- It wasn't the world's first camera phone,
or Sprint's or even Samsung's but it was the first
to make the act of taking a picture with the phone
almost as natural as it was with a point and shoot
by using cutting edge design that still makes sense
17 years later.
The year is 2003 and to the Samsung A600, I look like this
because this is my first camera phone.
From the days when phones were fun.
(upbeat music)
As I unbox this device, I want to give a big thanks
to Mike in Canada, who found it for me
in reasonably good condition when eBay failed me.
This particular A600 was sold by Bell,
so while the box branding, and probably software,
aren't an exact match for my college-era Sprint variant,
at least the hardware is identical,
which is to say,
oof, uglier than I thought it would be.
(laughing)
Oh this is not a looker.
See by 2003, Samsung had established a reputation
for distinctive and appealing design
on its flagship CDMA phones,
culminating in the tiny and utterly angle-free a500
from the previous year.
Well, the A600 basically threw all that out,
taking the A-series back to its boxy, brutalist beginnings
while also adding this hilarious Frankenstein bolt
at the hinge.
Now I don't like to speculate about designer's intent
but this has all the hallmarks of a company saying,
"look, we can't make it any smaller than this,
"so don't try to hide it, build it how it needs to be built
"and then let's just own it
"with this big Samsung billboard."
Hey, as Kate Winslet would say about GQ photo shopping
her cover image that year, "this is me, like it or lump it."
(record scratch)
Wait a minute, that can't be right, can it?
Like it or lump it?
That's what it says?
All right, guess it's a British thing, here we go.
Like or lump it.
(upbeat music)
We'll get into why the hinge looked like this
but first, this poor old phone
is bleeding on my hands, yuck.
Yuck, can't touch it without my fingers getting,
feeling like chewing gum.
Yeah, reversion strikes again,
that tendency of synthetic rubber to de-vulcanize over time
and start behaving more like latex.
So the headphone jack cover is basically a puddle of ooze
and the stoppers that kept the screen
from scratching on the keys,
they've melted into puddles too.
Fortunately, it turns out that removing this stuff
is pretty easy.
A quick rub down with isopropyl alcohol
at the old dining room table workbench
and while that headphone jack is never gonna work again,
after about 10 minutes, the phone as a whole
is looking a lot better.
(phone snapping shut)
Yeah!
I even ran headfirst into a memory
while dusting off the camera lens.
I think I remember doing this with my first A600,
doing the little Q-tip on the lens thing.
Yeah I do, I do remember doing that.
(laughing)
That's fun.
So back to that big bolt.
It was oversized like this so Samsung could make the phone
feel more like a camera.
Instead of following manufactures like Sanyo
and cramming a camera into the flip above the hinge,
the A600 mounted its camera within the hinge
on a rotating turret.
That meant you could take both standard shots
and even though the term wouldn't catch fire
for another decade, selfies with the same camera.
Fun fact: I thought this phone was broken at first
because the camera didn't invert the viewfinder
when I spun it around but I was imposing modern expectations
on a vintage product.
There is no sensor to tell the camera
which way it's pointing, it has no way of knowing that.
You have to invert the preview yourself
by using the volume rocker.
There's no such thing as a free lunch back in my day,
et cetera et cetera.
Now the A600 did not have a monopoly on the rotating camera.
It was also seen on its contemporary, the V205,
as well as the Sony Clie Personal Organizers of the day.
Speaking of, the A600 also shared
its second standout feature with those Sonys.
With a flick of the thumb,
you could spin the entire screen around
and fold it back down on itself,
giving you a full sized display, so you could hold the phone
more like a point and shoot.
Now this combination was deceptive:
the phone felt like a camera,
down to the dedicated shutter button
and though it looks a bit grainy today, back in 2003
you couldn't find a screen that was brighter
or more vibrant than this.
(gentle music)
So when you shot with it, you could easily have thought,
"hey, maybe this is good enough to replace that Olympus
"or Minolta digital camera that I'm trucking around."
