gfunkdave

If you have a smartphone rest assured lots of organizations already have all that info.

SMS is like sending postcards. Anyone can read what you send.

Toshbaf

That is why I do not use WeChat.

Any opinions about LINE, which is supposed to be popular in Japan and Taiwan?

bocastephen

No one mentioned HTC in the list of tragic flameouts?

I had an insider connection to the cluster-you-know-what that took that company down in dramatic fashion, but it's definitely a case study for what happens when everyone in charge is a complete moron

1. senior management decided they needed "white faces" to lead the company, so they hired from Sony Erickson, specifically people who failed at Sony Erickson, who subsequently failed at HTC
2. as they continued to load US R+D with more "white faces", conflict emerged between the Taiwanese staff and the western staff
3. one of the biggest strategic blunders ever was the pronouncement that no one wanted a fancy camera on their phone because it was just for low res photos to upload on social media - wrong, wrong, wrong
4. stale, boring design that never changed - not sure if they were selling consumer or business devices, rather than creating one device that could serve both - the product line was littered with too many similar designs that had little differentiation
5. a desire to break away from Google resulted in a failed attempt to create their own OS - another dramatic flame-out - yet they are still at it now, although to target the Chinese market
6. over-reliance on one strategic partnership in the US market - TMobile

der_saeufer

I don't think they're sold at all here in the Caribbean and you don't see many in the U.S., but when I lived in Europe up until a few months ago, HMD's Nokia smartphones seemed pretty common. It seems like they're trying to fill the same niche that Motorola aims at, but Motorola does better selling phones in the U.S. Decent but not great hardware, Android One or at least minimal mods to the OS. The Chinese phones have better looking specs, but Motorola and Nokia make better quality phones with a lot less dodgy bloat in the OS. If you can't or won't spend the money for a Pixel "a" series and don't want to buy a secondhand phone, Nokia and Motorola are where it's at.

I actually just found my old Nokia 8290 the other day. We still have GSM/EDGE here in the DR, but I have no idea where my SIM adapter collection went in the six moves since I bought the thing. At least I could play a couple games of Snake.

dtremit

By the time the Nokia / MS deal was announced, Google had owned Motorola for a couple of years — and Google proceeded to sell off Motorola at a loss of something like $10B before the Nokia / MS deal was even finalized.

moondog

I was a WeChat holdout for about 2 years, but I eventually took the plunge because everyone in China uses it. For many people, it has almost completely replaced email. In terms of functionality, I find it to be far more advanced than WhatsApp, Line, FB Messenger, and iMessage; one area in which all of them still suck is searching for text strings within message streams (I deliberately attempt to migrate conversations over to email when discussing specific work-related stuff (e.g. <CLIENT X> 2021 Q4 Invoice). I am not concerned about hackers intercepting my messages or getting access to my account, BUT I am careful about what I send because Tencent can certainly see everything. I suppose that the main driver in choosing messaging apps is what your contacts use. Functionality is a distant second.

I use WhatsApp to chat with people who don't like WeChat. I still have others installed and get messages on them and SMS once in a blue moon, but focusing on just two platforms seems to work okay. Now that I think about it, I technically still have MSN and Gchat on my computer. They presumably have mobile versions as well, but I've never felt a pressing need to learn more.

In terms of typing speed and accuracy, I was a big fan of T-9 SMS on Nokias. Having actual buttons provided better UE in many respects than touchscreens (e.g. no need to worry about having cold hands). And, of course, Nokia was a master in the talking category.

Going even further back in time, my college gf (mid 90s) still had a Motorola pager, and I was amazed at messages she was able to send/receive using numbers only (e.g. herself and friends all had 4 digit "names" and they also had number strings to represent common verbs, activities, specific restaurants, etc.).

My first cell phone (1996) was a Samsung CDMA flip phone that only operated on the Sprint network. It probably had SMS, but I never used the feature. In hindsight, that was a pretty crappy phone compared to the Nokias I started buying just a few years later. I feel like Samsung wasn't a serious player until the Galaxies came out a decade later.

jsnydcsa

1988 = Shared an apartment with a college roommate. He bought a tape-based answering machine that you could dial into to retrieve messages. I thought that was cool as I sat at my Mac with a built in 3.5 inch drive and a separate 3.5 inch drive which held basically everything I needed on a few 3.5 in disks.
1989 = A pager that didn't have a display. It just buzzed/beeped when my dedicated line received a VM. Then I would dial in and retrieve it. Having a dedicated number. Those were heady days.

