Nokia 9000 Communicator was launched 25 years ago

rcarmo 2021-08-16 13:35:38 +0000 UTC [ - ]

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 functionality I had in a 9500, even though the design principles were pretty advanced for that time.

(I strongly recommend reading "Operation Elop" for an idea of what that later stage in Nokia's life was like, and why Maemo tanked: https://asokan.org/operation-elop)

But the 9000 series was definitely something I wish we had today in some usable, non-niche form.

senko 2021-08-16 14:03:37 +0000 UTC [ - ]

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.

webmobdev 2021-08-17 04:40:25 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Coincidentally, I was just reading something related to this debacle here - https://workplace.stackexchange.com/a/177611 - too. And I do wonder how Nokia's future would have been different if they had fully focused on Meego / Sailfish OS instead of adopting Windows Mobile Platform. (Sailfish OS was developed by ex-Nokia developers).

wbertberw 2021-08-16 16:37:48 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> not only meant Nokia had to rewrite its proprietary UI and repackage everything

this is half-correct. Maemo->Meego did shift from GTK to QT, but they kept the Debian packaging on the N9 (the only device to ship with Meego)

senko 2021-08-16 17:29:18 +0000 UTC [ - ]

You're right, tho I believe that was only intended as a halfway step (so even more breakage, yay!).

phire 2021-08-16 16:38:44 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Still better than Meego, which they discontinued like 8 months before releasing the N9, the first and last meego device.

slim 2021-08-16 19:25:38 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Meego is Maemo + Moblin if I remember correctly. It's the frakenstein monster he's talking about

tyingq 2021-08-16 13:47:04 +0000 UTC [ - ]

>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 :)

reaperducer 2021-08-16 14:27:39 +0000 UTC [ - ]

In the early 2000's, I did my company's payroll using a Sony phone (maybe an M600c — the one from the James Bond film), while on a hydrofoil between Hong Kong and Macau. At the time I thought, "The future is finally here!"

jareklupinski 2021-08-16 20:48:53 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Ah, making me remember trying to monkey patch a script over ssh on my Blackberry Storm...

At that time I felt the future of system administration meant taking the manual things I could do over a smartphone and abstracting them into lists of tappable buttons, like "Provision Web Server" and "Set Up New Developer".

908B64B197 2021-08-16 23:56:21 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The Storm is quite infamous because it launched at the same time as the iPhone 3G.

Curious why you bought it instead of the iPhone.

tyingq 2021-08-16 23:57:07 +0000 UTC [ - ]

At the time, it was much better for email if your backend was Exchange.

jareklupinski 2021-08-17 17:49:13 +0000 UTC [ - ]

family plan was on verizon :(

rcarmo 2021-08-16 13:54:59 +0000 UTC [ - ]

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

pjmlp 2021-08-16 14:23:25 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Being at Nokia Networks during that last phase, I could observe in first person how many of those things went.

Nokia used to have internal shows to get employees feedback for future products, Maemo not having a radio modem was a common remark, naturally they couldn't add it due to Symbian.

Also think that Elop gets more blame than he deserves, as many see his connection to Microsoft and not the bonus from Nokia's own management board.

NetAct versus other networking products, also suffered from the same culture issues, by the way.

amonavis 2021-08-16 15:10:53 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Even today NetAct remains a hot mess.

pjmlp 2021-08-16 19:06:45 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Looking back, the way OSS Middleware was supposed to reboot NetAct, was the wrong approach, we had better just rewrite everything in better C++ without the Perl/CORBA stuff, but many pieces were at play.

Not much else I can talk openly about it.

netfortius 2021-08-16 18:49:11 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I appreciated the N900 (still have one), but Nokia caught my eye and then interest in the smartphone area before that, as I bought an E61 in an airport in Germany, while on my way back to the US. Once back to work I configured it as skinny (SCCP, actually) client to my Cisco CUCM, and amazed all my peers about being able to pick up my phone extension, over WiFi, on my cell phone. And then all the other things you could do with it ...

bartread 2021-08-16 22:41:55 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Out of interest I just had a look on eBay to see what Nokia 9500s go for and... wow. The answer is, kind of, proper money. As in, hundreds of pounds for unlocked models in good condition. Might not sound like that much in an era where premium flagship phones typically cost £1000-1500, but still pretty nuts for a phone that was released all the way back in 2004. I guess for a retro collector with the right sort of fetish this is reasonable[0].

