Having owned the Xperia play personally the best part of it is that it was not only moddable but highly overclockable (mine ran stable at 1.8-2 GHz) and there is an app you can download for PC that converts PS1 games to run on the inbuilt Sony emulator. All controls worked perfectly.
@@blunderingfool slightly different running native code on the PSP vs emulating it but I can see your point. This was a very capable phone once overclocked but at the time it came out most flagship androids where moving to dual cores so it quickly got outclassed. In saying that PS1 games smoothly emulated on it even at its stock clocks which was all the more impressive (and kept battery life reasonable)
The PS1 support was pretty cool on this device. These days most phones can run PS1 via emulation, but not back then. My biggest issue with it was the lack of at least one proper analog stick (instead of those touch fields). Also, I had a PSP and it got the job done.
I had one of those Sony Play phones, it was amazing! Linus missed the fact that it came with a custom version of Minecraft which fully worked with the buttons and it also had a store for other popular games which had the controls integrated, it was great!
IIRC (it was freaking ages ago so I may be remembering wrong) but Minecraft Pocket Edition came out first on the Xperia Play and only came to other devices later. So it was genuinely the first device to get what would eventually become Bedrock Edition.
I had the Play when it first came out back when I was a big Sony guy. It was a really good phone especially for emulation. I would play PS1 and GB games on it. The only thing that wasn't so great was the "analog sticks". Really, at around that same time, the Vita came out (which I still have in my possession) and seriously didn't understand why they couldn't have built that OS into the phone. Sure, it would have been missing like, all the apps, but a Vita that you had with you at all times seemed like such a real thing that should have happened.
As someone who is somewhat of a PSP fanatic, the Xperia Play is such a cool device. I remember being super jealous of a classmate who used to have one. Also very interesting how much they borrowed from the PSP Go for the physical design
I briefly had an Xperia play but found it too Chunky to carry everyday as a phone in my pocket also was quite a weight when moving around with it in pocket all the time ended up selling it and got the much thinner Samsung galaxy s2 😉
@@Anon-21j exactly the same for me, i was so jealous of my classmate back in school. but then i never had a psp either, was stuck on my gameboy advance
I worked at a mobile phone retailer for 15 years starting in the early 2000s, I not only remember but used, sold and set up every single one of these phones over the years... aah, memories.
The funky Nokia shapes absolutely did sell massively. Most people had standard brick phones but there were bragging rights with having one of the weird or high end ones. Phones didn't do much and designs were so varied that a weird keypad wasn't really a problem
Yeah. It was a fashion accessory. Not like it was meant for every day user. Those leafs and lipstick phones were something one would see with fashion models and rich people who wanted something fashionable. Probably not even their only phone. Plus the classic: if you are rich enough, you don't need a complex phone with lot of features to get stuff done. That is what the always hanging around personal assistant is for. The VIP couldn't text for the death of them on their lipstick jog wheel. They didn't need to, they had an assistant with communicator or other big productivity phone to text around organizing bosses day and ordering stuff. All bos needs is a phone with phone book (maintained by PA) and call and answer buttons. You call other people you care to talk to and answer friends and other important peoples call. Would every small town have person for such phone? No, but Nokia had global reach. Globally they would absolutely sell thousands of even the lipstick oddities. Plus those were statement phones by makers. Engineering and design statements. There was a war going on for example for *smallest* phone. Not the today's, who makes biggest blank. Exact opposite. Lead to stuff like the Nokia Zippo model (nick named as such for being about size of zippy lighter, big feat at the time.) and the lipstick model. I was little surprised hey didn't have the taco talk N-gage for this round up.
Reasonable people bought the reasonable Nokia phones. I owned a Nokia N95 8gb... I still consider it the best phone I ever owned. You could slide the screen up for the keypad.. or down a tad for access to media controls. It wasn't super fancy compared to some of the phones Linus showed, but at least it was functional. :)
@@unlokia You are so right and it is strange realising this was ~10 years ago. We weren't in 100 group chats, you just texted your mates to meet up or your mom to tell her you've safely arrived somewhere and that was basically that.
