Few people have heard of it, yet many consider John Blankenbaker's KENBAK-1 to be the first commercial personal computer.
The First Mobile Phone I Actually Liked
By James Grahame
The news that Nokia's mobile device division is now part of Microsoft made me a tad sentimental this morning. Like hundreds of millions of others, my gateway into the futuristic world of mobile communication was a Nokia.
The Nokia 5110 embodied everything that my late 1990s self imagined a phone to be: sleek and compact, with solid call quality and great battery life. It was also one of the first phones to offer swappable faceplates (critically important when half of your friends owned identical handsets).
I'm embarrassed to admit that I splurged $40 or $50 on a leather phone cover with a belt clip and wore it around proudly, like a lost member of a Star Trek landing party. At least I had the good sense to change my ringtone from the ubiquitous default after only a handful of completely unnecessary calls while driving around town (yeah, I know; times have changed).
Even though it's been about a decade since a Nokia was my handset of choice, there are several basic Nokias lying around our house which we received as freebies for setting up prepaid accounts in recent years.
And therein lies the problem. I don't think of smartphones when someone mentions Nokia. Instead, I find myself amazed that the company has managed to produce hundreds of millions of impossibly cheap handsets for developing nations and cheapskates around the world; simple talk & text phones like the Nokia 100 can be purchased for a mere £9 at Tesco.I wonder if it comes preloaded with Snake?
