In Depth: The 15 worst, WTF and best mobile phones of the decade
The sun has nearly set on the first decade of the third millennium, and we have been truly blessed… with phones. Sodding millions of the things.
We’ve seen phones made from wood, plastic, glass (and one from cheese… but that’s a story we swore we’d never tell again), we’ve seen mobiles that delighted, dismayed, made us go ‘meh’ and those that have made us curse our ridiculous laziness that we didn’t at least look at them before agreeing to a 24-month contract.
Let’s face it - there are mobiles out there that have excelled, but equally there are those that have had a team of crack designers working on them, cost millions to make, and are frankly rubbish.
So, without further ado - the best, worst and craziest phones of this century so far - extra TechRadar points for each one you owned.
The Sony CMD-J5
It’s a testament to the company that we could have chosen so many of its phones for this list before it went down to the mobile phone bar one night and woke up in bed with Ericsson.
The Sony CMD-J5 sticks out for us for one simple reason. No, not the pretty advanced web browser, the speedy OS, the cool spinning UI thing instead of a menu, a jog wheel or the slim form factor.
Banana. Any game that involves being a monkey up a tree throwing a banana at another monkey up another tree has got to make a phone an instant classic.
The Motorola Razr
Who didn’t have one of these in the early part of the decade? You’re right. Nobody. Stats show that no only did every single person on the planet have a Razr, but 95 per cent of us had three of them.
Heck, even pets had them. Their sleek chassis, their advanced… actually, no, that’s it. It was one of the slimmest, flippiest phones of its time and that was enough for most people to love it to a fault.
Here’s a scary fact for all you non-US dwellers - it was still the top selling mobile phone until last year in that country. It still sits in third place, only 1.7 per cent of the market share behind the iPhone.
And it even saved a man from being shot once. How many phones can say that? You’re right. Probably a few. But we haven’t written about them.
Sony Ericsson T610
You want one dynamite reason why this phone is in the top five? Try on this truth coat: it was featured in the Hannah Montana movie. Yeah.
If you’re a needy weasel and want more reasonage than that, how about it was one of the best selling phones of 2003, one of the early colour screen/camera combos for the firm and packed a fast WAP browser?
It was small, nimble, weighed just 95g and even had polyphonic ringtones.
Actually, stuff all that; it was available in Aluminium Haze, Abyss Blue, and Volcanic Red. Colours of a champion, in our book.
Nokia 3310/3330
If you were one of the seven people that didn’t have a Motorola Razr ‘back in the day’ (whenever that day was – likely Tuesday) then you probably had one of these bad boys.
After the popularity of the Nokia 5110 (which was released in 1998 and couldn’t make this list) the next big ‘un was the 3310, which had them damn cool interchangeable front and back covers. XpressOn or something, we think they were called.
The phone itself was pretty much bog standard, but just worked, and the games on it (think Nokia could have improved on Snake? Try Snake II… perfection can be bettered) were tip top. That space shooty one? It was so good we actually missed our slot in a chemist and then fell asleep in a chair. Not totally related to the phone, but it’s still the top memory in our minds.
In fact, the Nokia 3310 sold more phones in a five year life span than all the Nokias in the ’90s combined – you try achieving that in the next decade.
The 3330 was the upgrade to the 3310 the next year, although it was basically the same phone with a 100 contact memory added in to the phone and Bantumi as a game.
But most people don’t know that the 3330 was one of the first implementations of an MP3 players on a phone - although it was as a separate unit, it was still awesome at the time.
Apple iPhone
It had to be here. It just had to be. Like it or loathe it, the Apple iPhone has not only changed the game, but re-written the rules, forced the players to wear different colours and overhauled the amount of referees used per mobile match (we might be pushing that analogy a bit far).
But it’s simply tops - as an internet device. It’s not really had the best press from the public as a phone, dropping calls and whatnot, but the sheer amount of apps, the ease of internet use and the sublime media player is just amazing.
Add in that the firmware is so constantly updated that your iPhone is always getting more and more functional, and you can’t deny it deserves its position here.
Toshiba TG01
TechRadar has reviewed a lot of phones. A lot of them. And the fact that this is statistically the worst of the bunch is testament to how bad it is.
We’re not going to get into the issue of whether the Windows Mobile 6.5 update has made it better - the original 6.1 version was just awful.
