- A portion of this video is sponsored by Yubico
(upbeat music)
You know, in the world of vintage phone reviews
I'm not sure it gets any more mid aux
than he art then Eric Lin asking
in a review for Phone Scoop circa 2007,
what if you flipped over your MP3 player
and there was a cell phone on the back?
When Sprint announced this credit card sized curiosity
in March of 2007,
the idea of a music phone was already firmly established.
My first dumb phone with an MP3 player
was Nextel's i870 released about a year and a half prior.
Around the same time,
Sony Ericsson's famous walkman phones took off
and Motorola's infamous Rocker line failed to do the same.
But it was Samsung, as usual,
that took the concept of the music phone
to the brink of the absurd
dividing the two functions across the two faces
of what globally had called the ultra music phone
and what we in the states came to know
as the Samsung UpStage.
(upbeat music)
The choice of UpStage as a name
was almost certainly an homage
to Sprint's very first MP3 enabled phone,
the Samsung Uproar,
but it would prove an unfortunately ironic moniker.
Remember this was March 2007
and Apple's first iPhone was just three months
from upstaging the UpStage,
along with every other music phone on the market.
Fortunately for Sprint
and those of us who worked there at the time,
that didn't happen overnight.
Yeah, I was still slinging phones when the UpStage debuted
and I remember selling quite a few of them,
especially once the Beyoncé edition B'Phone
launched in October.
So it was no surprise to me that someone had the foresight
to preserve and UpStage on eBay,
still sealed in original retail packaging.
Let's pop it open
and see how kind 14 years of storage have or haven't been
to this curiosity.
It's free!
I wonder if Sprint will still honor
my free ringtone, screensaver or a game request.
Wow, I'm just, I, it is ridiculous to me how small this is.
I mean, it's a little taller,
but it is way, way thinner than that N95 I just played with.
Man dubious new, new rating on this, but maybe it's just,
oh, oh, oh dear.
I don't know if this is rubber,
I assume this is rubber reversion,
I don't know where it's coming from,
but this is the most severe case I have, I've seen.
This is liquid.
Is it?
Oh, it's under there.
It's a soft pad on which the phone was meant to sit
and it has completely reverted to a liquid Latex state.
Jaime informs me that that happened to him
with the Touch Diamond.
tell us more Jaime.
- It was the most horrible gooey experience.
(laughing)
Oh my God, don't shake my hand.
How dare you?
(laughing)
- Oh yeah,
God love a new, new, old phone.
Drink up friend.
Uh oh.
Oh boy, this is not encouraging.
Yeah, it turns out 14 years sitting untouched
will kill some batteries so dead
even Dr.Crusher can't bring them back
and to make matters worse,
the UpStage's battery is non-removable,
owing to its peculiar design.
Fortunately crying on social media sometimes actually helps.
Big thank you to friend of the channel Alvaro
who shipped me his very own old phone
all the way from Mexico City.
Now this is the Ultra Music F300 model I mentioned before,
but aside from it's high res camera, SIM card slot
and telcel branding
it's functionally identical to the M620 UpStage.
So it's a great stand-in to try and recall
how this little weirdo actually worked.
The answer is
well very strangely,
but before we get to that I want to make a quick point.
Earlier this year, I reviewed Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 2,
easily the most impressive smartphone of 2020
and part of a family of devices that I believe
will irrevocably shift the course of mobile technology.
Once Samsung figures out how to deliver this experience
for less than $2,000
and the only thing I really took issue with
was Samsung's refusal to include anything extra in the box,
despite that high price.
By contrast 2007's UpStage came with everything you need
to connect it to your computer,
an audio adapter with a 3.5 millimeter port,
so you could use your own headphones with it,
pretty rare in those days.
A 64 megabyte micro SD card for your music
and not just a case but a battery case
that the phone could slot into
in order to triple its talk time.
It's a clever design,
you can access either side of the handset
without taking it out
and while I do remember seeing some people in the wild
talking on the UpStage with the leather flap deployed
you did have the option
of keeping the case closed while talking
thanks to the earpiece hole here.