[0] Btw, I'm absolutely not dissing this: I have my own fetish - something of a thing for old synths, particularly those of the early-ish digital era in the 80s that are still fairly affordable, and recently bought a Yamaha RX5 drum machine... from Australia. It wasn't _that_ expensive, but it's a similar level of expenditure. I love old analogue synths too: I just can't afford them and, with these, because they're a bit more sexy and fashionable than the digital options, you can often pick up much less expensive modern day reproductions and homages.

christkv 2021-08-16 20:24:35 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The cosmo is a sort of attempt towards the communicators https://store.planetcom.co.uk/products/cosmo-communicator

rodgerd 2021-08-16 21:14:49 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> Maemo never came close to delivering half the functionality I had in a 9500

You're right, but you're going to upset a whole bunch of people who think that what people wanted was Debian on a phone, and are uninterested in hearing the last 10 years of market evidence to the contrary.

neals 2021-08-16 12:54:20 +0000 UTC [ - ]

As a kid, this phone was like my dream gadget, I still remember really wanting one and staring at it at the store.

To be honest, I don't know what I wouldv'e done with it, being 12 years old.

Anybody remember those "organizer" gadgets, with a screen and a calander and notes, but not a phone? I got one of those and didn't really use it for anything useful.

I did now just order de Fold 3. Comparable.

jon-wood 2021-08-16 13:46:12 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I have Dyslexia, which in me mostly surfaces as confusion of the various theirs, and a writing speed which would result in me never completing any class work. I dealt with that by learning to type, after which all my work was done on organiser type devices, first an Amstrad NC100, and then later on a Psion Series 5mx.

The Psion was such a lovely device, it would fit in a large pocket, but had a proper keyboard that you could comfortably type at a decent speed on. It was also my introduction to programming, and so probably indirectly responsible for me coming out of school with reasonable grades (having been able to actually finish work), and a career I'm still in twenty years later.

TacticalCoder 2021-08-16 18:52:00 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> Anybody remember those "organizer" gadgets, with a screen and a calander and notes, but not a phone? I got one of those and didn't really use it for anything useful.

Older, I guess, but I still have an Atari Portfolio from 1989 or so. It still works but I don't use it anymore ; )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Portfolio

bald 2021-08-16 12:59:45 +0000 UTC [ - ]

yes!! big time Casio Business Navigator BN-40A fan when I was 12 years old. had it for like 2 weeks before selling it to my best friend because my excitement had dropped off. But so cool to have something that looked like a super small laptop and such a wide screen.

Cthulhu_ 2021-08-16 13:46:49 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Yeah, me and a friend of mine got one from a shop, I think they were like €15 or €25,- at the time - pretty steep for pocket money, but not impossible. I mean we didn't actually use it much and since it only had a two line LCD screen, entering e.g. school schedules and contact information into it was a bit painful, but it was a neat gadget to have.

I have it in the drawer near my PC at the moment, I think I put in a battery the other day, still works.

Later on I bought a secondhand Palm V from the internet, I think it was €25,- that thing was pretty cool and more of the 'smartphone' functionality than the organizer; you could install apps on it and the like, so Sudoku was a favorite.

swiley 2021-08-16 14:17:25 +0000 UTC [ - ]

When I was 12 I remember really wanting my dev environment (turbo/free pascal) on a PDA but not being able to find one with good support. Eventually I got a Zarus but I wasn't good enough with Linux to get Free Pascal working on it.

gauravjain13 2021-08-16 20:23:07 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Exactly my experience! I had a Casio SF-R20 when I was around 13 years old, and it was a my first introduction to spreadsheets (IIRC the spreadsheet app was called Lucid 3-D).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_organizer#/media/Fi...

raesene9 2021-08-16 11:05:43 +0000 UTC [ - ]

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

fsflover 2021-08-16 11:09:26 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Or Pinephone with a keyboard addon: https://www.pine64.org/2021/08/15/introducing-the-pinenote.

hargv 2021-08-16 13:10:53 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I had an N900- for me one of the main downsides of it was the touchscreen, it was fine but with my colleagues all using the HTC hero it was frustrating to set their devices up for them and see how much nicer the experience was with multitouch.

Very solid device otherwise- i went from an Xperia X1 to the N900.

unnah 2021-08-16 13:43:45 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Another option is https://fxtec.com/ although it doesn't seem to have a second screen on the back.

donio 2021-08-16 17:23:50 +0000 UTC [ - ]

It's a slider so it doesn't need the back screen.

