Vintage Mobiles
Content:
AUCTION PRICE RECORDS
RESEARCH WHITE PAPER – The Most Important Mobile Phones in History
1 AUCTION PRICE RECORDS
TOP TWENTY VINTAGE MOBILE MODELS OVER TEN YEARS OLD
From 216 mobile models over 10 years old captured during the auction sampling windows in Q3/Q4 2011:
| Mobile Model |
2011 Best Auction Price (£) |
| Motorola 8000X |
1281 |
| Motorola Iridium 9505 |
500 |
| Motorola Iridium 9500 |
239 |
| Motorola International 2500 |
175.99 |
| Nokia 9000i |
150 |
| Motorola StarTac 130 Jaguar |
113.57 |
| Motorola 8000m |
109.37 |
| Nokia 8890 |
103 |
| Motorola 8500X |
99.99 |
| Nokia P30 |
95.99 |
| Sony CMD-Z5 |
94 |
| Technophone Excell M2 |
93 |
| Motorola 888 |
91.09 |
| Motorola 8000s |
87 |
| Motorola StarTac 130 |
84 |
| Motorola StarTac 70 |
82.81 |
| Nokia CT-300 |
82.77 |
| Samsung N400 |
79.76 |
| Sony Ericsson R250s |
77 |
| Motorola 3200 |
72 |
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TOP TWENTY MOBILE MODELS OVER FIVE YEARS OLD
From 495 mobile models over 5 and less than 10 years old captured during the auction sampling windows in Q3/Q4 2011:
| Mobile Model |
2011 Best Auction Price (£) |
| Vertu Ascent 2004 |
730 |
| Motorola Iridium 9505a |
511 |
| Samsung E910 |
400 |
| Nokia 8800 Chrome |
179.99 |
| Nokia 9300 |
139.06 |
| Nokia 8801 |
137 |
| Sony Ericsson P990i |
125 |
| Siemens SX1 |
120.77 |
| Nokia 8910 |
120 |
| Nokia 7280 |
106.05 |
| Nokia 8910i |
104.99 |
| Nokia N90 |
96 |
| Sharp 903SH |
93.85 |
| Nokia 9300i |
93.74 |
| LG P7200 |
90 |
| Nokia 8390 |
89.38 |
| Nokia 7600 |
82 |
| Nokia 5140i |
78 |
| Nokia 6010 |
77.5 |
| HTC P4300 |
71.4 |
2. Research White Paper – The most important
Mobile Phones in history: the unique mobiles
phones that changed the world
- 4th Edition
The mobile phone has become a highly collectable item. But which mobile phones are worth collecting from the thousands of models produced over the past 30 years? A good starting point is to identify the industry game-changers ?
A number of these mobile phones still regularly appear on ebay auctions at very reasonable prices.. offering a good entry point to build an exciting collection of significant vintage mobile phones.
Price data is given below for those mobiles that have come up for auction over the past 12 months:
1. First Prototype mobile cellular radio portable radio telephone (1973)Dr Martin Cooper (from the systems division of Motorola) is widely acknowledged as the person who took the mobile phone out of the car and into the hand. The proto-type was made in 1972, weighed nearly 1 kg and in a race to beat Bell Labs the proto-type is said to have taken 3 months to build.
Dr Martin Cooper poses with a proto-type mobile phone
Dr Cooper made the first call inNew York Cityon a portable cell phone in April 1973 to Joel Engel, head of research at Bell Labs … a leading competitor in the R&D race and the first sign that fierce competition would by a huge driving force in mobile phone innovation.
Dr Martin Cooper’s first mobile call was to tease a competitor
It is the most transformational mobile ever and was the genesis of the public cellular radio hand portable mobile telephone. It is not clear how many of these lab proto-types were every made or even exist today.
2. Motorola Dynatac 8000X (1983)Motorola went on to commercialise the mobile portable telephone. The design team included Cooper and designer Rudy Krolopp. What emerged was the Motorola DynaTAC 8000x (an acronym standing for DYNamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage). In 1983 the FCC approved the phone for use by which time the weight had been brought down to just over 1 lb but still a hefty piece of equipment that came to be known in the media and the public as “the brick. Inside were 30 circuit boards.
