Those look like real life windows media player skins from the early 2000s.
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2025
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The one in the thumbnail looks like it became the N-Gage taco phone.
I miss my Lumia 820. The UI was so smooth and the free music app in it was amazing for my needs. Sadly it ended before windows phone OS. Now I’ve been using a dumbphone (Nokia too) for 7 years.
Thank you for the unpaywalled link.
That feature photo device is a text-er’s dream. You could probably get some serious speed out of it.
Would that thing run any kind of Unix (I'd prefer one of the BSDs, but Linux is fine), I think on such a keyboard I could really use it for many things. As cool as PSP Slim, but more universal.
Yep. That would be great for gaming. Just swap out the rocker on the right side for a stubby joystick and you’d be off and running.
When I was a horny young man, I had this bad boy and a connection with "unlimited SMS to five chosen numbers" (you could then change those numbers but it'd cost you a little). It was only "unlimited" for the month it came out and the next month and then schools began and all us teenagers were texting each other in class under the table for absolutely no reason.
And the next month the "unlimited" became 1000 sms, to each of your five numbers or total I forget.
What a monster. Yeah, I definitely don’t miss the old days of the cellular companies vying to offer consumers the least shitty rates and constantly manipulating plans.
And you know what this thing could do?
It had FM radio and you had the capacity to record songs off the fking radio. In 2003. That was beyond crazy. I mean you can do that at home with a cassette player, but since this had a radio and recorder, it was basically one of those boomboxes people's carried around in the 80's. Functionally, if only because you had earphones and listened to it yourself.
Although the quality would horrify the HiFi people, especially anyone under 30 or so. They weren't mp3, more like AMR/ACR whatever have you. (A proprietary format called LSE).
I vividly remember the sights and smells of walking and listening to Eminem - Lose Yourself on a very specific path I used to walk in the woods.
Gods I miss being a kid.
Edit to make it clear about the phone, it was essentially an improved 3310 (the classic unbreakable nokia) with a different case so it had qwerty and a few other improved features (like I think even WAP basically which was like a very crude mobile internet) and a few added games, like the 3330 (which was this improved version but in a standard Nokia 3310 case, with very minor alteration of a few mm)
I miss when phones weren’t all black obelisks. I mean, the features today are incredible and far surpass anything available 20 years ago, but the variety of tactile features and colors was incredible back then.
I would very much prefer actual physical buttons to write with.
I'm impatient and write fast and the tactile feedback is so shit I use the mid correction after seeing it's the correct one but often I misclick and don't proofread so I end up with a lot of silly mistakes.
(I do proofread emails and whatnot but like not mobile posted Lemmy comments)
I miss my Nokias. I was rocking a N810 with bluetooth internet sharing to my flip phone when the IPhone came out. It was so much better in every way, especially being able to use the actual www. Same with window phones. we were rocking the full internet and top notch cameras for a decade before iphone finally upped their game.
Ah, replaceable batteries...
Honestly, I kept my Nokia going until I got a Fairphone - purely to be able to replace the battery.
It was great when visiting places they just asked me to install some shitty app (ie to view a restaurant menu, etc.) I'd just show them the Nokia and they'd have to treat me ”properly”
I wish Nokia was still a big player in the phone business. My favourite (and most unique) phones were Nokia:
N95 - still looks gorgeous and classy and the "slide both ways" design blew my mind at the time. If they would release a new version I would probably buy it.
N-Gage - it was a cool and gimmicky phone, I admit it, only bought it for playing games, but loved how weird it was.
Lumia 920 - I loved windows phones, actually this was my second one and for me it was the best I could wish for. It had great camera, it was fast and looked super cool compared to the android competitors at the time. A shame the era of windows phones didn't last long.