Finnish people are currently and have always been massive fans and consumers of Nokia, seeing how it's a Finnish company. I think Nokia's biggest mistake was not adopting Android earlier, and instead trying to develop their own OS which was worse in almost every conceivable way.
Would have been nice to have someone there to explain the phones after Linus was done guessing and exploring. Seems like there's a lot of cool stuff going on in each phone that's being glossed over.
I remember most of these phones, or ones like them. Honestly, he managed to figure out the most interesting things about them. Although yeah, some of them are interesting enough that they could have had a video all to themselves.
Having had a couple of these, the most interesting thing about these phones, and most old phones in general, was the shape of the phone. The only notable exception would be something like the phone with WinMo on it since there were a ton of apps you could get for it and, like windows desktop, it was very customizable. It's biggest downfall was the power of mobile chips of the time would often mean the display was kind of laggy at times. Other than that, the rest were just standard phone software outside of the playstation phone.
It actually makes me realize how little innovation there has been. Like, sure it's faster, but at least back then companies were willing to take a risk by trying out something new.
@a1r592 uh samsung literally takes risk all the time. It wasn't that long ago that they risked a big phone that was mocked. Today, everyone adopted it. Samsung took a risk with the Z Fold, etc. It payed off. LG relied too much on risks. They no longer make phones.
I loved this episode. Brought back memories of all the Pre-Smartphone Era mobile phones I used to own. I had a variety of Nokias, Sony's and Motorolas growning up. The 2 phones I remember most fondly fom those early days where the Sony Ericsson K800i and the Nokia N95-2, which was the Black version and I think I remeber it being pre-loaded with a full movie on it (I think Spiderman or something like that) 😁
Inflation is a thing. Games are one of the few things that wasn't hit by inflation for many many years. If regular price inflation hit games, they would cost 100 bucks now. That's why they started pushing DLCs, loot crates and so on instead.
The StarTAC was a GodPhone: You could have a thin or "bulge" battery (as seen in video) on the lid, and then one of two sizes of backpack battery on the other side of the phone... this gave you the ability to A/B batteries without dropping a call. I called mine, a blue Brazilian-only color, "The Endless Customer Support Phone" and it was. It helped me sell a company. Still have it, with both batteries!
Exactly. This version that Linus got is hideous but back in 1996 when this came out all the cell phones were fat ugly monsters. Here in Canada they retailed for 1700 when they first came out but they were as you said, God Tier.
The increasing need for conformity is kinda scary. It's supposed to be all about choices but customers don't even have the choice to have a replaceable battery.
This is because as technology progresses, real value lies in the software capacities not the hardware designs. In reality most people care what can be done with it after the first thought than what it looks like
Can confirm the N93 was an amazing camera. First phone camera I owned that allowed me to take a picture of both pages of my school book and be able to read the text on all of it. Previously I had to take a pic of one at a time. Saved me loads of time and effort carrying my text books home.
Yes, and I've been collecting old phones for over a decade now. I have close to 50 phones in my collection, mostly populated by my past phones and from relatives/friends giving theirs to me.
I knew the Xperia Play would show up in this list. Underrated device - well, appropriately rated device, but the IDEA was underrated. Shocked we have not seen more devices in a similar style - not sure if it’s a marketability issue or a patent issue. Would love more Play-style phones.
Pretty sure it's a google are horrible issue. I.e they don't let manufacturers ship with google play services and third party stores at the same time. Sony would have absolutly destroyed mobile gaming if they did this well with a curated store.
I got one on release. When it came it didn't have the latest gen OS and apps stopped working less than 2 years in due to this. They also promised to release a lot of playstation games for it.. which they never did. My biggest problem with it was that it came with large games preinstalled in main memory that you could not move to a SD-card and the remaining memory was not enough to do anything really. Good idea, bad implementation.
i had this back in 2011 and it was a blast especially when you download all the emulators... i remember one night i was trying to get metal gear solid to run on the ps1 emulator with no hope then at about 4am i finally got it to work... you should of seen my face when mgs loaded up
Owned Nokia 6760 and it was the most memorable phone I've ever own: slide up with qwerty, gps, symbian with PyS60 for light scripting. The amount of available customization back then was great (relative to its peers). Only drawback is the screen size.