For those looking for modern PKB phones the Unihertz Titan and the upcoming Titan Pocket are some other good options.

swiley 2021-08-16 13:48:07 +0000 UTC [ - ]

At least that one has a PMOS wiki page: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/F(x)tec_Pro1_(fxtec-pro1)

swiley 2021-08-16 11:25:35 +0000 UTC [ - ]

It says debian support is "planned" but I wonder what exactly the plan is. Looking around it sounds like a bunch of drivers are missing for that SoC, is the plan to re-implement them? Wait for the community to re-implement them?

odiroot 2021-08-16 13:53:52 +0000 UTC [ - ]

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

user3939382 2021-08-16 14:17:48 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Related, the Neo900 project apparently gave up. Does anyone know why?

wbertberw 2021-08-16 16:40:22 +0000 UTC [ - ]

They had massive organizational problems. At one point years ago I received a series of e-mails asking for permission to move my preorder funds from one org to another. That's when I wrote them off.

phpnode 2021-08-16 11:08:02 +0000 UTC [ - ]

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

pier25 2021-08-16 13:32:44 +0000 UTC [ - ]

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.

afavour 2021-08-16 13:50:24 +0000 UTC [ - ]

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.

FridayoLeary 2021-08-16 19:54:42 +0000 UTC [ - ]

For some inexplicable reason new Nokias seem to have ditched T9. The one feature that gives 'dumb' phones an edge over touchscreens has been abandoned. The replacement is a horrid, crappy and eminently useless home - grown editor that is worse in every way. It seems Nokia execs enjoy shooting themselves in the foot. But anyway, their phones are irrelevant, it's just a pity that they seem to be going backwards.

molofaha 2021-08-17 02:54:46 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The Microsoft-Nokia didn't want to maintain the old OSs so went with a licensed clone of Series 30, and then post-Microsoft went with KaiOS (though newer ones seem to be back on the Series 30 clone, which is frankly a better experience than KaiOS was). Like, I was never a big fan of Series 30 or 40 but they had an awful lot of iterative improvement over the years and they just pissed that all away.

FridayoLeary 2021-08-17 13:23:06 +0000 UTC [ - ]

KaiOS (if that's what it's called) is crap and almost unusable. The Symbian series and more basic OSs were pretty complete and nice to use. Nokia no longer make good phones, or even mediocre phones.

y04nn 2021-08-16 13:55:19 +0000 UTC [ - ]

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...

ljf 2021-08-16 14:11:06 +0000 UTC [ - ]

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!

grishka 2021-08-16 16:07:00 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Back when touchscreen phones were new, Nokia 5800 had a T9 keyboard you could use instead of qwerty.

noipv4 2021-08-16 12:11:28 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I see a lot of features re-used from the N900 in Android and iOS. I think Maemo/N900 changed the world far more.

hargv 2021-08-16 13:26:44 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I would say if you were going to elevate anything after the 9000 it should be the Symbian devices- i had a 6600 and a friend had a 6630 and those will to me always be the first "Smartphones" We played downloaded multiplayer games over Bluetooth in school, and though mine didn't have official mp3 functionality I downloaded the app used on later devices and used mine as an mp3 player. Even downloaded a bunch of roms for the ngage that ran just fine.

In the end though the peak for me was Windows mobile, everything up to 6.5 was literally just a pc in your pocket, after that they made the mistake (imo) of trying to compete with apple and android for user experience and failed miserably. For my part I never wanted the improved UX- a start menu style system with a stylus was great for me. Nokias N900 was great, but in the end too niche to compete with HTC and Apple when they were pumping out androids and iPhones. I handled purchases at my work for smartphones and gave the HTC hero as suggestion for my colleagues since it was simpler and got a N900 for myself, and though I liked it a lot android certainly went a lot further in the end.

pjmlp 2021-08-16 14:28:46 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I kept using Symbian until the end, Symbian Belle was quite nice, and with PIPS and Qt, Symbian C++ wasn't that bad.

Also jumped into Windows Phones, as its development experience was miles ahead (still is) from whatever comes out of Google.

With exception of Android, I never needed a "gaming rig/server configuration" for mobile development.

Anyway it is what it is.

neurostimulant 2021-08-16 18:35:31 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I remember picking up a secondhand hp ipaq pocket pc and got my mind blown when I realized how easy it is to make an app for it. It's basically just plain old winform apps.

SeanLuke 2021-08-16 23:15:34 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I can literally -- and I mean that word in the proper usage -- think of nothing in the N900 (or earlier models) that changed the world in any way. And I still own, and occasionally use, my N800.

Prior to the iPhone the acme of portable touchscreen interface design was the Newton Messagepad 2100. Its interface was superior to Maemo in practically every way, despite being discontinued ten years prior.

