(phone ringing)
- There it is.
You remember them for the phone no one could break,
or for the phone that had all the features
before having all the features was a thing
but you might not remember that for a few years there,
while the killers were killing the billboards,
Google was first going public,
and so was Janet Jackson,
Finnish phone maker Nokia was going a little bit crazy.
Like, just, I mean, what?
You can't use this as a phone.
Oh, man, all right, let's do this.
I'm Mr. Mobile and this is When Phones Were Fun.
(upbeat music)
Hey folks, I hope you don't mind me dressing down a little
for this one but this is the only shirt I could find
from the Maddox that I still owned
and that I still fit in to.
True fact: this pocket right here
is where I used to store my Discman.
So it's big enough for even the largest of these weirdos.
My European friends are always surprised to hear this
but between 2002 to 2006 or so,
when Nokia was just pouring itself
whatever was in the party punch bowl,
here in the USA, phones were a lot more conventional.
Smartphones existed but they were mostly BlackBerrys
or Sidekicks and they were a tiny sliver of the market.
The most common phones you'd usually see
on the streets were small silver clamshells.
As a result, I didn't own one of these bizarre-trons
so please join me in thanking friend of the channel Martin
for this whole box of beautifully preserved specimens
for your viewing pleasure.
Most of them are European models with branding
and user manuals in various languages I can't read,
but even the box art speaks to the totally different era
these products came from.
Before I even opened these
I knew I was gonna have a good time.
Now before I get to the true weirdos,
here's a phone I'm gonna skip for today.
Not because I don't want to cover the Nokia 6820
but because I'm planning another episode
of this series for devices like it.
See this was part of a subclass
that came to be known as messaging phones.
You could use them as a typical handset
but they also featured a full QWERTY keyboard,
usually hidden behind a slider.
Well, Nokia's 6800 family took a really clever approach
to that problem and I'll talk more about it
when we get to that episode.
Let's kick things off properly with the Nokia 3560.
Sorry, 3650.
Man, one thing I do not miss
is Nokia's numeric stew of confusion.
Almost as confusing?
This keypad.
Modeled after an old-fashioned rotary phone,
the numbers encircle the perimeter of the pad
instead of filling it up with the usual grid
and it plays horrible mind games with your muscle memory.
Well it's not the worst keypad in this video,
stay tuned to the end for that.
It was apparently divisive enough
that Nokia replaced it with a conventional keyboard
being a sequel called the 3660.
That means the 3650 was successful enough
to warrant that sequel and it's easy for me to imagine why.
I remember I was working at a mall around this time
and I was walking back from a lunch hour
and I passed the T-Mobile kiosk
where the guy working there was using this phone
to watch an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation."
Needless to say, I was intrigued.
Remember, at the time most phones
in the States were just getting polyphonic ringtones.
So a device that could play full TV episodes was something.
The 3650 was the first phone
with an integrated camera to be sold in North America.
0.3 megapixels, hold onto your butts,
and it was the first phone sold in the U.S.
with Nokia's Symbian S60 platform.
So it was a true smartphone,
in the sense that you could load up a compressed
LimeWire rip of a TNG episode onto an SD card
and play it back in glorious 12-bit color
through a relic like RealPlayer.
Now this is a 17-year-old phone at this point,
so, of course, it's cumbersome and clunky to navigate
but I'm actually surprised by how responsive it is.
And ergonomically speaking, wow!
It's crazy comfortable.
While, like all the phones in this video,
it's cheap and plasticky, there's not a hard edge on it.
"Feels good in the hand," as they say.
If I'd been on a GSM carrier back in the day,
I think I'd have considered the 3660.
It's quite attractive.
And speaking of attractive,
let's have a gander at the next. (gasps)
Whoo!
Sorry about that, but this is heinous.
Remember how I kept calling the Sidekick a meatball
in the last episode?
Well this, this is a legitimate potato.
I'm gonna call it the Nokia Spud.
I'm just kidding, save your hate-mail.
The Nokia 6600, which is what this is actually called,
was marketed as a business phone when it launched in 2003
and dudes, it sold.
Nokia put more than a 150 million of these into suit pockets
across Europe and the Middle East,
which means it outsold the first Motorola RAZR.
Demand was so high, in fact,
that it remained in production until 2007.
Why the success?
Well the product placement
in the movie "Cellular" probably didn't hurt
but really, it was the business features
like corporate email support, a mobile VPN client,
and even virtual wallet application for online purchases.
It also packed the table stakes like VGA camera,
Bluetooth, and the common for the time, IR port,
which you could use to transfer data
between phones wirelessly and slowly.
All this ran once again on the series 60 platform
which was first announced back in 2001
in this peculiar package.
God, November 2001 phones in Europe looked like this,
meanwhile I'm living in Virginia,
limping to the barn with a Sprint phone
that looks like this.
I should have studied abroad.