@@timurklc4431 Nokia Mobile was *huge* during the 90's until early 2010's (it ended when Microsoft bought Nokia's smartphone division). They had garanteed sales, because of the quality and plurality of their devices.
I had the Xperia Play, and loved it, great for emulation as there weren't a ton of games that supported game pads in the play store at the time. They dropped the ball with those specs though. Wish Sony would give it another go. The native game market has way more options than it did back in 2011. Also there was probably something wrong with that hinge, mine never had that much play.
they actually did, kind of, there's an Xperia 1 IV with gaming accessories that makes it a gaming phone (but no slide out controller like the original)
IIRC the Xperia Play had the same specs as the Xperia Arc, their flagship phone of the time, so the specs wouldn't have been lacking vs other devices available then. I remember playing Galaxy on Fire on my Arc, which was a fantastic gaming experience vs what we'd had before.
@@me2olive it was comparable to their own highest end but there was alot of other phones with superior specs, I also owned one and was very much disappointed compared to what it could have been! Was a fun novelty for emulation even tho n64 emulation struggled on it at the time 😢
I remember seeing ps1 games running on it. Didn’t Sony include ps1 games with that phone? As a little kid I was amazed that there was a sort of psp that worked like a phone.
I still can't believe that nobody ever made another phone with a built-in gamepad ever again. Back in the day I thought the Xperia Play was the future of mobile gaming. To this day I *still* don't play phone games cause I can't *stand* to put up with gaming on a touchscreen. All I need is my PC.
The Xperia Play was amazing, but you definitely needed a custom ROM and kernel to get the most out of it, you could OC the CPU to 2Ghz. I developed the Aurora Play ROM 10 years ago for it and still use it sometimes today, runs all PS1 and below consoles but since android 2.3.7 is dead now you need to side load most APKs.
@@litlsnek This is impressive. Honestly the hardware can handle it. The issue tends to be with mass market phones and locked bootloaders, and other anti competitive practices. My first smartphones all ran windows CE, before it become windows mobile. I've been in this game for a while. I honestly hoped android would bring the desktop Linux experience to smartphones - but the hardware became so locked down it's terrible. - written on a 512gb note 9 with 1tb MicroSD that I paid $1500 for on release day that you'll pry from my cold, dead hands. Long live headphone jack! To say nothing of the pulse oximeter which I use frequently.
You feel kinda old watching this video and remembering the majority of those phones 😅 Sidenote about Nokia - they were just so big at the time that they could do all kinds of crazy phones, the lipstick one was from a series ''La Fleur'' if I remember correctly, all of them were kind weird like that, but considered very cool at the time
My friend was so hyped to get the Kyocera duel screen phone, fun fact, it came with 2 batteries because with the duel screens they knew it would burn through them fast.
@@lioneification i had one of their slide out phones in 2013 with the keyboard and i used to love it because you could map keys to the controller ingame. was so fun
I had a Nokia 7600 and absolutely loved it, easily my favourite pre-smartphone phone. It didn’t take me long to get used to the split keyboard and there were some great games on it.
i owned 2 xperia plays between the years 2011 and 2015, The phone was actually amazing at the time, With lots of support on XDA around custom roms it extended the life on this phone quite a bit.
Given all the old tech LTT has gathered over the years, I think it might be a heck of an idea for them to open a tech museum. I mean why not! That way all the tech is preserved and people can go somewhere to learn about it all!
sounds neat, but how's it gonna make any money? they'd need (yet more) physical space, and then have to have people come visit it, etc. nerds would like it, but how many times would they go? and normies just wouldn't care.