Maemo feels like a crappy, half-assed attempt to implement some of the Newton's magic on top of X11, and with weird desktop mouse-oriented design elements (menus, scroll bars, combo boxes, Windows-style tree-views, even cursors in some apps) bolted on awkwardly without any thought about their appropriateness to a tablet operating system. I wrote an extensive article comparing the two way back when, when I was doing a moderate number of contributions to the N800 platform. Maemo was amateurish at best, with an incredible array of inconsistent and obtuse iconography, several inconsistent sizes and designs for the same exact kind of GUI element (text buttons, icons, ), a complete lack of state persistence, absolutely horrible fonts, and a desperate need to be backward compatible with X11, hardly the best choice for a mobile OS GUI foundation. It was clearly built by linux software developers and not GUI designers.

iOS didn't borrow anything from the N900: it borrowed directly from the Newton and from MacOS and NeXTSTEP, when it wasn't inventing things from whole cloth.

Thankfully now Android has shown us that Linux can shine in the mobile pad market, if you jettison X, stupid archaic design elements from desktop GUIs, and design a consistent and organized interface from the ground up considering the needs of the device and and user.

ddalex 2021-08-16 12:18:19 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I see the software keyboard layouts of Maemo everywhere :)

markstos 2021-08-16 14:57:43 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I remember around 1997 I was reading my raw web site logs and saw the Nokia 9000 user agent appear. I knew what it was but never saw one in person.

I wondered what some rich person was doing reading my website, probably about skateboarding back then.

sumedh 2021-08-16 15:22:09 +0000 UTC [ - ]

It was probably the rich guy's son.

Maakuth 2021-08-16 10:33:39 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Interesting tech choices (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator): Intel 80386 CPU, MS-DOS compatible base OS and GEOS shell. Later EPOC-based (which became Symbian) products had much less of a PC-like tech stack.

Wildgoose 2021-08-16 10:54:12 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I had one of these. Sadly, there was only limited software available for it. It was very useful (at that time) to be able to receive faxes though.

zokier 2021-08-16 11:40:59 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I didn't remember that the early models were DOS based, that puts them closer to my favorite 90s portable, the HP 200LX

zokier 2021-08-16 11:28:25 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I think Nokias 7650 deserves also mention. Launched in 2001/2002 it arguably laid the foundation for mainstream smartphones, while Communicators were inevitably doomed to be niche devices. 7650 had also many of the hallmarks of modern smartphone, at least compared to Communicators which were more of evolutionary dead end.

kiksy 2021-08-16 18:43:21 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Worked with someone who had a 7650. Watching what that could do blew me away at the time. First phone I saw that genuinely acted like a PC in your pocket. Bought a 6600 as soon as it was released and loved it.

You could probably make an interesting article on how much a modern smartphone in 2021 differs from the 7650. Fundamentally I don't think it's as much as many would think.

kokey 2021-08-16 10:35:34 +0000 UTC [ - ]

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.

nabla9 2021-08-16 11:27:16 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Nokia Communicator was insane. Telnet/ssh connection was a game changer. It was device for professionals, not for mass market.

Selling same core concept to both mass markets and professionals

* has made everything cheaper and more powerful, and

* has decreased input ergonomics for heavy users.

Communicator/Blackberry with hardware keyboards were in some sense peak in input ergonomics for accuracy and speed in thumb-typing. Now it's just less or more suck with touch screens. I don't even bother to install ssh terminal for iPhone because easier/faster to carry tiny laptop than suffer the experience.

marcodiego 2021-08-16 15:22:12 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Nokia 9000 may be a landmark but nothing impressed more than the day I saw N900 running OpenOffice. I knew it was not a good idea, but that deeply impressed me.

fsflover 2021-08-16 16:41:26 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Librem 5 smartphone runs a desktop GNU/Linux with desktop apps. You can even connect a keyboard and screen to it.

marcodiego 2021-08-16 23:46:40 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Yes. But it was not available more than a decade ago.

pedrocr 2021-08-16 10:10:48 +0000 UTC [ - ]

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.

antris 2021-08-16 10:43:48 +0000 UTC [ - ]

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.

ollifi 2021-08-16 11:15:17 +0000 UTC [ - ]

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.

sofixa 2021-08-16 11:55:04 +0000 UTC [ - ]

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.

Pyramus 2021-08-16 13:17:01 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Yes, it's a great example of a Pareto distribution where 20% of the price gives you 80% of the features.

ollifi 2021-08-16 13:55:27 +0000 UTC [ - ]

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.

antris 2021-08-16 14:25:16 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Phones have become so important in our lives. In 1996, you never needed the internet to do anything, as our society was based on other technologies. People could live their lives without the internet, or even without a mobile phone and it would be no problem at all.

