In Sweden our most iconic-looking phone was the Ericofon "Cobra". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ericofon

> Although only ten buttons are needed for today's telephone needs, thw two "extra" buttons prepare these sets for future communications services.

I wonder what they had in mind? Have there been any noteworthy uses except for stuff like signaling the end of an input?

The first touch tone phones only had 10 buttons, FWIW.

In the US, the * key was used for a lot of shortcodes with various add-on phone services -- turning on/off caller id visibility, disabling call waiting for one call, calling the number that dialled you back, etc. However, in general, the keys were designed to be used to access computer services where you needed various delimiters.

Of note here is that the DTMF system was originally designed with a fourth row of keys, A-D. These were supposed to be used for general access of menus instead of the now traditional 1-9, but they only ever really got used for the military Autovon [1] network for setting priorities.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autovon

Not was, is, the vertical service codes still work - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_service_code

Very informative for those of us like myself who didn't know touch tone was around since the 60's, but damn is that website stuffed with ads. I had to click 3 close/collapse and then lower the browser window to cover up the footer bar crap just to read the post without getting a headache. Note to self, never overdo the ads like that.

I've had several phones with this design. One of them was made of clear plastic so you could see the components inside... and had some LEDs that lit up when it rang. But my favorite was just a plain old version that I hacked apart and installed the components into a shoe.

Why was I expecting a post about the Nokia 3310?

Because the Nokia 3310 (and to a lesser degree the 3210) were the iconic devices of the cellphone, just like the iPhone 4 (with iOS 6 or earlier) is probably the most iconic phone of the smartphone era.

And even if you were told to think of a landline telephone, the image in your head would probably look less like the Trimline and more like a late-era Bell, the kind that was chosen to represent the Washington-Moscow hotline.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com