Motorola brought to market the first viable hand portable mobile phone, the Dynatac 8000X
It was launched with a price tag of $4000. Further refinements took place and imitators soon arrived in the market including the Mobera Cityman. But the Motorola “brick” has become the public perception of the premier vintage mobile hand portable telephone – heavy, large, expensive and niche.
These mobiles are particularly sought after by collectors and in the second half of 2011 the Ebay auction price for the 8000x ranged from £565 to £1281.
3. Technophone EXCELL M1 PC105T (1986) Technophone was a company set up in 1984 by Nils Martensson, a Swedish radio engineer who left Ericsson to set up on his own in 1978. Nils Martensson’s dream was to transform the large, clunky”brick” into the world’s first mobile phone to fit into the pocket. He secured a DTI R&D grant, brought as much computer technology into the mobile phone as the state of the art would allow (including soft keys) and the PC105T arrived on the market under the Excel brand in 1986 with a price tag of £1990.
The Technophone PC105 turned the mobile from a hand portable to a pocket phone
The mobile phone actually did fit into a Marks & Spenser shirt top pocket, as the advertisements at the time illustrated below.
The first mobile phone to fit into a pocket…notwithstanding the antenna
The technical challenges were enormous and during the development phase Nils incentivise his development engineers to reduce the power drain with a cash bonus for every mille-amp of current reduction they managed to achieve. Even then the compromises stretched things to their very limit. The talk time was around 20 minutes, standby time around 6 hours and the rf power was taken down so far (to save battery drain) that the phone was prone to drop calls. Bit by bit the technical issues were resolved by the sheer grit of Nils Martensson and production was ramped up to 1000 per month and the phone sold through Excell Communications as the Excell M1 and then the M2 (an example of the latter being in the Science Museum in London). The Technophone PC105T was an extremely influential phone in the history of mobile radio for three reasons:
(i) Just as the Motorola brick had taken the mobile out of the car and into the hand so the Technophone PC105 directionally took the mobile phone out of the hand and into the pocket
(ii) It was the phone that inspired the DTI to view the future of the mobile phone as a mass consumer item and led the UK to join the GSM initiative and produce the critical GSM MOU that ignited the global mobile phone revolution.
(iii) By 1991 Technophone was Europe’s second largest mobile phone manufacturer by handset volume after Nokia. In that year it was bought by Nokia… positioning Nokia as the Number 2 mobile supplier in the world after Motorola.
The M1 model has not appeared on Ebay over the monitoring windows, it is quite a rare and a very sought after vintage mobile. The M2 has been auctioned in ebay from time to time and can fetch over £100 in good condition.
4. Motorola MicroTAC (1989) The Motorola MicroTAC analogue was the next leap forward in mobile phone design and was released by Motorola in April 1989. It was the smallest and lightest mobile phone and featured a flip-open mouthpiece (semi-clamshell), the forerunner of the clam-shell in design concept.. It was immediately an object of desire for the wealthy customers and carried a corresponding price tag of $3000.
The Motorola MicroTAC that won the analogue mobile battle and lost for Motorola the digital mobile war
The deeper historic significance of the Motorola MicroTAC was that it’s sheer genius in terms of state of the art analogue technology led the top Motorola Executives to take their eye off the ball in terms of the GSM mobile revolution that was just around the corner. They also wrongly believed that GSM would just be “carphones” for many years (due to excessive current drain of the current state of digital chips at the time). It was a huge strategic blunder.
Motorola MicroTac mobiles regularly appear on Ebay with prices ranging from £3 to £58 depending on the model and condition.
5. Nokia 1011 (1992) Nokia launched its first GSM mobile phone, the Nokia 1011, on 10.11.1992. The black handset featured a monochrome display and an extendable antenna. The memory could hold 99 phone numbers.