Not that the 7710 is a looker
but it's one of those products that's so ugly,
it's well, if not pretty, then at least interesting.
That's probably what led to its marketing tie-in
with the dystopian future thriller "Minority Report"
but it was its litany of features
that cemented it in phone history.
It was the first Nokia with a camera
and MMS messaging to send it with.
One of the first with Bluetooth
and it married those with an internal antenna
and the always fun slide-out keyboard.
Bummer that it's not an assisted slide,
no springs to be found here
but at least you can still slap it shut.
Other signs of the times ranged from the convenient,
a user-replaceable battery, to the less convenient,
a 2.5-millimeter headphone jack,
to the delightfully odd, a dedicated voice memo button.
This actually shows up in a few of these Nokias
and it reminds me of how many drunken voice memos
I used to leave myself on my Samsung A600 in college.
For that story, be sure you're subscribed
for the next episode.
All right, now that you've seen the beginning
of Nokia's smartphone legacy,
you gotta check out its fat metal.
The 7710 looks less like a phone
than one of those dashboard GPSs that would become popular
in the years following its 2004 release.
This was a replacement for the Nokia 7700
which was canceled presumably
because it looked like a rejected prototype
for a bicycle helmet Napoleon Dynamite
might have worn as a kid.
It also required the user to side talk,
like the infamous Taco Phone, aka the Nokia N-Gage,
which I covered in a video a few years back.
The 7710 was a full touchscreen phone
with an integrated stylus and a few physical controls
that actually make sense.
The display was roomy for the time
with the same 3.5 inch diagonal
that the first iPhone would launch with three years later.
And it came with some fun tripod-like accessory
to stand it up with and also a frankly,
horrible-looking leather case.
Sadly, the phone lacked not only 3G
which was even becoming common on Nokias of the time
but it also omitted WiFi.
So you had this big for the time display
but you were stuck loading websites
at less than dial-up speeds.
The new series 90 platform was apparently,
also undercooked at launch,
and all this combined with a strange form factor,
high price, and increased competition
from platforms like Windows Mobile
to basically kill the 7710.
The phone was discontinued, series 90 was canceled,
and I was allowed to move on to our final,
much more fun phone.
This is without question,
the most ridiculous phone I've ever held.
Is it a leaf?
An eyeball?
An ancient Egyptian artifact?
Sure, whatever you want.
All rules are out the window with the Nokia 7600,
announced in the fall of 2003.
About the only conventional things on it
were the Symbian S40 platform,
changeable express-on covers, like those we saw on the 3650.
3560?
No, 3650.
And a design ethos that seemed to say,
"Eff it, man, let's get weird."
Threading the leather wrist strap
through the corner pocket,
I got to thinking maybe I could carry this
as a weekend dumb phone if I could get it work
and just to discourage my constant impulse to text,
because yeah, you don't wanna text on these keys.
They're horrible.
You don't wanna use this D-pad, it's horrible, too.
And you absolutely don't wanna talk on it,
which you have to do by tilting it diagonally
and wincing through the pain of hard plastic
on all the wrong parts of your ear.
Hey, at least it had polyphonic ringtones.
(phone ringing)
Really, the 7600 is at its best just sitting there
and attracting ogles from passers-by,
which is why Nokia marketed it
to the fashion segment, exclusively overseas.
Even then though, to read the user reviews at S21.com,
well, it ranges from embarrassing to celebrity worthy,
to just a total piece of junk.
My favorite is this user in 2008 who boasted,
"I go for style uniqueness,
"that's why I dominate conversations and gossips."
Hey man, you keep doing you.
Respect.
As I slipped the 7600 back into its dope travel sack,
I will say this is not the last we'll hear from Nokia
in this series.
The company has many more examples
of crazy design from this period.
Why?
Well, it was the dawn of the smartphone era.
New designs were needed for new interface paradigms
and new more powerful internals.
That meant new casings were needed as well
and companies like Nokia decided to push
into every possible corner of far-flung theory and thought.
We're seeing something similar happening in foldables today,
and that's one of the reasons I'm so excited for them.
But I don't think we'll ever quite recapture
the off-the-wall brazenness
and exotic experimentation of Nokia in the noughties,
back in the days when phones were fun.
This video was not paid for, previewed,
or copy-approved by Nokia or any other OEM.
It was produced entirely thanks
to the borrowed private collection
from friend of the channel Martin.
Thanks, one more time to him for sending me these gems
and for sharing his own experiences with them.
Now as I say, Nokia wasn't big in the States at this time
so I'd love to hear from those of you
who did on these things.
Leave your comments below.
Next up on the program:
I finally get to go back to my first camera phone
and Samsung's first camera phone for the States as well.
Check out the rest of the series playlist
on my channel page.
And if you liked this video, subscribe while you're there.
Until next time, thanks for watching.
Stay safe at home if you can,
but in spirit, stay mobile my friends.