@@tzxazrael > How’s it gonna make any money? Already existing museums: “That’s the neat thing, you don’t” Everything you’ve described has been a problem faced by every museum ever. Up to a certain point they’re all kind of solved problems, so long as LTT actually cares to attempt it.
@@bubbledoubletrouble except that LMG is a business, and doesn't get government funding. so whatever they're going to do it needs to at least pay for itself somehow. literally paraphrasing what Linus himself has said in a recent video; if it doesn't make enough money to pay for itself, they can't really do it.
The Xelibri Phones are one of the most fascinating pre-smart phone mobile failures, marketed to be upscale iconic status symbols more about fashion than function. They released the first 4 designs in one wave, and then another 4 designs in the 2nd, and last wave, and just as an example, the Xelibri 6 was a literal compact mirror phone and the Xelibri 3 was a voice control only phone you'd wear around your neck.
The StarTAC was the pinnacle of phones during it's day, maybe not the rainbow one, but the normal ones. If you were a serious user of mobile phone, that's the phone you had.
HTC HD2, that is what you should get, runs Windows Mobile 6.5 Pro (Original OS) but can also be upgraded to Android (which came after the phone did interestingly) and it can even run Windows Phone 7. For the record you can actually triple boot this phone.
I actually thought about buying one when they came out (as my contract was ending ) I was looking to upgrade from my HTC TYTN II, I waitied and got a HTC desire HD a year later.
Few years ago I tried to run Minecraft server on a HTC HD2 running desktop Ubuntu 10.10, it ran noticeably better than on a Nokia N810 (which has the same TI OMAP 2420 SoC as the Nokia N93 in the video). Not that you'd really want to host a Minecraft server on either of them
One of my friends was kinda rich and had this phone . As teenagers we were confused when this mf pulled up on a Sunday and told us his phone is running windows . We were like what ? you got a low powered pc running there ? We thought windows meant computers .
I'll never forget that Kyocera folding phone. My cousin had one and used to marvel at how huge temple run looked on it. When the more recent folding smartphones started to come about, I used to argue with my coworkers that they are NOT the first, but never remembered the name of that phone. Thanks for reminding me.
While I really liked this video that the price was mostly not in dollars made it really hard to tell how close Linus' guesses were. I think it would have been a lot better if you did a currency conversion for the year the phones were released just so it's easier to tell how well he's doing
@@DimT670 Definitely an oversight the video producers should've checked. Not because it's an extremely important detail, but it's basically half the point of the video (to guess the prices), so not doing that well-enough is like losing half the content haha. I could barely guess if any of those were prices at the time, were prices now, or if the prices were SRP, or if they were the prices of the used units they bought, etc.
Those phones were so different and so original! Just think of the lipstick one, imagine how weird would it be to carry it around and how cool it would've been if it had like a roll out keyboard or a laser keyboard! Now every phone has the same features because it is what makes companies sell their product (even if they're pretty much saturating it and it's becoming difficult for them to have the customer find a reason to buy their smartphone with respect to others) but in the old days of experimenting with new stuff it was incredible the number of designs they came up with.
The golden age of phones - predating the iPhone launch - were the best years, literally something for everyone. The Sony Ericsson P910i was my daily driver, I was the unofficial source for Samsung sliders on Howard Forums (D500 mostly), and the sound of closing flip phones still coloured the soundscape of daily life. Good times - but only after 6pm.
I still have my original Nokia N93 that I got when it was new, so I definitely want to give more info on it! It actually has an optical zoom lens, a real lens that moves when you zoom. It had for the time a powerful GPU that was rumored to give you PS1 level graphics, and I was very impressed of some 3d games that it had, they were buttery smooth higher resolution, meanwhile every other phone had pretty slow games that lagged. It also has an external display that you could use to see what music you were playing and control it from the side buttons without opening the phone, making it a very good MP3 player at the time. The screen also rotated horizontal so you could lay it down like a laptop and play games using the arrows as a pretty easy dpad. It had a Symbian OS that didn't really have a lot of software. It was pre android and I always felt the phone was ahead of its time. The audio quality and volume on the speaker was actually pretty good too, since it had a bigger secondary speaker just below the external display. It came with a fancy cloth pouch that I used to carry the phone with me. There was also N93i and N92 models, from which the N92 model was veery interesting, it actually had a tv tuner inside that you could use to watch tv channels live from your phone. It used DVB-H technology, at that time, it was crazy and neverheard really. Even this day when phones are super fast and intelligent, they don't really come with TV tuners inside, so it was something that we didn't see much after that. Anyway, good times, it was nice to see that phone in your video, so thank you for that.