The Nokia 1011, Nokia’s first venture into the GSM market
The timing was perfect and the bet well placed. Like a surfer, with a mixture of skill (inspired intuitive user interface) and luck, they were lifted by the rising GSM tidal wave to global dominance. The Motorola MicroTAC and Nokia 1011 need to be set side by side. Together they tell a tale of two company strategies around the choice of technical standards. Few would argue that the Motorola MicroTAC was not the better mobile phone both technically and in terms of style. But for Nokia the one design to the new GSM standard opened up a market in over 14 countries but for Motorola, each new analogue market necessitated a significant re-design since there were a huge variation of frequency and technical standards across the analogue world. As the design cycles of mobile phones got shorter and shorter in the 90’s Motorola found their competitive position hobbled by the wrong choice of technology. By 1997 GSM had up-ended the global mobile phone industrial landscape. Motorola lost its crown to Nokia and was never given the space to re-claim it. From 1991-2000 Nokia’s number of employees doubled, net sales grew ten-fold and operating profit grew a hundred-fold.
This historic Nokia mobile seldom appears on the UK Ebay however it regularly appears on the German Ebay auction site for prices ranging from £10 to £40.
6 Orbitel 901 – the mobile Phone that carried the first commercial SMS text message The first commercial SMS text message was sent over the Vodafone GSM network in December 1992 by Neil Papworth of Sema Group from his office PC to Richard Jarvis of Vodafone… who received it on his Orbitel 901 mobile.
Orbitel 901 that received the first commercial SMS Text Message
The Orbitel Mobile has other claims to fame. It was in fact the first GSM mobile in the world to receive official type approval. It beat the Motorola 3200 by a week…although most people think the Motorola 3200 was the first GSM mobile phone. It was also the phone used by the University of Technology in Sydney for work they did to determine the limits of position fixing using a GSM network…the results being fed into the ETSI standardisation work in this area.
The first Motorola GSM mobile to feature an SMS capability was the Motorola 3300.
Orbitel was a joint venture between Racal (who then owned Vodafone) and Plessey with Mike Pinches (the first Technical Director of Vodafone) as its Managing Director. The company was eventually bought by Ericsson.
This model has not appeared on Ebay over the monitoring windows.
7. Nokia 2110 – 1st phone with Nokia tune (1994) There are a number of happy accidents of history in the mobile phone story in terms of successes that nobody foresaw. One of those happy accidents was the mobile ring tone bonanza. Without doubt its foundation was laid by Nokia with their introduction of the Nokia tune. So the story goes Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President of Nokia Telephone Company and Lauri Kivinen listened through the Gran Vals, by the Spanish classical guitarist and composer Francisco Tárrega and selected an excerpt “Measure 142” to become “Nokia tune”.
The Nokia 2110 that brought with it the musical ring tone
It arrived on the market incorporated into the Nokia 2110 and from then on the “ring, ring….” was transformed into:
It was the first identifiable musical ring tone on a mobile phone and in this regard the Nokia 2100 was game-changing mobile phone for the industry and consumers.
This mobile appears from time to time on Ebay and has fetched an average of £10
8. Nokia 7110 (1999) The Nokia 7110 was the first mobile phone to have a WAP Browser (Wireless Application Protocol) or Microbrowser.
The Nokia 7110 with WAP browser tries to take the Internet to the mobile phone
WAP was enormously hyped up by the Industry. Most consumers found the WAP phone a disappointed and failed to ignite the mobile Internet revolution.
This mobile appears from time to time on Ebay and has fetched an average of £10
9. Kyocera VP210 – the first mobile offering video telephony The first mobile phone to offer two way video telephony was the Kyocera VP210 in 1999. It operated on the Japanese PHS system which was a mobile network of the Telepoint type ie using essentially cordless phones over short links to wireless hot spots.
VP210 was the first mobile video phone
The reason it appeared on this type of network first (rather than cellular networks) is that the data rate was 32 kb/s whereas GSM started its life with only 16 kb/s for voice (or 9.6 kb/s for pure data) and getting good quality pictures and voice over 16 kb/s was too much of a stretch let alone 9.6 kb/s. An interesting facet of this comparison is that the reason 32 kb/s was possible over PHS was that it had very short ranges whereas GSM had to operate over very large ranges…which led to much superior coverage…one of the reasons why PHS (and Telepoint) did not survive.