And you've got all that for $149 in 2007.
Sure you had to sign a two year contract for the privilege,
but that's still quite a value.
Now curiously, one of the small differences
between the M620 and F300 models of this phone
is the design of the dock connectors
that interface with that battery case.
The Ultra Music will not plug in to the UpStage's wallet
so I wasn't able to bolster my battery
when taking this phone out to get a little sunlight on it.
Not to worry though, it lasted long enough
for me to remember how it works,
which is to say about as bizarrely as you think it does
and I'll share that experience
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and thanks to Yubico for sponsoring this video.
Now, if the first words that come to your mind
when you hear dual-sided phone
are usability nightmare,
to be fair Samsung actually did a better job here
than you might expect.
To begin with,
you can only use one side of the phone at a time
and there's no finicky accelerometer
trying to guess which side is facing up,
as we see in modern experimental phones
like the Surface Duo.
Instead a simple side button
toggles you between front and back
with a physical lock switch above that
to prevent accidental touches.
Now, while the F300 here is pretty as you like it
with what it allows you to do on the phone side,
up to and including the browser and even the camera.
I remember the Sprint version being
restricted to talk and text features only.
Everything else you had to flip the phone over for
and there begins my sadness.
This side is first and foremost an MP3 player,
but while years of muscle memory
had at this point conditioned to iPod users
to assume this control pad must be a scroll wheel,
nope.
This is an early form of capacitive panel
that we used to refer to as an electrostatic touch pad,
which is very cool,
but the way Samsung designed the interface is very not.
You see a scroll by swiping up, down or left, right
with scrolling speed determined
by how long you leave your thumb on the pad,
but the phone often over or underestimates
how far you want to go,
to make matters worse some areas of the pad
do serve as buttons
when the under panel icons are illuminated,
but because it's a touch pad
there's no physical feedback at all
because we hadn't started adding haptics
to touch controls yet.
And then the button in the middle
is actually a physical button.
You know, it all ends up being so confusing
that I even got lost more than once during the tutorial.
It is weird to me that I have basically zero memory
of helping customers set this up
'cause as I mentioned I sold a lot of 'em in my Sprint days.
The only thing I vaguely do recall
is having to flip the thing over
every time I needed to enter text
and it was just kind of bizarrely inconvenient
and that's one of the reasons I never bought one probably.
But you know that's just an unavoidable byproduct
of the environment into which the UpStage launched.
This pre-iPhone, pre-Android, spaghetti at the wall,
kitchen sink, choose your own cliche
wild West of experimentation.
In 2007, there seemed to be a phone for every niche
and despite its UI stumbles
and the typically underwhelming camera performance
for the time,
this phone did advance the state of digital music.
Alongside the UpStage,
Sprint launched its first over the air MP3 download service
charging the same 99 cents per song, as iTunes
and bundling in some PC music management software as well.
Of course, these days and manual management of music
and per track charges sound nightmarishly arcane,
but back then the ability to download a song over the air,
anywhere you were in Sprints 3G coverage area
and pay for it on your monthly bill.
That was powerful stuff
and interface shortcomings aside,
the care with which this new kind of device
was presented by Sprint and Samsung
right down to the prettiest
and most in-depth full color user manual
I've ever seen come with a phone,
well combined with a one of a kind form factor.
It all adds up to a kind of gadget
you just don't see anymore.
A memento from a time when Gs were three,
accessories were free
and phones were fun.
One more thank you to friend of the channel Alvaro.
You folks can follow him on Instagram
at the link in the description
and as always neither Samsung nor Sprint
had any input into the contents of this video.
They provided no compensation
in exchange for its production.
It's just a bit of fun hanging out in the past
and I hope you enjoyed it.
Please subscribe to theMrMobile on YouTube
if you'd like to see my reviews of more mobile devices
from yesterday and tomorrow.
Until next time.
Thanks for watching
and if you can't stay home
then please stay safe and mask up
while you stay mobile, my friends.