Fellow WP enthusiast here, bought a wp7 on day 1. MS just couldn't keep from fucking it up. Such a great opportunity with great phones, and soooo much more responsive than the androids at the time. But they couldn't draw in the apps they needed, pushed to the wrong group of people targeting business types weirdly, and then they just kept ruining it with the updates. I miss the early WP days, and music wise I loved zune, it was so much nicer to use than the garbage that was itunes, but once wp got to 10 it started to lose a lot of the charm. I held on to the bitter end and then a little after. So fucking depressing.
The first phone I bought myself (I had others before, but they where hand-me-downs) was the N900, which should have been the next generation of smartphones/devices. But because of Microsoft and Stephen Elop it wasn't.
They thought about making a Switch in 2004 ...
https://repo.aalto.fi/uncategorized/IO_eabfd363-1d3d-4ba0-8604-7df4f05376c7/
Page 12
Nice find!
I owned the N-Gage and the 5510. I probably would have bought this.
That one is even more goatse looking than the N-Gage
Reminds me of my old N-Gage
Taking phone calls on that thing was so strange. You had to hold it like you'd hold a sandwich.
We called it "Sidetalkin'".
You hold your sandwiches like this? Weirdo…
Broadly yeah, pinched between my thumb and fingers, though of course I don't eat it vertically lol
🤌🥪
The N-Gage had a bunch of bizarre design decisions.
The game cartridge slot was behind the battery - swapping games required disassembling the phone.
The revised QD version fixed a lot of the mistakes but it was too little too late by then.
Nokia was the Casio of mobile phones. Sad it couldn't keep up with the smartphone era.
Nokia was purposely sabotaged by Stephen Elop.
Elop was a Microsoft employee who moved to Nokia to become their CEO.
Elop scrapped Meego as well as the rapidly-improving and highly promising Symbian OS that Nokia had, killed internal projects that used Android, and went all in on Windows Phone 7, a completely unproven platform that just happened to be from his ex employer.
After the market really didn't like that, Microsoft was able to buy Nokia for a bargain price (€5.4bn), and Elop was given a €18.8m bonus.
Curiosly, that bonus works out as €1 million for every €1 billion that was wiped off Nokia's market cap during his time as CEO. But I'm sure that's just a coincidence...
When he was asked for the good of the company to take a smaller bonus, Elop said that he "couldn't".
After the deal to buy Nokia went through, Elop moved to a different cushty position within Microsoft.
Nokia didn't really fumble smartphones. They were purposely ran into the ground by Microsoft so they could use a powerful brand name as the the thin end of a wedge to take over the phone market, without having to pay much for it. Then Microsoft fumbled it from then on out.
all they needed to do is to make the app making/launching easier and more profitable to the devs and I think the OS would be still alive. They pulled the plug too fast.
Classic Microsoft. Never trust a Microsoft anything really.
They chose windows os over android. It was their downfall. The amazingly designed phones we could have had if they would have used Android instead... I miss my old Nokia phones, all of them but especially the 3310.
Windows OS was the better OS as the time, ran great on low spec hardware, and the tile system and integration of apps was a a lot better than anything Android or iOS has to offer at the time. The downfall was hardly any apps, changing the OS so much every update that the people that were developing left the eco-system because they where fed up of having to change their apps again, and hardly any first party apps. The promise that you could run Android apps on your Windows phone device was never delivered. Also Steve doubling down that he was too busy to use apps so why would you want them on your phone thing.
I still love my Lumia and turn in on from time to time
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This creepy-ass liminal space mock-up of how one of their stores might look...
Nokia was cool when phones were fun.
My mom has some weird combination of disorders, hard to determine since she becomes aggressive when advised to visit a psychiatrist. I suppose it's just NPD though. Point is - she makes technical things up and acts insulted when I explain it's nonsense, and doesn't learn. Thus she's so bad with tech that I wouldn't give her an Android phone simply because she won't be able to use it.
So - she still asks from time to time if she can use her old Nokia.
From time to time - because that small unimportant thing about cell standards being phased out, that I blabber, she doesn't even try to catch.
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