This mobile is unlikely to appear on an Ebay auction as it was never marketed outside of Japan.
10. Nokia 9000 Communicator (1996) In 1989 the DTI published its “Phones on the Move” document that set out a vision that future mobile phone designs would incorporate many new functions like electronic diaries and other Information Technology novelties and the term the “office in the pocket” was coined. In 1996 Nokia turned a vision of an “office in the pocket” into a practical reality with the introduction of their Nokia Communicator.
The Nokia Communicator ushers in the “Office in the Pocket”
The Nokia Communicator gathered around it a hardcore of devotees who organised their lives via their mobile phone. It is probably the point of origin of the mobile phone becoming a vortex sucking in ever more functions and applications as the basic mobile phone became commodity consumer items.
This mobile appears from time to time on Ebay and fetches prices ranging from £5 to £25.
11. Siemens S10 – the first mobile phone with a full colour screen The Siemens S10 was the first mobile phone with a colour screen but it was not the screen that was to change the world. The Siemens S10 emerged in 1998 with four only colours (red, green, blue and white) and with a screen resolution of only 5238 pixels (97×54).
Siemens S10 – the first mobile with a coloured screen
In December 1999 DoCoMo, the largest mobile phone operator in Japan, introduced the first mobile with a colour screen of sort that had a much bigger impact.
DoCoMo D502i adds realistic colour for the first time to the mobile screen
The mobile was manufactured by Mitsubishi and had a screen resolution of 11,520 pixels (96 x 120) and 256 colours. A colour screen had arrived that changed the way we look at our mobile phones.
The popularity of coloured screen exploded around the world and only 2 years later annual sales of mobile phones with coloured screens had leapt to over 150 million units. The D502i itself never appeared outside of Japan as it only worked on the PDC network – a cellular technology that was unique to Japan – one of the reasons why Japanese Companies, in spite of their fantastic mobile phone innovations, were held back from dominating the global mobile phone market.
One Siemens S10 appeared on Ebay over the monitoring window and went for under £1 – history at a very cheap price. The DoCoMo D502i unlikely to appear on an Ebay auction.
12.Samsung SCH-N300 with Verizon – the first commercial A-GPS For a development as important as mobile network Assisted GPS (A-GPS) it is very difficult to tie down exactly the first mobile featuring A-GPS as it required not only the mobile innovation but the network service to provided the “assisted” function. Verizon had such a service working with the Samsung SCH-N300 from December 2001 and that is the earliest record I have found so far.
Samsung SCH-N300 appears the first A-GPS mobile with active commercial network assistance
Benefon brought their Esc! and Track mobiles to market also around December 2001 but the essential link to a capable mobile network is not clear. As early as 1998 Enuvis, SnapTrack, Global Locate and Traxsis had various developments underway to meet the US E911 mandate but no clear association with a particular commercially available mobile phone…and most interesting is that research so far has not thrown up anyone claiming to have produced the world’s first mobile phone with A-GPS…so for the present the Samsung SCH-N300 appears to have the best claim.
The Samsung N300 did not appear on Ebay over the monitoring period. If it does come up this is likely to be on the US Ebay auction site as it uses a technical standard not used in most of the rest of the world.
13. Siemens SL45 – the first mobile with MP3 player In 2001 Siemens brought together for the first time the mobile phone and MP3 player in their SL45. However, it needed a plug-in 32 MB MMC plug-in card to store the music.
Siemens SL45 – the first mobile to incorporate an MP3 player but lacked integrated storage
This was followed in early 2002 by Sprint who offered the SPH-M300 from Samsung that used the mobile’s internal data storage.
Samsung M100 brought the MP3 music player with integrated memory
The Samsung M100 had 64 MB of internal data storage that provided for around 1 hour play-time. It commanded an initial price of $400 for a mobile phone alone that would not have fetched more than $250. Soon MP3 would be a function that would become standard on all mid to high end mobile phones.
