My son found some old mobile tech in our garage a couple of weeks ago and I thought I would highlight what he found. The idea is to understand what each device offered and how well it stood up in the early days of mobile computing. Some devices pushed the mobile smart era forward and others completely failed, but it would be true to say that none of them had the impact the iPhone did when it was released. It is possible, however, that bits of what they brought to the world likely eventually made their way to the much smarter mobile world we live in today.

The Nokia 9210 was released in 2001 and came with a whopping 52Mhz clock speed alongside 8MB of RAM and 16MB of ROM. With a 640×220 pixel TFT screen that could display 4,096 scales and a much less useful 84×48 pixel exterior screen with just 2 shades it was primarily designed for communication and for workplace tasks. The 222g device was big and bulky with a not-so-great keyboard and even at the time it was a bit of an oddity.

Holding it today brings back all of those memories, the main one being ‘Why the hell did I buy this?’ It managed to succeed on literally no level at all; the screen was washed out, the device was bulky and impractical to carry, data input was dreadful with very flat keys and there was a strangely small and non-responsive number keypad on the front. Even after 2 more decades of mobile familiarity an iPhone onscreen keyboard is way quicker than the physical setup here.

The Nokia 9210 is very well built, it still looks kind of futuristic today and it was way better than the 9110 that preceded it, and way way way better than the original Nokia 9000 Communicator.

Running Symbian OS should have been a bonus because of the Psion history built in, but it was poorly implemented here. Throw in the fact that mobile internet at the time was really not quick on anything outside of the BlackBerry offerings and I am sitting here looking at a device that I am just as critical of as I was 20 years ago.

Nokia had a chance here and should have found a way to compete with what came later, and despite better models following the 9210, the company could not bring itself to build anything that moved away from being too mobile phone-centric. A massive missed opportunity.

Categories: Articles, Phones, Retro