Visiting My Mobile Graveyard

    I don’t have to go far to get nostalgic about the old days of mobile computing. My desk drawer is full of dead devices that no longer hold a charge but still make me long for my yesterdays.

My Blackberry (below, left), named for the seedy fruit that resembles its cluster of tiny keys arranged qwerty style, packed a full keyboard into a handheld perfect for people with tiny fingers.

Next to it lies my Hewlett-Packard iPAQ Pocket PC (below, center), an example of the PC companion device Gates alluded to in my one interview with him. This souped-up organizer had a crude app that would let you view, but not modify, Windows documents and spreadsheets. The idea was you could take some of your PC stuff on the road, sorta, in those days when we called laptops luggables. My then-teenage son used to play a game on the iPAQ, the only real use any of us found for it.

My first flip phone, a Samsung model (above, right), sits in the dark drawer, too, but not its predecessor, my very first cellular phone which I apparently lost along the way. The Nokia 610 (below) was one of the most popular devices of the day. It came in what we called a candy bar form factor, but the description was flattering. The phone was as thick as a Snickers glued on top of a Mars bar.

We learned texting on the 610 the hard way, pushing each number key multiple times until it served up the letter you sought. Making phone calls, not texting, was by far the handset’s main use, and that was a joy for those of us who grew up with phones wired to the wall. No more hunting for a phone booth; I could interview anyone, anywhere, anytime. I suspect that’s why my company gave it to me free. 

On the strength of the 610, Nokia became the thought leader in mobile. While it pushed SMS texting hard, the Finish company had its eyes on the next big thing—camera phones. So, it sent me and a couple dozen other tech reporters to a conference it hosted in Maui to learn about the chips, prototype handsets and applications for this new beast on the horizon.

I was skeptical. Point-and-shoot digital cameras like my Nikon CoolPix S3700 -- also now dead in my drawer – were standard tools for getting good headshots of folks I interviewed. So, I asked hard questions, took notes, wrote stories and snorkeled every inch of the hotel’s beachfront.  I’m sure I left with a more positive feeling about camera phones than if the event had been staged in Finland.

My drawer also holds four generations of my former iPhones, including my first, a 2008 model with a 3.5-inch display considered huge at the time. I even kept my Zune (right), Microsoft’s belated answer to the Apple iPod, but a product I never routinely used. It was too hard to navigate the super-small device that had a single button and a tiny screen. Interestingly it was emblazoned on the back with the logo of the chip maker who helped enable it -- NVIDIA.

I rarely wrote reviews—we were not a consumer publication—but I loved playing with new gadgets. Once, I was invited to speak on the state-of-the-art at a small gathering of mobile aficionados near Boca Raton, Florida, where the IBM PC was born. I had fun with my talk, calling the Blackberry an example of all-thumbs computing for the way users tapped out emails on its maddeningly miniaturized keyboard.

The IBM Simon (above), a short-lived device, became in my talk the pioneer of the touch-face display because it embedded a monochrome display in a brick-like classic cellphone. The result: I accidentally activated functions like sending a fax whenever I used it for a voice call. And yes, dating its antiquity, the ability to send a fax was one of its advertised features. 

My talk eked a few chuckles from the couple dozen people in the room, but, clearly, I was not ready for a career in tech comedy.

Next: HonorableMentions of Mobile Computing