The Siemens SL45 appear regularly on the German Ebay site for an average price of around £4. The Samsung M300 appears from time to time on Ebay and fetches a price between £10 and £16.
14. Blackberry 957 Internet edition (2001) Without a doubt the RIM Blackberry is one of the phones that has changed the course of mobile phone history. But which Blackberry or which history? The earliest Blackberry model was the 850 (followed by the 857) and worked on a packet-switched network networks called DataTac, which in turn evolved from a network developed by Motorola for vertical mobile data applications, such as field force management. Both the Blackberry and the network it ran on were a niche sideshows and of no consequence to the wider mobile radio world.
More internationally significant was their 900 model that worked on the Mobitex network Mobitex was developed by Ericsson and again aimed at the niche vertical mobile data applications market. This still does not qualify as a very significant global step forward. Probably the model that came to revolutionise the mobile radio industry was the Blackberry Internet Edition 957. It ran on the Mobitex network in the US and was specifically designed for use with POP accounts.
The 957 was the first Blackberry designed for use with POP accounts
With the Internet Edition, the provider of the Internet service took responsibility for ensuring e-mails were delivered and an Exchange Server was no longer needed. A BB Redirector ensured that when a new email arrived in the user’s mail server a copy of the email was automatically sent to the user’s 957. Push e-mail linked to Internet arrived on a portable wireless device!
Some might argue that devices working on networks other than a public cellular radio network do not qualify to be a part of the mainstream mobile phone history. In which case the Blackberry 5810 takes the prize as the first GSM/GPRS voice enabled mobile. This version was designed only to work on the North American 1900 MHz networks. It was released in May 2002, measured 4.6 x 3.1 x 0.7 inches, weighed 4.7 oz, had 4 hours talk time and 10 days standby time. In September 2002 the 5820, the version that worked on 900 Mhz/1800 MHz, arrived.
Another innovation with the Blackberry was the thumb-wheel used to scroll down the list of e-mails and an in important part of the Blackberry addiction but this has not swept into the wider mobile phone industry.
These very early Blackberry models do not appear often on Ebay and usually go for under £5.
15. Ericsson T36 with blue-tooth (2000) The Ericsson T36 was a prototype version of what later became the T39 and the very first phone with Bluetooth.
The Ericsson T36 brought the mobile phone into connection with things around it
With the arrival of Bluetooth the phone could be linked to independent devices in proximity of the phone. The two most widespread applications are to link to a hands free kit in the car and to link to a Bluetooth headset or ear-piece. Soon almost all medium to high end phones incorporated a Bluetooth capability.
The T36 quickly became the T39 and these mobile do appear from time to time on Ebay and fetch in the region of £17.
16. Nokia 8850 (1999) In 1995 Frank Nuovo established a Nokia design unit to influence and steer the design of Nokia phones. Nuovo studied industrial design at the Art Center College of Design inPasadenaand also spent time with studio Designworks before joining Nokia. The 8850 was his brainchild. The Nokia 8850 was announced in 1999 and represented the arrival of style over pure technology advance (that had hitherto largely driven the mobile phone market).
The Nokia 8850 built to catch the eye rather than price or performance
Frank Nuovo went on to head the Vertu project which is Nokia’s luxury phone division that has driven the mobile phone into the strata of astronomically priced “high fashion” items.
These mobiles are quite sought after by collectors and one in good condition can fetch up to £50.
17. Motorola L7089 Timeport (1999) The bridging of the 900 , 1800 and 1900 MHz bands in the one mobile phone unified the GSM system between the USA and the rest of the GSM world and was hugely significant in the universality of the GSM service, particularly to the business world (you cannot be a global company and not travel to the USA). The final destination was arrived at with the Motorola L7089…
The Motorola Timeport tri-band phone unifies the GSM business world
but the journey is interesting. The first GSM mobile that allowed people to cross the Atlantic was actually the Bosch World 718 that was a dual 900/1900MHz phone and introduced in June 1998. (It was also badged by a few other companies). This phone, in turn, was based on a GSM mobile that Dancall developed when it was owned by Amstrad. A prototype of the phone was shown at C-Bit in 1997. Meanwhile Amstrad sold out to Bosch and Bosch sold the phone as the Bosch 738 but this quickly transmuted into the Bosch world 718.