Now the internet, and increasingly mobile internet is becoming the default way of accessing almost any service, so having a phone that works for you is something that people are ready to pay for. You end up using it so much, that people feel like it's not a waste of money.

dagw 2021-08-16 10:44:03 +0000 UTC [ - ]

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.

ZeroGravitas 2021-08-16 11:01:26 +0000 UTC [ - ]

In History they have the concept of "The Great Man theory":

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory

Which ties everything that happened to some individual hero.

We do that in tech for people too, but also devices. I think I'd be interested to read a smartphone (and indeed general computing history) that focused on the other elements like the relentless miniaturisation of tech, battery improvements, radio technology, societal adaptations etc. rather than "this obscure/famous person/device invented the future".

shapefrog 2021-08-16 10:20:42 +0000 UTC [ - ]

It changed the world as clinging to this form and function when it came to 'smart phones' is ultimately why Nokia ended as a viable mobile phone maker.

INTPenis 2021-08-16 13:56:33 +0000 UTC [ - ]

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.

marban 2021-08-16 10:30:36 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I owned every generation of it and so did many of my colleagues. Can't recall it being regarded a curiosity. More like, serious business machine.

TheOtherHobbes 2021-08-16 11:02:02 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I had the 9110, 9210, and 9500. None of them really made sense as connected devices because data services were so slow. Web pages would literally take minutes to load, and for heavy use you were paying by the byte.

The main benefit was a nice(ish) keyboard for texts and emails.

I once wrote and emailed in a consultancy report from the back garden of a pub, just to prove I could. But it's not something I'd have been happy doing regularly.

If Psion had somehow added mobile data to their Organisers they'd have killed this market.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_5

The main thing these devices did was normalise ARM and pocketable form factors for serious mobile use. But they were really micro laptops and not large mobiles.

They were more like very early versions of the MacBook or Air. The iPhone - rightly - went in a different direction.

dejv 2021-08-16 11:47:27 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Back in early 2000s I worked at company doing pharma CRM for emerging markets in rural places like central Africa, Mongolia and east Russia. We used Nokia commnicators as a client nodes for field representives.

The platform was really limited, app development was tricky, but at the end it did the job and there were very few alternatives.

We actually ended up using emails as our sync mechanism: internet connectivity in places we served were as limited as you can imagine and also because of device limitation. It worked in a way that changes in data were serialized and sent to server that merged the data into the master and sent you changes back via email as well.

fredoralive 2021-08-16 14:39:15 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Seeing as Symbian descended from EPOC32, the later Nokia Commicators are kinda Psion Series 5s with radio. Of course the mad multiple UI layers Symbian had means they aren't software compatible...

BuildTheRobots 2021-08-16 10:46:18 +0000 UTC [ - ]

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).

Pyramus 2021-08-16 13:19:39 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Yes - I knew someone who was deaf and mute, and he was an eager user because it became so easy to communicate in writing.

2021-08-16 13:00:02 +0000 UTC [ - ]

zelos 2021-08-16 10:14:20 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I don't think so. I worked on software on the (later model) 9500 and it was awful. Sure, it had a browser, but even over wifi it took minutes to render pages. Anyone I showed the hardware to laughed at it.

Series 80 was a dead end too I think?

Edit: I hadn't realised how much earlier the 9000 was. I guess in '96 it might have made more impact? I can't remember ever seeing one in use, though.

Fnoord 2021-08-16 10:29:56 +0000 UTC [ - ]

A friend of mine worked at a bank and used early Nokia Communicator to remotely administer machines including AS/400. He could do it from his bed while on standby, or while on the go. An absolute game changer. That it had a browser is more of an afterthought. And of course it is slow; GPRS is slow. But if you use the text-based part, and were good with CLI, it was great. I never got to like very small keys, but for me a 'full' qwerty keyboard is a huge upgrade over T9. I never liked nor used T9 much. I avoided it as much as I could.

I own a Planet Cosmo Communicator which is a homage to the Nokia Communicator (as well as Palm devices). I also purchased the successor, the Planet Astro Slide, which has a slideout keyboard like the (patented) Nokia N900 (among others, like Symbian-based). The keyboard of these devices is, like the Planet Gemini's, great.

