(phone ringing) - There it is. You remember them for the
phone no one could break, or for the phone that had all the features before having all the features was a thing but you might not remember
that for a few years there, while the killers were
killing the billboards, Google was first going public, and so was Janet Jackson, Finnish phone maker Nokia
was going a little bit crazy. Like, just, I mean, what? You can't use this as a phone. Oh, man, all right, let's do this. I'm Mr. Mobile and this
is When Phones Were Fun. (upbeat music) Hey folks, I hope you don't
mind me dressing down a little for this one but this is
the only shirt I could find from the Maddox that I still owned and that I still fit in to. True fact: this pocket right here is where I used to store my Discman. So it's big enough for even
the largest of these weirdos. My European friends are
always surprised to hear this but between 2002 to 2006 or so, when Nokia was just pouring itself whatever was in the party punch bowl, here in the USA, phones were
a lot more conventional. Smartphones existed but
they were mostly BlackBerrys or Sidekicks and they were
a tiny sliver of the market. The most common phones you'd usually see on the streets were
small silver clamshells. As a result, I didn't own
one of these bizarre-trons so please join me in thanking
friend of the channel Martin for this whole box of
beautifully preserved specimens for your viewing pleasure. Most of them are European
models with branding and user manuals in various
languages I can't read, but even the box art speaks
to the totally different era these products came from. Before I even opened these I knew I was gonna have a good time. Now before I get to the true weirdos, here's a phone I'm gonna skip for today. Not because I don't want
to cover the Nokia 6820 but because I'm planning another episode of this series for devices like it. See this was part of a subclass that came to be known as messaging phones. You could use them as a typical handset but they also featured
a full QWERTY keyboard, usually hidden behind a slider. Well, Nokia's 6800 family
took a really clever approach to that problem and
I'll talk more about it when we get to that episode. Let's kick things off
properly with the Nokia 3560. Sorry, 3650. Man, one thing I do not miss is Nokia's numeric stew of confusion. Almost as confusing? This keypad. Modeled after an
old-fashioned rotary phone, the numbers encircle
the perimeter of the pad instead of filling it
up with the usual grid and it plays horrible mind
games with your muscle memory. Well it's not the worst
keypad in this video, stay tuned to the end for that. It was apparently divisive enough that Nokia replaced it with
a conventional keyboard being a sequel called the 3660. That means the 3650 was successful enough to warrant that sequel and it's
easy for me to imagine why. I remember I was working
at a mall around this time and I was walking back from a lunch hour and I passed the T-Mobile kiosk where the guy working
there was using this phone to watch an episode of "Star
Trek: The Next Generation." Needless to say, I was intrigued. Remember, at the time most phones in the States were just
getting polyphonic ringtones. So a device that could play
full TV episodes was something. The 3650 was the first phone with an integrated camera
to be sold in North America. 0.3 megapixels, hold onto your butts, and it was the first
phone sold in the U.S. with Nokia's Symbian S60 platform. So it was a true smartphone, in the sense that you
could load up a compressed LimeWire rip of a TNG
episode onto an SD card and play it back in glorious 12-bit color through a relic like RealPlayer. Now this is a 17-year-old
phone at this point, so, of course, it's cumbersome
and clunky to navigate but I'm actually surprised
by how responsive it is. And ergonomically speaking, wow! It's crazy comfortable. While, like all the phones in this video, it's cheap and plasticky,
there's not a hard edge on it. "Feels good in the hand," as they say. If I'd been on a GSM
carrier back in the day, I think I'd have considered the 3660. It's quite attractive. And speaking of attractive, let's have a gander at the next. (gasps) Whoo! Sorry about that, but this is heinous. Remember how I kept calling
the Sidekick a meatball in the last episode? Well this, this is a legitimate potato. I'm gonna call it the Nokia Spud. I'm just kidding, save your hate-mail. The Nokia 6600, which is
what this is actually called, was marketed as a business
phone when it launched in 2003 and dudes, it sold. Nokia put more than a 150 million
of these into suit pockets across Europe and the Middle East, which means it outsold
the first Motorola RAZR. Demand was so high, in fact, that it remained in production until 2007. Why the success? Well the product placement in the movie "Cellular"
probably didn't hurt but really, it was the business features like corporate email
support, a mobile VPN client, and even virtual wallet
application for online purchases. It also packed the table
stakes like VGA camera, Bluetooth, and the common
for the time, IR port, which you could use to transfer data between phones wirelessly and slowly. All this ran once again
on the series 60 platform which was first announced back in 2001 in this peculiar package. God, November 2001 phones
in Europe looked like this, meanwhile I'm living in Virginia, limping to the barn with a Sprint phone that looks like this. I should have studied abroad. Not that the 7710 is a looker but it's one of those
products that's so ugly, it's well, if not pretty,
then at least interesting. That's probably what led
to its marketing tie-in with the dystopian future
thriller "Minority Report" but it was its litany of features that cemented it in phone history. It was the first Nokia with a camera and MMS messaging to send it with. One of the first with Bluetooth and it married those
