Back in 1984, Miami Vice ruled the small screen, shoulderpads were big enough to launch private jets from and mobile phones were even bigger. This was the year Motorola launched the DynaTAC, which stood for the less-than-catchy "Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage". The phone was designed by a team led by Rudy Krollop, whose brief had been to create the ultimate communication device. A brick of a phone, weighing in at 2lb, it was - nevertheless - the first phone that could be described as portable, and was swiftly embraced by the greed-is-good generation of corporate raiders.
Though Nokia had been making car phones and the phone-in-a-suitcase Mobira Talkman for some years, 1987's Cityman was the company's first "hand portable" phone. The Cityman was targeted at power brokers who wanted to communicate their messages and decisions instantly. It came in black, grey or cobalt blue, stored numbers and had a four-level ring tone so that it could easily be heard - even from inside the leather briefcase that was supplied to carry it. Incoming callers could also leave messages, though what we know today as voicemail was, back then, an actual person taking notes.
Weighing as little as 3.1 ounces, and roughly the size of a pager, the Motorola StarTAC, released in 1995, was the smallest phone yet seen. Motorola marketed it as a "ready-to-wear" accessory - a phone that could be "stylishly" clipped to the belt or worn around the neck. The design of the StarTAC was unashamedly lifted from its futuristic predecessor, the Star Trek Communicator. As the first earthly clam-shell phone, the StarTAC won awards and along the way created a new category of "phones as fashion". The StarTAC meant freedom: its size meant that this phone could boldly go where no phone had been before.
In 1997 Nokia launched the tiny 8210. The mantra of "small is best" ensured that Nokia did not compromise any features in getting the 8210 down to size: it had predictive text, voice dialling, and picture messaging, as well as 35 different ring tones to choose from. However, the very mininess of this mobile got people wondering whether it was possible that a phone could be too small? The 8210 certainly drew complaints from people whose fingers were too fat to press the keys. In the end, the world was divided: the Japanese loved it, Americans hated it, and Europeans were not quite sure. But the profits rolled in.
Erik Ahlgren, the designer of Sony Ericsson's 2003 T610 phone, claims to have been inspired by a grand piano when he dreamt up the glossy black-lacquer look that made it so covetable. (The finish attracted fingerprints, which is why it came with a cleaning cloth.) While the T610 echoed the brickishness of previous Sony Ericsson models, it was in fact completely composed of subtle curves; according to Ahlgren their presence made the phone ergonomically and aesthetically pleasing. The company marketed the phone as a beautiful accessory for beautiful people, and soon everyone wanted one.
When, in 2004, the Talby phone hit the shelves in Japan, hip Europeans and Americans turned green with envy. Marc Newson, its designer, was the third person to enjoy the privilege of redesigning the mobile from scratch for manufacturer KDDI. Newson, who had previously put his skills to everything from creating private jets to swanky hotels, from expensive watches to expensive trainers, jumped at the chance to do something different. 'When as a consumer I can't go out and get something that I like, I want to do something about it,' said Newson in Blueprint magazine. "I would actually go out and pay money for this."
In 2004, the V3 RAZR brought a new meaning to the term "cutting edge": Motorola's ultra-slim aluminium clamshell phone was whittled down so far that Vogue called it "the superwaif of the phone world". Not just a pretty face, however, the V3's good looks disguised rugged engineering. Made from anodised aircraft-grade aluminium, it was as tough as it was light, with an innovative keyboard design constructed from a single sheet of nickel-plated copper alloy, with numbers and characters chemically etched into its surface. The design team also needed to develop an internal antenna and, after some pretty contortionist attempts, the result eventually proved to be the best in Motorola's portfolio.
Because of the gorgeousness that was the iBook, iPod and all the rest, there are a lot of people out there who would dearly like Apple to make a mobile phone. But when Apple did finally team up with Motorola to launch the ROKR, the iTunes phone, the fans slunk away, a little disappointed. This - although it currently exists only as a fantasy - is what the Apple mobile could have looked like. The HiPod is the creation of Isamu Sanada, a photographer who designs fantasy Apple products for a hobby. But, given that he created a design for a new laptop that predicted Apple's distinctive titanium powerbook months before it came out, perhaps a nice, shiny, music-playing HiPod is not so very far away after all.
The just-launched 8800 has been described as Nokia's answer to the successful V3, but to give credit where it's due, the phone is also a very simple evolution of those two landmark phones in the company's history - the 8810 (the hot- metal, shiny banana phone of 1998) and its successor, the 8850, which replaced the shiny plastic with matt aluminium. Both showed there was a big market for phones as status symbol, and the 8800, while proving this continues to be true, also reminds us that Nokia still has the knack of making nice phones.
What is remarkable about the Vodafone Simply phone is how unremarkable it is. It's a phone. It's mobile. That's it. It won't take pictures, it won't receive email or play music. In fact you can do very little with it at all, apart from sending and receiving texts, and ringing people. Bills come in low and the battery lasts for ages. Ostensibly a phone for children and the elderly, the wider appeal of this back-to-basics model is easy to see. It's part of a trend towards gadgets that are easy to use, and do what they do well, rather than doing a bit of everything in a fiddly, life-complicating and compromised way.
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