I loved Nokias. https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/01/03...l-phone-world/

GadgetFreak

I forgot about them. I loved my HTC phones, I had a few. I had one with a slide out keyboard that I flashed with a ROM from Taiwan I downloaded from the web. None of this "it just works" back then. And then these was Psion.

moondog

A few more random thoughts:
-Boca's post reminded me that I had an Ericcson phone at some point around 2000. It wasn't quite as satisfying as small Nokias, but I thought it was much nicer than my Sprint phones
-my high school Chinese textbook included two words that are no longer in use: 大哥大 ("big brother" because cell phones were enormous when they published the book) and BP机 ("beeper")
-my uncle had one of those big phones, maybe as early as 1985. IIRC, he dropped a lot of coin to buy it, and air time was crazy expensive. It was mostly a novelty/status item at the time
-upthread, I mentioned that I'm now annoyed when people call me instead of sending messages. Now that I think about it, 2005 moondog was the polar opposite. I simply couldn't understand why people would waste time sending text when they could simply call me from the same device. It didn't take long for me to get onboard with SMS though

bocastephen

Was it the (in)famous Motorola brick phone? The one that doubled as gym equipment? My mother had one for her real estate business, and I am certain we all got a free CAT scan every time she made a phone call. I think back then the cell phone service was $50 for access to the network plus $1.50 per minute for inbound or outbound calls and text didn't even exist.

Progress is a funny thing - now I have a "computer" far more powerful than what ran the Space Shuttle, sitting in my pocket.

Cerberus

I miss the old Snake game. Many years playing on my Nokia candy bar phone waiting for and on a bus to work!

24left

Awesome thread. The comments in many of the posts are a bit of living history for me (and I'm sure for many, many others).

I agree that no one wants to talk on a phone and there are many reasons not just the availability of alternative options. Preference for communication format is not age-related like some believe. Psychographics matter, not always demographics. It's also partly based on the preferences of the people at the other end of the communication. And indeed, a major factor is the preferred methods in different parts of the world.

While not being ancient, I remember the Motorola flip-phone (circa 1990's). We bought this one for mom when she was doing treatments at the hospital and while the Bell Canada monthly costs were insane at the time, it gave her comfort knowing she didn't have to go looking for a payphone there. Photo courtesy of search as I eventually returned the original and battery bricks to the telco, which at the time were recycled for use in shelters.

This thing was "weighty" - especially with the larger back-up battery like this one while the other one was charging.




And of course the world moved forward with many different companies and types of phones as noted above.

I recall when we were doing our winter travels in the Sunshine State, it was significantly more efficient and cheaper to buy what are called burner phones. T-Mobile and retailers like Walmart offered those cute little Nokia (non-flip) phones for not much more than $10. Came in a box with a prepaid phone card to get going and we had a bunch of them for visitors etc.

Found a photo in search. This is what it looked like. It did the job. We had these around 2013 and onward.






Some time in the early 2000's IIRC, I had this gem from Bell Canada. It was by far my favourite phone. It served it's purpose and survived a full cycle in the washing machine . I took the battery out and dried it, and she came back to life. We keep it for nostalgic reasons.






This one below is the last surviving sibling from the T-Mobile collection . Still works and only costs $10 a year to top up, so why not.

I will note that this little Samsung below is not remotely close in quality to the little one above. I did not read the tech specs, I just found the build was.... what's the word.....and yes, different products at slightly different times from different telcos etc. But it served its purpose and we still use it at times even with our collection of iOS devices.





Many family members had RIM pagers and then BlackBerry phones due to employer-paid phone services. At the time, the rest of us were envious.

Brand matters, but many companies with fantastic products and produce design lose the plot because they don't understand the consumer and in some cases, don't or can't run the business.

As for SMS etc, I let the clients or personal group contacts decide what works best in terms of app. I'm a blue bubble person, and avoid green bubbles where possible for a few reasons.
.

moondog

I removed the images from your quote because I want to conserve thread space, but I (and others) appreciate them.

-your Samsung flip phone looks quite similar to my own; my friend had one that looked almost the same, but his was GSM and mine was CDMA; I haven't heard much about this technological divide in quite a while, and I honestly don't care
-IIRC, I had your color Nokia phone for a brief stretch before jumping to the N80 (awful attempt at a smartphone). The N78 was a little less sucky, but also had no legs to compete in the new environment
-satisfying (to press) buttons were a feature I loved, but now completely irrelevant
- bocastephen might loathe me for this, but Huawei suits me best, at present. The Google divorce took a while to get used to, but their product is solid; my current phone takes amazing pictures

GUWonder

Nokia was so very interesting in some ways -- including with some software stuff -- for a period of time, but consumer electronics and strong UIX advancement just wasn't in their DNA as much as being infrastructure heavy. Much the same can be said of infrastructure-heavy Ericsson, where even its partnership with consumer electronics giant Sony left them wanting in the face of Apple and Google's blitzing into the handheld mobile phone marketplace from one angle or another. Motorola also had the Nokia and Ericsson disease.

At this point, it seems too late for Nokia, Ericsson or Motorola to again become major players in the handheld mobile phone marketplace from either the consumer electronics software or hardware side. But some companies have managed to reinvent themselves and become re-born legends that go on to become even greater legends than they were before. But that kind of transformation is much harder to pull of nowadays than it used to be, for reasons that are unlikely to change anytime soon.

moondog

Greetings, all. This is might be my first time ever in the Travel Technology forum. I just might stick around. I started this thread in Bad OMNI because I assumed it would become political; it has not. Its next stop was Good OMNI. Now we are here, and maybe the addressable audience will increase, as a result.

I will always regard Nokia as a high point in the mobile phone arena. While I get the fact that buttons simply weren't viable post-2010, those little devices were kind of awesome.