We wouldn’t have minded so much if Toshiba hadn’t made such a song and dance about how good it is at the launch - the fact it failed to work properly in front of all the assembled journalists was surely a clue to what lay ahead.
The laggy user interface was made all the more perplexing by the fact this was supposed to be the first phone to use the super fast Qualcomm Snapdragon 1GHz processor - never have we wanted to throw a phone out the window more.
Motorola Razr
Aha - look at us being all controversial. ‘But you put it in the best phones category as well!’ we hear you cry. Yes we did, but there’s method to our madness, you gun-jumper, you.
And the reason is: from a design perspective, it was great, for use as an actual phone: rubbish. For one, the OS seemed to have been designed by a blind hamster with a fetish for mazes, such was its complexity.
The camera was poor, there was no room for memory expansion, and what’s worse, Motorola decided to ignore these flaws and just keep re-releasing it, until eventually the once-dominant company became a mere blip on the mobile scene, and you could argue this used-to-be-brilliant-but-then-got-a-bit-boring phone brought the company to its knees.
Moto has recently revamped itself via the medium of Android, but we have to wonder - had it never made the Razr, would it be in this position today?
Samsung P300
We have to admit - it was an interesting concept. If a mobile phone, calculator and credit card had all woken up in the morning together, hungover and feeling a little bit awkward, this would have been the ensuing result nine months later.
It should have been good – slim enough to go in a shirt pocket, thin enough to be maybe called stylish and quirky enough to attract a cult following.
But Samsung should have realised that nobody keeps ANYTHING in their shirt pocket (unless they have a subscription to Stationary Organisation Monthly) so a phone just being thin wasn’t really enough to satisfy the increasingly savvy mobile public in 2005, and, well, it just wasn’t cool enough to be stylish.
You also couldn’t hear it ringing ever thanks to an odd speaker design. But it did have a flash. You can never overlook a flash on a phone.
RIM BlackBerry Storm
It wasn’t until the BlackBerry Storm 2 came out that we got any kind of hint that RIM might slightly agree that the first iteration wasn’t as good as it could be.
Before that the company was all sweetness and light about the phone that Stephen Fry (or to give him his full title: Lord Fry Who Giveth Opinion of All Things Tech Because He’s Very Posh, Very Clever and Likes Gadgets Therefore Must Be Listened To) called “shockingly bad” which quickly translated into everyone else sort of nodding and agreeing.
But he didn’t speak the devil’s language (lies, in case that was too complex) – it was poor. The clickable screen was actually a bit of an effort to use – try and type anything more than a quick email and your thumbs could start to ache.
Add to that the fact that it wasn’t a multi-touch screen and typing speed was severely limited, which isn’t the best thing for fans of the BlackBerry being used to swiftly tapping out a message or 90 on the train to work.
If that wasn’t enough, how about this: it fell apart in a fair few cases. Buttons falling off, wobbly and rattling screens – if you’re going to shed the keys on a BlackBerry then it’s going to have to be for a damn near perfect phone, which this sadly wasn’t anywhere near.
Motorola Rokr E1
Ahahahahaaa… we just laugh even thinking about this one. It’s no surprise to see another phone from the company that went from hero to near zero inside a decade, and this one was wrong for so many reasons.
The first phone to officially synchronise with iTunes, it’s so far removed from what the iPhone is it’s barely true.
The reasons are plentiful: it was limited to 100 songs despite having a microSD card slot, there was a dreadful lag, the camera was a rubbish VGA effort when 2MP was the new standard in 2005, and to top it off it regularly froze.
Connecting it to your PC might have seemed cool when it automatically synchronised with your iTunes account, but then again that trick was already owned by the iPod range.
Essentially it was an iPod Shuffle with a screen with a screen, so you could see the album artwork of what was being displayed – but one that cost more, froze more, had no touchwheel and was a darn sight larger, with much less Apple-cool factor about it.
Siemens Xelibri 8
We were tempted to put this phone in the worst phones category, but after looking at it for twenty minutes and still not being able to work it out, we were forced to shift it sideways into the realms of ‘eh’?
What was going on when Siemens decided to make this phone? It’s like a little button with limited ability to, well, anything. A d-pad from an original Nintendo controller, bolted on to a plug and dangling off the end of a necklace does not make a tip top phone.