Now there may have been an earlier dual band phone but according to Dancall this required the user to stop the call to switch bands. Dancall claim their phone to be the first dual band phone with seamless handover (using a new type of Phase Lock Loop synthesiser called fractional N PLL).
In parallel CommQuest Technologies emerged in Jan 1998 to announce their two chip tri-band solution (with the time-line making it unlikely that the Dancall development triggered their development). Motorola used this to produce the first tri-band phone in 1999 that was introduced into China as the L2000 (with Chinese characters and some adaptation to the key pad to allow the up-stroke important to the Chinese language) and the rest of the world as the L7089 Timeport.
So it is a matter for argument as to whether it was the Bosch World 718 or the Motorola L7089 was the phone changing the course of mobile phone history by bridging between the US and most of the rest of the world.
One of these mobile came up on Ebay over the sampling window and only fetched around £1
18. Sharp J-SH04 (2001) The Sharp J-SH04 was the world’s first phone to incorporate a camera and followed a month later by the J-SH05, first clamshell mobile with a camera and the latter had the bigger impact in transforming the market
The Sharp J-SH04 & 05 were the world’s first two camera phones
It represents another happy accident in mobile phone history. The idea was developed by Sharp. So the story goes that Sharp uncharacteristically did little market research with their first-line customers (the Japanese mobile phone operators) before developing the phone. They first tried to interest the market leader DocoMo in distributing the phone but DoCoMo thought that nobody would want such a poor resolution camera. They then approached J-Phone, the struggling smallest of the three Japanese operators. The J-Phone engineers liked the novelty but the marketing department thought it a daft idea. Under pressure from the engineers the company ordered two versions of the phone with 8000 being a phone without the camera and 2000 with the camera. The result was to see the 2000 fly out of the doors and many years later the J-Phone warehouse (by then Vodafone KK) still had some of the remaining 8000 phones without the camera languishing unsold.
The J-SH04 was succeeded by the J-SH05 flip phone, which was released just one month after. The camera phone had arrived. The idea of the camera phone was embraced enthusiastically by consumers with quite remarkable breaking news being captured by consumers with the now ubiquitous camera phone.
These mobile are unlikely to appear on an Ebay auction site as they were only ever marketed in Japan
19. Motorola Razr V3 (2004) The Motorola Razr was the clamshell mobile phone with the thinnest profile on the market (13mm) in 2004 and made all the competitor phones around it look clumsy in comparison. For a few years it set a trend towards thinner mobile phones across the industry. The thinness as a feature of high styling elegance was re-enforced by an all aluminum body with an external glass screen and keypad made out of a single metal wafer with an electroluminescent illuminated keypad.
The Motorola Razr V3 set the industry design standard for thinness and elegance
The mobile was developed in 2003 and introduced in the fourth quarter of 2004 as a high end fashion phone selling at $800.
These mobile appear very regularly on Ebay and fetch and average of £23
20. Motorola C113a (2005) The GSMA (successor to the GSM MoU that became the mobile operators’ industry association) ran a competition for the first under $30 mobile phone as a stepping stone to a huge expansion of mobile radio in poor developing countries. At first the big suppliers were worried about a grey market developing but eventually a number of them entered the competition. The Motorola C113a was selected as the winner: It had a credible specification.
The Motorola C113a unlocked the mobile phone door to developing countries
The initiative was a success and the mobile phone is the most popular electronic device on the planet…far exceeding the PC.
This mobile has not appeared on Ebay over the sampling window and is probably unlikely to as they were not sold into Western markets.
21. Ericsson R380 (2000) The mobile that blazed the trail for the SmartPhone (2000) Ericsson brought out the R380 in 2000. It incorporated the two key features of today’s SmartPhones: a touch screen and an open operating system.