I think Razer has a patent for that. I remember they made a slide-out gamepad case for the iPhone 4. I believe LG tried to make a magnetic gamepad but it never got anywhere.
@@jamesalexander5559 I remeber the Razer one. I doubt that they have any copyright for that or that anyone will have any trouble with Razer because of it. Also, the mobile game scenario in the iPhone 4 era was completely different from today. Back then we barely had mobile games that took advantage of a gamepad like that.
@@HappyZavulon me too! That's why I saying that if we had a phone case with a slide gamepad that would be awesome. I used to play a lot more mobile games back then, because whenever I had to wait for something or felt like it, I just slide the gamepad and I was ready to play and I didn't have to worry about always carrying a Bluetooth controller with me. Like, I finish the hole GTA III on it just playing little by little when I have to wait for something. Now, every time I go to play mobile I have to play casual games because I never have a bluetooth controller around and I simple hate playing more complex games with the touch-screen. A phone case that use this same concept would be the perfect solution and I would buy it without a doubt! You are loosing money, Sony!
@@ZizoMass yeah, instead of the god forsaken abomination that is the new PS5 handheld they should just release an Xperia Play 2 or an addon case pad for one of their Sony flagships.
Who ever wrote that sponsor transition NEEDS A RAISE, deserves one. I’m expecting more like this. Those transition make me wait and see and actually be interested in the product
Missed talking about the Bang & Olufsen Serene, made in conjunction with Samsung. I had one for a while, inherited from my dad who was B&O mad. Clamshell design, it had the screen below the keyboard, the camera was in the clamshell hinge and aimed out sideways, the keypad was CIRCULAR and had a spinning dial in the middle. The thing was pretty mental for 2005.
Man, I wish the LG Chocolate had been included. That is still, to this day, my FAVORITE phone I've EVER had, including the Fold 3 I currently use. The camera was surprisingly good for the era, the screen was not terrible, the slide up for the keypad was still considered cool, it came in a bunch of neat colors (mine was lime green), and that thing was basically a knock off MP3 player. I definitely used it more for that than actually making calls lmao! I will say my generic $150 Motorola slide phone with a full keyboard was much better for once I got into texting. My nerdy college-age self did full text RP on it while at work when nothing was going on. Pretty sure I had an entire single-person campaign through the Vampire Bloodlines game universe on it, never showing up anywhere else. I made a pretty terrible magic vampire.
The quality control on the Sony Ericson xperia play was somethin that needed to be done better, because I had one with me that went through several situations most phones wouldn't survive today. Yet my buddies play wouldn't even open an app without crashing. I can even still use mine as an emulation player, though the screens about had it with scratches.
I owned the Nokia 7380, the updated lipstick phone with a 2MP camera. The rotary dial for typing was really fast & one handed. Perfect for banging out quick text on the go! Back then we were very used to Nokia's T9 predictive text & knew what would come up ahead of time which would further increase the wpm of our texts. Loved that phone, I still regret selling it when I did finally upgrade! My father had the Nokia N93i, the upgrade to the N93, most notably it did have expandable SD card storage, so no limits on recording! It also had 3x optical zoom & in a very stylish packing.. complete with a little screen on the outta case to say who's calling with out needing to open the phone. Do I love my current phone? Yes! But do I wish phones were not always slabs still? Yes! Nokia 6800, 6820, 9000i, e90, N95, 8910 & 7650 are some other very cool, practical & stylish phones!