with an internal antenna and the always fun slide-out keyboard. Bummer that it's not an assisted slide, no springs to be found here but at least you can still slap it shut. Other signs of the times
ranged from the convenient, a user-replaceable battery,
to the less convenient, a 2.5-millimeter headphone jack, to the delightfully odd, a
dedicated voice memo button. This actually shows up
in a few of these Nokias and it reminds me of how
many drunken voice memos I used to leave myself on
my Samsung A600 in college. For that story, be sure you're subscribed for the next episode. All right, now that
you've seen the beginning of Nokia's smartphone legacy, you gotta check out its fat metal. The 7710 looks less like a phone than one of those dashboard
GPSs that would become popular in the years following its 2004 release. This was a replacement for the Nokia 7700 which was canceled presumably because it looked like
a rejected prototype for a bicycle helmet Napoleon Dynamite might have worn as a kid. It also required the user to side talk, like the infamous Taco
Phone, aka the Nokia N-Gage, which I covered in a
video a few years back. The 7710 was a full touchscreen phone with an integrated stylus
and a few physical controls that actually make sense. The display was roomy for the time with the same 3.5 inch diagonal that the first iPhone would
launch with three years later. And it came with some
fun tripod-like accessory to stand it up with and also a frankly, horrible-looking leather case. Sadly, the phone lacked not only 3G which was even becoming
common on Nokias of the time but it also omitted WiFi. So you had this big for the time display but you were stuck loading websites at less than dial-up speeds. The new series 90 platform was apparently, also undercooked at launch, and all this combined with
a strange form factor, high price, and increased competition from platforms like Windows Mobile to basically kill the 7710. The phone was discontinued,
series 90 was canceled, and I was allowed to move on to our final, much more fun phone. This is without question, the most ridiculous phone I've ever held. Is it a leaf? An eyeball? An ancient Egyptian artifact? Sure, whatever you want. All rules are out the
window with the Nokia 7600, announced in the fall of 2003. About the only conventional things on it were the Symbian S40 platform, changeable express-on covers,
like those we saw on the 3650. 3560? No, 3650. And a design ethos that seemed to say, "Eff it, man, let's get weird." Threading the leather wrist strap through the corner pocket, I got to thinking maybe I could carry this as a weekend dumb phone
if I could get it work and just to discourage my
constant impulse to text, because yeah, you don't
wanna text on these keys. They're horrible. You don't wanna use this
D-pad, it's horrible, too. And you absolutely don't wanna talk on it, which you have to do by
tilting it diagonally and wincing through the
pain of hard plastic on all the wrong parts of your ear. Hey, at least it had polyphonic ringtones. (phone ringing) Really, the 7600 is at its
best just sitting there and attracting ogles from passers-by, which is why Nokia marketed it to the fashion segment,
exclusively overseas. Even then though, to read
the user reviews at S21.com, well, it ranges from
embarrassing to celebrity worthy, to just a total piece of junk. My favorite is this user
in 2008 who boasted, "I go for style uniqueness, "that's why I dominate
conversations and gossips." Hey man, you keep doing you. Respect. As I slipped the 7600 back
into its dope travel sack, I will say this is not the
last we'll hear from Nokia in this series. The company has many more examples of crazy design from this period. Why? Well, it was the dawn
of the smartphone era. New designs were needed
for new interface paradigms and new more powerful internals. That meant new casings were needed as well and companies like Nokia decided to push into every possible corner of
far-flung theory and thought. We're seeing something similar
happening in foldables today, and that's one of the reasons
I'm so excited for them. But I don't think we'll
ever quite recapture the off-the-wall brazenness and exotic experimentation
of Nokia in the noughties, back in the days when phones were fun. This video was not paid for, previewed, or copy-approved by
Nokia or any other OEM. It was produced entirely thanks to the borrowed private collection from friend of the channel Martin. Thanks, one more time to him
for sending me these gems and for sharing his own
experiences with them. Now as I say, Nokia wasn't
big in the States at this time so I'd love to hear from those of you who did on these things. Leave your comments below. Next up on the program: I finally get to go back
to my first camera phone and Samsung's first camera
phone for the States as well. Check out the rest of the series playlist on my channel page. And if you liked this video,
subscribe while you're there. Until next time, thanks for watching. Stay safe at home if you can, but in spirit, stay mobile my friends.
The 6600 was a great phone. Could play ripped n-gage games on it, without actually having to own an n-gage.
I know it wasn't one that he was given, but can't believe he missed out mentioning the Nokia 7280!
This guy’s one of my favorite tech you tubers. He does actually fun and insightful videos without any of the pretentiousness of others
Old but gold. Nokia will be forever "the best phone ever".
MrMobile is quietly the best tech reviewer on YouTube.
He's got that down to earth charisma and none of the elitism that the more popular channels like MKBHD have.
Shameless plug: Check out /r/VintageMobilePhones if you like old cell phones in general. The subreddit is quite new but very enthusiastic at the same time
Top left makes me think of digimon