They thought about making a Switch in 2004 …
https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_eabfd363-1d3d-4ba0-8604-7df4f05376c7/
Page 12
Nice find!
The one in the thumbnail looks like it became the N-Gage taco phone.
Ah, replaceable batteries…
Honestly, I kept my Nokia going until I got a Fairphone - purely to be able to replace the battery.
It was great when visiting places they just asked me to install some shitty app (ie to view a restaurant menu, etc.) I’d just show them the Nokia and they’d have to treat me ”properly”
Those look like real life windows media player skins from the early 2000s.
I miss my Lumia 820. The UI was so smooth and the free music app in it was amazing for my needs. Sadly it ended before windows phone OS. Now I’ve been using a dumbphone (Nokia too) for 7 years.
Thank you for the unpaywalled link.
That feature photo device is a text-er’s dream. You could probably get some serious speed out of it.
Would that thing run any kind of Unix (I’d prefer one of the BSDs, but Linux is fine), I think on such a keyboard I could really use it for many things. As cool as PSP Slim, but more universal.
Yep. That would be great for gaming. Just swap out the rocker on the right side for a stubby joystick and you’d be off and running.
When I was a horny young man, I had this bad boy and a connection with “unlimited SMS to five chosen numbers” (you could then change those numbers but it’d cost you a little). It was only “unlimited” for the month it came out and the next month and then schools began and all us teenagers were texting each other in class under the table for absolutely no reason.
And the next month the “unlimited” became 1000 sms, to each of your five numbers or total I forget.
What a monster. Yeah, I definitely don’t miss the old days of the cellular companies vying to offer consumers the least shitty rates and constantly manipulating plans.
And you know what this thing could do?
It had FM radio and you had the capacity to record songs off the fking radio. In 2003. That was beyond crazy. I mean you can do that at home with a cassette player, but since this had a radio and recorder, it was basically one of those boomboxes people’s carried around in the 80’s. Functionally, if only because you had earphones and listened to it yourself.
Although the quality would horrify the HiFi people, especially anyone under 30 or so. They weren’t mp3, more like AMR/ACR whatever have you. (A proprietary format called LSE).
I vividly remember the sights and smells of walking and listening to Eminem - Lose Yourself on a very specific path I used to walk in the woods.
Gods I miss being a kid.
Edit to make it clear about the phone, it was essentially an improved 3310 (the classic unbreakable nokia) with a different case so it had qwerty and a few other improved features (like I think even WAP basically which was like a very crude mobile internet) and a few added games, like the 3330 (which was this improved version but in a standard Nokia 3310 case, with very minor alteration of a few mm)
I miss when phones weren’t all black obelisks. I mean, the features today are incredible and far surpass anything available 20 years ago, but the variety of tactile features and colors was incredible back then.
I would very much prefer actual physical buttons to write with.
I’m impatient and write fast and the tactile feedback is so shit I use the mid correction after seeing it’s the correct one but often I misclick and don’t proofread so I end up with a lot of silly mistakes.
(I do proofread emails and whatnot but like not mobile posted Lemmy comments)
That one is even more goatse looking than the N-Gage
Nokia was cool when phones were fun.
My mom has some weird combination of disorders, hard to determine since she becomes aggressive when advised to visit a psychiatrist. I suppose it’s just NPD though. Point is - she makes technical things up and acts insulted when I explain it’s nonsense, and doesn’t learn. Thus she’s so bad with tech that I wouldn’t give her an Android phone simply because she won’t be able to use it.
So - she still asks from time to time if she can use her old Nokia.
From time to time - because that small unimportant thing about cell standards being phased out, that I blabber, she doesn’t even try to catch.
I miss my Nokias. I was rocking a N810 with bluetooth internet sharing to my flip phone when the IPhone came out. It was so much better in every way, especially being able to use the actual www. Same with window phones. we were rocking the full internet and top notch cameras for a decade before iphone finally upped their game.
I tried using the Leaf for a couple weeks. It was interesting.
Nokia were crazy back in the day but I think people may remember them a bit too fondly. I remember how whenever there was some new tech or idea they would absolutely trickle them out just to try and squeeze as much money out of you as possible. If there were two new pieces of tech they’d release two phones, with each of them having one of the new pieces of tech. Back in those days they just refused to make the absolute best phone possible. That’s one of the biggest changes that came from the iPhone.
That’s called “diversification of investments”. And what Apple and other companies today are doing is called “putting all resources onto one critical point” (or “milking the golden cow till it’s dead”, I guess).
Good strategy is to do both. Finding a critical point gives you advantage, but things change and oligopolies gained by past successes don’t last forever.
You not think it could’ve been a cost saving measure too though and that putting the two new pieces of tech in one phone would’ve made it too expensive for anyone to buy
As a Nokia Mobile Phones employee in the mid 2000s, I can confirm this was indeed the case. The US wouldn’t pay over $100 for a handset, and Nokia was already losing money on hardware in the phone sale to have it subsidized by network providers. Nokia wanted to add tech and capability, but the high end stuff didn’t sell at a profit and carriers wouldn’t sell phones that were more expensive than their customers would pay. Apple was an exception due to marketing as “premium”.
Anddd now we have boring slab design, thanks Steve Apple.
But there are tries to make flip phones again with bendy screens - too fragile I think.
A bendy screen is useless IMHO. Even a flip phone with two screens is better.
Steve Apple isn’t the only one to blame for it, Apple just used to great success a few cultural cliches about future technology.
Still, unifying the control device and the display device is very stupid. I understand something with a normal screen for displaying information and a touchscreen for displaying controls.
The biggest problem with that is sadly the most functional design also happens to be the most boring.
It’s not the most functional for everyone with every balance of power possible. It’s the optimal for casual (dumb) usage with surveillance economy, ads and content consumption, but not production, and when that content is mostly not text.
Idiocracy machine.
Paywall, so I can’t see the others, but the one on the thumbnail isn’t that different to the N-Gage
They released a crude version of the model in the thumbnail. It was the 5510.
That one seems like it would be easy to remake with current day components. Keep the display the same to extend battery life, give it smarter internals and slimmer design. That could be the work phone, the texting phone, the going hiking phone, the daily driver that has several days of battery life.
But the more I think about it, a Bluetooth keyboard paired with a normal smartphone would not need its own phone plan and would provide the physical buttons for typing. It just won’t be as cool as that thing.
With Android - not cool. With some SBC like RPi in such a box - very cool.
![The Crazy Nokia Designs That Never Saw the Light of Day [Wired]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/7bae5b80-f6c7-4a81-b44a-e9763245b5ac.webp){kind=link}