That said, I believe a smartphone like Nokia N95 was more of a game changer for the general consumer. And Nokia became popular because of their iconic dumbphones (and their networking pioneering, hence their name reference to town in Finland); not so much their smartphones.

tannhaeuser 2021-08-16 10:29:00 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Idk if we go by Hollywood's idea of a hacker device, that would be a PDA with separate foldable keyboard (as in Die Hard 4.0).

gpas 2021-08-17 06:54:12 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Val Kilmer in The Saint used the first gen Nokia Communicator. Loved everything about that movie when I was a kid.

wombatmobile 2021-08-16 11:09:50 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> 25 years since it changed the world

Nokia’s Communicator may have been the most capable phone computer of the pre iPhone era, but it didn’t change the world. It was too expensive, too closed, and not well enough marketed to change much of anything.

I’m surprised to see it glorified here, not because it wasn’t a nice piece of visionary tech, but because the company that made it had such little impact on changing the world despite pioneering the category.

kevingadd 2021-08-16 11:44:15 +0000 UTC [ - ]

It feels a little far-fetched to suggest that one of the leading handset manufacturers putting out one of the very first "smart devices" had no influence on the future of smart devices that followed it, if you ask me.

Yes, they weren't in the hands of every stylish adult or high-spending teen, but it wasn't for them. I'd guarantee it influenced the thinking of other people building products in that category for at least a few years. And in the long run the world changed due to that product category.

wombatmobile 2021-08-16 12:24:40 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The communicator was literally like a toy IBM PC.

Blackberry innovated by shrinking the keyboard to thumb size, and making do with a smaller display so it could fit in a pocket instead of requiring a handbag.

Those two innovations/ bold compromises over the Communicator enabled RIM to discover the first addictive euphoria of an always connected social device with the crack berry.

I say “social” but it wasn’t really because the app was really just email. But RIM got it into the gossip columns through Paris Hilton and Janet Jackson, setting the stage for the blockbuster device that landed in 2007 when Steve Jobs showed everybody what a leap forward into a new category could be.

Zenst 2021-08-16 12:58:04 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Key for blackberry was as you say the one handed keyboard. That I would add - great battery life, robust (could drop it without expending upon some military tested grade case) and above all. They focused on the one internet application buisness needed - email on the go.

That right there gave them a winner in those early days.

Now what gave Blackberry there consumer base was the PIN messaging which was a basic chat system that was simple and effective, something a bit more for those that grew up on SMS to engage with and they did.

Zenst 2021-08-16 12:53:53 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I owned one of these, not as good as a Psion 5MX that preceded if year before. Sure this was an all in one but no, always laughed at the ariel and the thing felt like you could almost use it as an ice-pick with the ariel folded down and the unit closed. But hey, was neat - just the usual issues of these open/close designs was the ribbon cable to connect the screen - those always seem to fail outside warranty period.

But crux was, this was too dam expensive and heck a few years later Blackberry would have it's moment and that did more for the market than the Nokia communicator ever did. Heck the IBM Simon did more than the Nokia did for pushing things or about the same lack-lustre uptake. FWIW I got my communicator for free from a friend who orded one and got two with the company failing to take back the second one in a period of time that made it legally his (he notified in writing so was 3months, maybe 6).

I would also ad the Sony P800 was more game changer as well than the nokia communicator. Also owned that and for the era - pretty darn good.

dagw 2021-08-16 15:04:39 +0000 UTC [ - ]

not as good as a Psion 5MX that preceded if year before.

The 5MX was released 1999 and the Communicator in 1996. That being said, I agree that the 5MX was fantastic piece of hardware that in many ways has never been matched.

zandorg 2021-08-16 22:36:30 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I use an Epoc32 emulator on my PC so I can do Agenda on that, and it beeps me my reminders.

I got sick of buying Psion 5's and 5MX's because they always broke in 6 months.

nine_k 2021-08-16 13:10:24 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I'd hazard to say that Nokia 3210 changed the world more. Affordable, reliable, simple, it had everything to make cell phones the norm of everyone's pedestrian, daily life.

tannhaeuser 2021-08-16 10:26:21 +0000 UTC [ - ]

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.

fsflover 2021-08-16 10:37:38 +0000 UTC [ - ]

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....

p4bl0 2021-08-16 11:27:33 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I know this is off-topic but wow, following your links I just read this on the Puri.sm site:

> Introducing Librem AweSIM: > Unlimited talk, text, and data for just $99/mo

"just"? Really? Isn't that awefully expensive?!

I have a plan with ulnimited talk, text, and 40GB of data that I use extensively (including for a lot of youtube videos) and I've never hit this limit. I pay €8/mo for that. For people who would need even more data, there are 200GB plan for less than €20/mo.

fsflover 2021-08-16 11:32:15 +0000 UTC [ - ]

1. You don't have to buy the AweSIM. You can use any sim-card with this phone, there is no lock.

2. This is not just a cellular service provider:

Librem AweSIM adds an extra layer of privacy to your customer data to protect you from targeted tracking. We register your phone number in our name on your behalf and keep your personal and financial data private and out of the hands of companies who would sell it to others.