The Ericsson R380 ground breaking development of the Smartphone
The OS was the EPOC operating system first pioneered by Psion for its digital personal assistant and thrown open to other vendors to use. It was to lead onto the Symbian OS. However the R380 architecture did not envisage users down-loading their own Apps at that time so it had more of the character of a feature phone – with a focus on the PDA applications.
These appear from time to time on Ebay and have fetched around £25
22. Apple i-phone (2007) The Internet on the mobile phone was one of the huge flops of the dot.com era. The idea looked compelling from a commercial standpoint of a massively growing Internet population and a massively growing mobile population – so pulling the two together seemed a guarantee of success – only WAP over GPRS on a tiny mobile screen was far from a compelling consumer experience.
What the legendary Steve Jobe pulled off was to make the Internet on the mobile phone a compelling consumer experience. He was helped by the advances in LCD screen technology that produced crystal sharp pictures, by desirable applications being on hand and all the advances in mobile network technology. But the genius was the simplicty and pleasure of the user interface.
The Apple i-phone made the Internet on the mobile phone a compelling experience
The first version was a GSM only phone released in 2007. It was a tribute to Apple’s marketing skill that customers did not appear to mind the fact that they could only access the Internet at a paltry 56 kb/s…a limitation that was quickly put right a year later with the 3G version.
These original 2G Apple i-phone come up regularly on Ebay and whilst the price has been falling as attention has moved onto later models one in good condition with its box can still fetch over £80
23 Nokia N92 (2007) Some times history can be shaped by what did not happen. In South Korea mobile television made enormous headway driven by advances in the quality of screens. That extra detail made the pictures watchable on small screens. In Europe Nokia went to enormous efforts to get mobile television off the ground based upon the DVB-H mobile television standard. Alcatel even had visions of mobile satellite television. DVB-H networks were launched in Italy, Germany and Finland but lack of radio spectrum blocked DVB-H networks emerging in the UK, France and elsewhere. Nokia brought out an incredibly well designed flag-ship mobile the N92 that incorporated a DVB-H chip.
Nokia 92 – a dream mobile for the mobile TV viewer
The mobile had a rolling 30 second capture of the video that allowed instant replays and a VCR function although this needed a plug in memory card since the mobile itself only had 40MB of integrated storage.
Mobile television failed to take off and certainly one reason is that it was not mounted on a big enough scale ie to have stood a chance of attracting mass consumer audiences to develop the necessary advertising revenues would have needed DVB-H chips to have been in every high end mobile phone….that never happened. The failure of DVB-H in Europe has left the video space clear for video over mobile broadband to Smart phones to develop (with some challenging consequences for mobile networks to handle this Tsunami of new data traffic).
The Nokia N92 is very collectable and one in good condition can fetch up to £290.
24 Vertu Ascent (2004) – Vertu is Nokia’s luxury phone division. Vertu, more than any other enterprise, has propelled the mobile phone into the luxury goods stratosphere and has dominated this top of the market niche.
Vertu Ascent was the first mobile to sell on brand, quality of materials and outstanding craftsmanship
There are other companies that have aspired to occupy this space ranging from mobile phones studded with precious stones to quality mass market products such as the Motorola Aura but Vertu mobiles remain luxury market leader. The very first Vertu 2004 second hand version of the Ascent can still fetch up to £730 on ebay.
25 Samsung i9020 or Nexus S (2010) – Mobile payments at the point of sale need a standardised Near Field Communications (NFC) chip to allow secure contact-less data to be passed over a very short distances. The technology has been around for some time and took off in Japan with their Felica system and used extensively on their public transport. But it has been slow to emerge outside of Japan. One day every mobile phone in the world will have an NFC chip – in 2010 we saw the first mobiles emerging outside of Japan with an NFC chip. The Samsung Nexus S (i9020) was among the first.
Samsung Nexus S with a standardized contact-less payment (NFC) chip
The Samsung Nexus S fetches up to £464 on Ebay with the average price in 2011 being £375
It would be nice to add the first mobile in Japan that emerged with the Felica technology…perhaps somebody would be so kind as to contact me with the information.
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