

An iconic phone before the iPhone - todayiamme
http://www.juxtapoz.com/design/an-iconic-phone-before-the-iphone

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Aloha
I'd argue there are several really important telephones:

Automatic Electric 34/40 - First one without a subset - Western Electric 500 -
First self compensating network - Western Electric 1500/2500 - First with
TouchTone - Motorola StarTac - First Clamshell Phone - Apple iPhone - First
Modern Smartphone.

Out of all of these landmarks, the AE 34/40, WE 500/1500/2500 and the Motorola
StarTac are the most important ones.

The AE 34/40 was the first what we'd identify as a modern phone in appearance,
the WE 500/1500/2500, is so iconic that anyone could identify it as a
telephone, it also was a huge leap forward in transmission quality, and the
StarTac was the first of billions of clamshell phone, the thing most
identifiable as a cell phone to anyone shown an abstract drawing.

I'd argue that the 500 is more iconic however than anything to come before or
after it.

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laumars
> Apple iPhone - First Modern Smartphone.

Depends on your definition of "modern".

The iPhone wasn't the first to support apps (Windows Mobile / CE handsets had
been around for a while, but they weren't nice to use as a "phone". Also
plenty of feature phones, eg most of Sony Ericsson's pre-Android range-
supported apps too).

If you meant "the first smart-phone form-factor", then there were Nokia and
sony handsets long before the iPhone. But they weren't all that great from
many of the accounts I heard (which always put me off buying one). Blackberry
and Palm (remember them) also had some great offerings for their era too.

If you meant the "first with capacitive touch screen", then LG beat Apple to
the market with an iPhone-like device by a few months.

However Apple's iPhone is still the handset we all remember as being the
groundbreaker. I don't know if that's because Apple PR team have done a
wonderful job rewriting history; or because Apple happened to build the most
successful product of that era that it made other products before it seem
forgettable. Maybe a bit of both. But in any case, I think if you want to
credit the iPhone for it's importance in history then it's only fair to credit
the numerous other handsets which preceded it and pioneered the various
different technologies and paradigms that Apple then went on and merge
together so effectively.

~~~
Aloha
Apple was the first one to put all of those things together in a single
package that really worked well - thats what I mean by first modern :-P

~~~
laumars
Well that's now more a question of personal bias / preference than something
that can be defined as cold, hard fact.

What worked for you might not have been someone else's preferred method of
using a smart phone. As well polished as the iPhone was, I found many of its
design implimentations worked against the way I liked to use a smart phone.
And I think the fact that Symbian (amongst others) outsold iOS for the first
few years of the iPhone's life would suggest that I wasn't alone.

So I think even by that measure, it's still unfair to exclude other handsets
of the same generation which were just as popular.

But then I guess history is written by the victors, not the other pioneers
who've since fallen by the wayside.

~~~
Aloha
Apple took the smart phone from something used by technologists and other tech
oriented people, and turned it into a mass market appliance accessible to
everyone - every smart phone that has come since is related to it in form and
function.

~~~
laumars
If Apple held a majority market share, then I might agree, but as I said
before, Symbian et al had a larger market share so they must have had some
degree of mass market appeal as well.

edit: just to clarify. I do agree that the iPhone deserve a place in the
history books because it did change the landscape significantly. But my point
was that the iPhone wasn't the first phone of it's ilk (probably the best all
rounder and definitely best at specific criteria, but those are point I'm
enjoying discussing here). In light of that, if the iPhone deserves a place
then equally the handsets that pioneered much of the technology and paradigms
which Apple beautifully combined, those other handsets deserves a mention too
(like how scientific papers based on original research still need to draw from
the pool of existing research and thus even new theories owe credit other
publications)

~~~
nicholassmith
Symbian had a larger market as Nokia were throwing it on as many devices as
they could, irregardless of whether it worked well so they saturated the
market. Plus they were commonly called featurephones and not smartphones.

~~~
laumars
Good point.

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kalleboo
In Sweden our most iconic-looking phone was the Ericofon "Cobra".
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ericofon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ericofon)

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rbinv
> Although only ten buttons are needed for today's telephone needs, thw two
> "extra" buttons prepare these sets for future communications services.

I wonder what they had in mind? Have there been any noteworthy uses except for
stuff like signaling the end of an input?

~~~
Sanddancer
In the US, the * key was used for a lot of shortcodes with various add-on
phone services -- turning on/off caller id visibility, disabling call waiting
for one call, calling the number that dialled you back, etc. However, in
general, the keys were designed to be used to access computer services where
you needed various delimiters.

Of note here is that the DTMF system was originally designed with a fourth row
of keys, A-D. These were supposed to be used for general access of menus
instead of the now traditional 1-9, but they only ever really got used for the
military Autovon [1] network for setting priorities.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autovon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autovon)

~~~
Aloha
Not was, is, the vertical service codes still work -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_service_code](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_service_code)

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twelve40
Very informative for those of us like myself who didn't know touch tone was
around since the 60's, but damn is that website stuffed with ads. I had to
click 3 close/collapse and then lower the browser window to cover up the
footer bar crap just to read the post without getting a headache. Note to
self, never overdo the ads like that.

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jack-r-abbit
I've had several phones with this design. One of them was made of clear
plastic so you could see the components inside... and had some LEDs that lit
up when it rang. But my favorite was just a plain old version that I hacked
apart and installed the components into a shoe.

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rvschuilenburg
Why was I expecting a post about the Nokia 3310?

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zyx321
Because the Nokia 3310 (and to a lesser degree the 3210) were the iconic
devices of the cellphone, just like the iPhone 4 (with iOS 6 or earlier) is
probably the most iconic phone of the smartphone era.

And even if you were told to think of a landline telephone, the image in your
head would probably look less like the Trimline and more like a late-era Bell,
the kind that was chosen to represent the Washington-Moscow hotline.