From https://puri.sm/products/librem-awesim/.

jonathantf2 2021-08-16 12:52:26 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Is it actually unlimited data though? It doesn't say if they throttle at high usage, that'd be a dealbreaker for me.

nsizx 2021-08-16 12:57:19 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The laws of my country already make it illegal for my mobile provider to take my private data and sell it away.

fsflover 2021-08-16 15:01:10 +0000 UTC [ - ]

This is US-only anyway. But apart from the data selling, there are also leaks.

p4bl0 2021-08-16 11:46:57 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Thanks for the explanation.

znpy 2021-08-16 23:29:19 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> I pay €8/mo for that.

Because you live in happy Europe, fellow european.

But people in the US have to pay that ridiculous amount of money for on average worse service.

Europe is very well connected.

pavlov 2021-08-16 13:13:57 +0000 UTC [ - ]

American mobile phone subscriptions are all ridiculously expensive compared to Europe, so the baseline is different...

Even then, $99 USD/month is about twice what you'd pay with a regular carrier.

amelius 2021-08-16 10:48:32 +0000 UTC [ - ]

How well do the Android apps run on it (using Anbox)? I'd need that for running my banking app.

danhor 2021-08-16 11:04:20 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Do note that many banking apps use google safetynet, which means they won't work on anything that deviates too much from normal android and it won't work on anbox.

fsflover 2021-08-16 11:17:27 +0000 UTC [ - ]

This is exactly why one needs to make a stance in public against surveillance economy. The government and banks should not support the duopoly.

amelius 2021-08-16 14:47:59 +0000 UTC [ - ]

:(

swiley 2021-08-16 11:19:43 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I still haven't gotten anbox to work but I also realized every single app that I used besides Snapchat had a website that worked well (including my banking app.) Some banking apps apparently include a TOTP implementation, this is a trivial algorithm and there are many native Linux apps for it.

fsflover 2021-08-16 10:52:17 +0000 UTC [ - ]

https://puri.sm/posts/anbox-on-the-librem-5/

Also, see the FAQ.

zibzab 2021-08-16 10:33:54 +0000 UTC [ - ]

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.

Fnoord 2021-08-16 10:33:53 +0000 UTC [ - ]

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 ;-)

zozbot234 2021-08-16 10:51:08 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Lots of people building customized, hacker-friendly "cyberdecks" these days. Just pick your favorite.

amarsahinovic 2021-08-16 10:37:09 +0000 UTC [ - ]

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

mnmmn123456 2021-08-16 10:29:44 +0000 UTC [ - ]

GBA = Gameboy Advanced

frosted-flakes 2021-08-16 11:27:29 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Game Boy Advance

crawsome 2021-08-16 12:40:38 +0000 UTC [ - ]

“ugly but revolutionary”

every damn tech author has it built in to hate on old tech and QWERTY. Screw them all, id take a snapdragon in an “ugly” but massively functional form factor (like the one on the right) over these garbage screen-bars with trash virtual keyboards.

nine_k 2021-08-16 13:04:54 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I suspect that the majority of users are not fans of typing in any form. Many of them immediately press the dictation button and tell the phone what they'd like to see. Many people's idea of cool or fun is totally not an office in their pocket, but rather a TV / music player / camera / game console. Plus a phone, of course, for talking by voice.

The target audience of Nokia 9000, people like you or me, are long since not the target audience of flagship smartphones. Bluetooth keyboards, 11" laptops, or some highly custom and expensive hardware are the choices for a proper "mobile office" today.

metafunctor 2021-08-16 12:57:01 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Functional software is, I believe, what you would be missing. It’s amazingly rare (and I’m not trying to make the point that current incumbents always have great software).

aqsalose 2021-08-16 11:29:16 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Question. I can believe Communicator didn't change "the world". However, Deutsche Welle is German broadcaster. How prominent Communicator was in Germany?

dagw 2021-08-16 12:37:48 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The launch event for the Communicator was in Germany, exactly 25 years ago yesterday. I guess that in the Germany connection here.

callidus 2021-08-16 20:52:41 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Oh wow. I got one of these second hand as a kid from a family friend who upgraded from this model. I was the coolest kid in the neighborhood until they realized it didn't do anything "fun".

svdree 2021-08-16 14:13:14 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Ah, nostalgia settles in my brain. Old times = good times, at least most of the time.

macintux 2021-08-16 17:27:59 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> The article was updated on August 16,2021. The orginal text said the Communicator line was discontinued after thge 9210 model, which was wrong.

