I rocked a Samsung Alias 2 for 4 years before I got an iPhone 5. The e-ink keyboard was awesome how it changed when you flipped the screen open to portrait or landscape.
A Samsung F400,it was a slider that slid up to reveal the number pad and down to reveal a speaker. Was great for music, don’t remember much more about it. Moved on to the Blackberry Bold after that as far as I remember.
I also had the Alias 2, and then it became my mom’s phone after I moved on to my first smartphone (HTC One M7). Loved that stupid double flipping thing to death, such a great design with the e-paper or w/e for the buttons so they could change for the different perspective / context.
Nokia N75. It was an upgrade from a Sony Ericsson hand-me-down after my invincible Nokia was thrown out of the window of my car as it was being stolen (I called it and the thief answered… long story).
The N75 had a 2mp camera and MP3 playing, but tiny storage and I got a free iPod (the touch wheel one) with a college powebook around the same time. I used the N75 online once, to locate a restaurant one time, and it probably cost my $3-5 since I had no data plan.
This was a right before the iPhone 3G would make those affordable and launch the App Store. I bought that for my wife and we never went back.
Technically, but it was useless for any of the things that we use in smart phones. It had terrible web browsing, no GPS. Very few apps outside of games. T9 typing (which should have disqualified it in the first place). It was a camera phone that they tried to upsell as a smartphone and a big part of why Nokia lost so much market to Apple and later Android.
Smartphones used to have a different purpose than they do now. Just because it doesn’t have a querty keyboard, doesn’t mean it’s not a smartphone. Just look at the first iPhone, it’s just as useless, it didn’t even have the ability to install apps (imo it’s a must for smartphones) , yet hardly anyone will dispute whether it was a smartphone.
iPhone had gps and mapping and really nice full website browsing, plus bigger storage and music (since we all wanted iPod phones before then).
I’d argue one of the bigger factors in its success was that it had an unlimited data plan (which I never should have let go of).
The N75 may have had Bluetooth, the OS, and a browser, but lacked the UI to use it. It was a camera phone marketed as a smartphone because it launched right after the first iPhone.
I never used N75, but i had n95, and they’re both running Symbian OS so I assume they were similar at least in software. I had full website browsing (made faster thanks to opera mini), email, file manager. I also had third party apps like Skype, Google maps (doesn’t matter whether you have gps), Gmail. If that’s not a smartphone then I don’t know what is.
Even the wiki you linked to clearly defines it as a smartphone. Why would you argue with that?
I had a Motorola StarTac, but I also had a plug-in organizer that I could import my contacts and initiate calls with. On top of that I had a cable that that I could tether my iPaq to by dialing #777 . My next phone was a Palm Treo.
Don’t remember exactly what it was, but I think it was Samsung and was one of the ones where you slid it up to access the keypad. I got it around middle school as a hand-me-down from my dad. I thought it was the absolute coolest thing at the time, despite that was around when my parents were upgrading to smart phones. I’ll definitely have to look it up to see what it was.
Edit:
On GSMArena there is 66 pages of different model Samsung phones and plenty that you slid up to access the keypad. Finding the exact model would be like finding a straw of hay in a needle stack, so I’m giving up after 14 pages.
Yeah took me forever to find mine, about 20 pages. Worth it for the nostalgia hit though. GSM arrange by age though so if you can guess when you got it that might narrow it down for you.
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