Well, it only takes one look at my own A600 photos
from the time, to see how far phones still had to go.
At 0.3 megapixels
and the field still very much in its infancy,
only the best lighting could salvage these photos.
My being a theater student at the time,
hanging out between dark back stages and late after parties,
only exacerbated its shortfalls.
But as Samsung would continue to do
over the next decade and a half,
it painted over those flaws with features.
Years before Snapchat and Instagram,
you could frame your photos in flowers,
make yourself the star of your own home theater system,
lower case h, capital T, okay.
Or you could get macho buffed up
or you could get a little Eyes Wide Shut.
And between the white balance and custom color modes,
you could make your snaps artsy or retro
but if you thought any of that was gonna help
your fridge magnet poetry, friends,
well I've got some bad news.
(laughing)
Oh, emo me.
Of course, dwelling on the quality or the features
is missing the point.
Grainy as they are, my having these memories at all
is entirely thanks to
the existence of camera phones like this,
which could be carried when bulky cameras couldn't
and while it was pricey for the time,
it wasn't out of reach of regular folks at $350 retail.
(upbeat music)
Now importantly, Samsung didn't focus on the halo features
at the expense of the fundamentals.
The A600 was a really great phone.
Other interfaces were poorly designed or laggy
but Samsung phones flew, with big comfortable keys
and menus with shortcuts at every tier.
So if you used it long enough, you could skip the D-pad
and just hit like, 751 to set your alarm for the morning.
Kids, that's called a floppy disc.
Those of us who spent too much time on Howard Forums
knew there were hidden menu items too.
Pressing zero on this phone's display menu
and entering a passcode provided for a helpful HoFo friend
lead to a field service menu that could help you prove
to your skeptical friend once and for all that yes,
extending the antenna really does help with reception.
And another reason I still think about the A600 today,
it's because it gave me an early preview of the skepticism
new technology always faces.
People asked the same questions about the A600 in 2003
as they do about the Galaxy Z Flip in 2020.
Is it gonna be too awkward to use one handed?
Are the moving parts gonna wear out?
Well, my A600 didn't, though I did develop
a few scratches on the display
from having it constantly exposed.
Screen protectors were not yet a thing
and for those more cautious
who wanted to keep it a conventional clamshell,
well the A600 sported one of the most hypnotically
retro futuristic LEDs I've ever seen.
It's a great companion
to these most excellent polyphonic ringtones.
Oh, hey Sleighride!
I remember when this used to get stuck in my head
for months and months and...
well hey, if you're gonna have an ear worm,
it may as well be as banging as this one.
(upbeat polyphonic ringtone)
But I guess I'll admit that my favorite thing about the A600
was that really no one else had it.
I don't have sales numbers but despite a variant
called the A610 coming out for Verizon
and a GSM model called the P400, exciting!
I didn't see another A600 in the wild
until my friend's girlfriend took inspiration from mine
and bought one for him.
Of course, by then I'd already moved on to the Sanyo 5500
for its video camera, the first in a long line of upgrades
that would take me further from truly unique experiments
in the feature phone space and further from a time
when phones were fun.
If you wanna hear more nostalgic musings
from an old tech guy,
listen to the latest Android Central podcast,
we have a long discussion about that.
Thanks for having me, guys,
and let me know what your first camera phone was
or let me know if you had an A600 too.
Please, share any memories you have down in the comments.
Next up on When Phones Were Fun,
well it could be a messaging phone roundup,
it could be a next tel retrospective,
it could be a video about transparent phones.
Subscribe to The Mr Mobile on YouTube so you don't miss it,
whatever it is.
Thanks once more to Mike up in Canada
for snagging this device
and as always, no manufacturer paid for this video
or got to see or approve it before publication,
it's just a fun throwback and I hope you enjoyed it.
'Til next time, thanks for watching,
stay safe at home for now if you can
but in spirit, stay mobile, my friends.