It’s depressingly impressive that the correction at the end of the article has three typos.

cherselle 2021-08-16 14:17:51 +0000 UTC [ - ]

It's quite a trip on the memory lane when I am still using Nokia as my phone. The times when Nokia was the giant of the phone industry. But due to the rapid technological advancements, they struggle in the smartphone revolution, and since then, there has been a power shift in the industry.

ajklsdhfniuwehf 2021-08-16 16:55:54 +0000 UTC [ - ]

i have a web scrapper going to gsmarena.com every day and checking if there's a new android phone with keyboard :)

years ago it allowed me to buy the blackberry priv and key2. two awesome devices with real keyboards (which also act as touchpads)

But their marketing sucked and both tanked. I think the company that licensed the blackberry brand (why?) flopped and there will be no more models.

priv was the best one, but is stuck on android 5 or 6 now.

Key2 is still being sold and receiving security updates for android 8.

erhk 2021-08-16 16:57:58 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Calling the nokia 9000 the first smartphone is disingenuous. It fits perfectly the modern connotation of a "dumb" phone.

mnmmn123456 2021-08-16 10:35:10 +0000 UTC [ - ]

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.

bserge 2021-08-16 14:14:56 +0000 UTC [ - ]

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.

soylentcola 2021-08-16 17:59:33 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Yeah...I remember the iPhone release. I was so jealous of the capacitive screen and solidly implemented graphics acceleration. But compared to the HTC WinMo phone I had at the time, it was missing such futuristic capabilities as 3G data, GPS for turn-by-turn nav, 3rd party apps, copy/paste, MMS, background apps, front camera (although it was less important because video calls on 2G was a non-starter), and the ability to even change your background or ringer to something that didn't ship with the thing.

Definitely glad that others were soon to follow with the more modern displays, because the first iPhones themselves were like a step back in many other ways compared to the Palms, Blackberrys, and PocketPCs of the day.

bserge 2021-08-16 19:14:46 +0000 UTC [ - ]

At the time I had a Tytn II, which had all of those. Guess that's why I never got the iPhone.

soylentcola 2021-08-16 19:32:52 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I also had one of these (that's what I was referring to). Between that and AT&T exclusivity in the US (right after all the domestic wiretapping info became public) it just wasn't an option for me at the time.

toast0 2021-08-16 23:37:32 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Did Windows Mobile have firmware updates independent of carriers? AFAIK, Symbian didn't.

Getting updates on the regular changed the world (not always for the better)

bserge 2021-08-17 04:00:02 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Both of them did. You updated it yourself. Ffs

908B64B197 2021-08-16 23:58:21 +0000 UTC [ - ]

No apps.

bserge 2021-08-17 03:59:30 +0000 UTC [ - ]

You can't be serious... Do you think they just had a preset number of programs and that's it?

Windows Mobile (and even fking Pocket PC) had text editors, browsers, music and video players, file management and transfer tools, GPS software, painting tools, etc.

Granted, you needed three cells in your brain to, gasp, install apps yourself, but they were available.

seba_dos1 2021-08-16 11:10:27 +0000 UTC [ - ]

We have all noticed that the world has changed with iOS and Android, and we're still trying to recover from that disaster.

mnmmn123456 2021-08-16 11:57:49 +0000 UTC [ - ]

We have a free marked and please just buy what you want. Did you buy a Nokia?

unixhero 2021-08-16 11:26:18 +0000 UTC [ - ]

You apparently never used one.

asymptosis 2021-08-16 11:42:52 +0000 UTC [ - ]

When you flag and downvote someone it doesn't make them wrong. Feel free to let me know some time what I said which was actually incorrect.

asymptosis 2021-08-16 11:31:01 +0000 UTC [ - ]

You seem to have a problem with literacy. The user claims it never changed the world (true) and you claim they never used one (irrelevant).

asymptosis 2021-08-16 11:25:17 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I don't know why you're getting downvoted. The thought arises: what's the motivation for Deutsche Welle to suddenly post an article about a derelict Finnish proto-"smartphone"?

unixhero 2021-08-16 11:27:18 +0000 UTC [ - ]

At the time Nokia was not derelict. It is stated in the heading, it is now 25 years ago when Nokia started its path to become a global juggernaut.

asymptosis 2021-08-16 11:29:24 +0000 UTC [ - ]

When did I say Nokia was derelict? Please pay attention to what I really wrote.

2021-08-16 18:30:32 +0000 UTC [ - ]