Too many companies hide behind the label of ‘fashion accessory’ when designing batcrap mental phones, and let’s be honest it’s no excuse.
Yeah, it had a screen, but that was only to add to the mystique – beyond that the most amazing features it possessed were a screensaver and an FM radio.
You try spending 20 minutes to send a text message response with just 15 characters – even Twitter lovers would want to destroy this thing (and they’re a pretty tolerant bunch).
Nokia 7280
Someone mentioned this phone to us a while ago and before we had time to stop and check our internal cool-o-meter, we leapt in with the factoid: “Oh yeah, that phone. The stick one used by the Pussycat Dolls in the music video for Beep?”
Had we thought that response through a little more we might have realised that a better response would have been to enter the conversation by mocking the phone too - instead we bore the brunt of clearly having watched a number of girls parading around in underwear a little too much.
In fairness, it was used in the video (check the footage from 0:29 for proof… sorry), and while it looked cool being able to do your make-up in the inbuilt mirror then click it open to take a call (well, we thought so) it was so ridiculous in design we still can’t believe it.
Part of Nokia’s ‘fashion’ phase (marked out by phones that had little labels on that got so dirty little colonies of bacteria threatened to take over your pocket) this phone had no keys, just a click-wheel nabbed from the Apple iPod design.
Some people liked it because it fitted in their bags easily for a night out (mostly girls) but we have a better idea – just get a bigger bag and leave the Nokia 7280 at home.
LG GD510 Watchphone
The most recent addition to the list, the LG Watchphone is a device that came into being simply because LG could do it.
Samsung has been making watchphones for years, along with other no-mark Asian firms, but there’s a reason they failed to make the mainstream – you look ridiculous talking to your wrist.
However, that didn’t stop LG pushing the watch onto the British public, and charging £500 a pop for the privilege. The problem is that in the UK you can’t have multiple SIM cards, so the GD910 became your actual device all the time.
And after the eighth text message that your fat fingers fudged up and the third hushed conversation you had to have talking to your wrist in a shop because the bundled Bluetooth headset had run out of battery power, you knew you’d made a mistake forgoing a holiday this year so you could live the ‘Dick Tracy’ dream.
Oh, and we also pulled a muscle trying to use the camera – unless you constantly only want to take pictures of yourself, you needed to be a contortionist to turn the front-facing camera around.
The LG GD510 Watchphone review
Samsung B&O Serene
‘This is a piece of art that transcends the boundaries of mobile and phone, creating a fusion that exists outside the realms of audio and creates a vortex of truth at the boundary of what is possible’.
This is how we might have written the PR blurb for the Samsung Bang & Olufsen Serene phone, which was as much made of insanity as it was bits of metal and plastic.
The premise sounded pretty good – a phone that would work equally as well as a stylish desk speaker, finally beating off the spectre of those tinny speakers chavs love to pump at the back of the bus.
But no, in between that great idea and release, there must have been an ‘upside down’ day at the Samsung factory, as to think that a phone with an ageing interface and the buttons in the wrong place could justify a £900 price tag by having a ’sort of nice opening system’ is like taking the air from a scuba diver and replacing it with helium and saying: ‘Well, at least you’ll die with a funny, squeaky voice’.
We’ve spoken to people that defend this phone, who gabble on about the sound quality and the premium build and what have you – but most of these people also own sculptures of titanium ants and platinum banana-ripeners too, and laugh artily as they descend down their spiral escalator into a lounge filled with hyper-intelligent octopuses.
Toshiba G450
And finally – the Toshiba G450. We nearly didn’t include this one, mainly because we get a sense that someone from Toshiba knew this phone was mostly made of crazy juice and yet still thought it would be a laugh to release it.
Let’s just go through the specs – it’s an MP3 player with only 160MB internal memory. It’s a phone that you have to use a headset to talk on and it only has two hours of talktime at most. It has two keyboards in annoying to hit places.
It’s designed as a portable modem, but doesn’t support Bluetooth. In short, it’s a dongle with a near-impossible game on it that you have to win to send a text.
And damn it, we love a challenge, and we love a phone that’s at least a little bit different, which is why we can’t hate the G450. But we can think it’s a jolly odd way to handle a USB dongle, and for that reason alone, we doff our crazy caps on bended knee to one the most random of mobile phones.
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