Exactly! My sister had the black nokia lipstick phone and she could write texts really fast, I used her phone a few times, the navigation with the wheel was easy to pick up and since I had a nokia phone too, I was very used to the same predictive text.
The Nokia 7600 was my first phone and I loved that thing! I learnt to text on it. It came with headphones and had space for 3-5 mp3s. It had a camera and a very locked-down version of internet connectivity. I also based my school project for graphic communication around it. It definitely didn't cost that much when I got it though. Nice to see it again!
I bought a used Xelibri 2 years back, still have it and love the ringtones on it, they were mad dear and designed as fashion pieces. The keys were akward and difficult to use, however, fantastic and love mine.
14:59 thats exactly the reason why nokia started dying even before smartphones. they came out with whackier and whackier designs but nobody actaully wanted them. i know many people that bought one nokia "innovation" and never bought nokia again.
It's so nice to see a video where you could look back at a time when phones were genuinely exciting. Every brand tried to push for unique use cases, form factors, and just had fun with what they made. The wild west of mobile computing. It will just never be like this again.
man i had a 7600 back in the days, absolutely loved the thing. the split keypad was super quick to use with predictive text. had a lot of great app support for the time too, like clients for irc, ssh, msn, html (of course), and a pretty dope version of tetris ah simpler times
Seeing phones like the Motorola Flipout and the Xperia Play got me nostalgic, as I was born in the end of the 90's I grew up dreaming with a lot of phones, unfortunately in Brazil through the 90's and mid 2000's having a phone was out of this world and only for the rich. I remember my mom saved money and got a Nokia 5110, it was fantastic (and a brick). A year after she upgraded to a 3210 and I remember asking her the phone to play Snake. About the Motorola Flipout, I knew friends who had it but the Xperia Play was "the must have phone" for gaming. Damn, thank you Linus for bringing back so much memories...
With their last dying breath Siemens Mobile hoped to reignite the fire for Siemens phones by producing a whole series of mobile phones that were meant to be treated like stylish accessoires. Soon after Siemens "sold" the mobile branch to BenQ and within a few months BenQ closed the whole thing down. Those were the wild days of my mid-20s when I worked for S in the Munich HQ. But I have a lot of fond memories of those crazy last Siemens phones. One even looked like a necklace.
I actually really love the form factor of the square-ish Motorola keyboard phone. They should have included a few honorable mentions for "neat phones". The LG Ally, Motorola Droid 3, Palm Pixie, LG Cosmos, Samsung Star TV, ASUS ZenFone Zoom, and Blackberry 10 would be great phones to feature that are unique but also were genuinely great and innovative phones.
I daily an LG Wing and I love seeing how wacky phones used to be. My phone is wacky by modern standards but back in the pre-rectangle era it would have been completely average.
@@Torabaito Back then, pretty much every cell phone was. And they were priced accordingly in most cases... but yeah, the StarTac was still coveted by anyone who could afford it.
In absolute numbers it probably wasn't nearly as popular as the Razr. But as a proportion of the market, it was probably the most popular phone ever. I think 80% of phones in 1998 were StarTac.
The Kyocera Echo was genuinely cool and for what you paid for it, seems like a steal for anybodies collection, especially since it still works! PS: My suggestion for a second part: Samsung M7600 beat DJ. Loved that thing, in my memory the speakers and headphone jack audio was incredible compared to what was available at the time ^^
I absolutely loved the Xperia play. It was one of my favorite phones. I was really surprised they didn't include the "Palm Pre", that phone was awesome!!!
I had a Palm Pre when it first came out, alongside the Tablet, think it was called the Pad. The Synergy idea where you could find something interesting you wanted to view on a larger display and easily load it from the phone to the tablet was such a great idea. I loved how small the Pre was, but all that excitement ended when everything went fire sale and Palm just poofed in a matter of months. I really wanted Palm to succeed.
I was a bit of a tech nerd, loved my N93, I had an 8110 as well although mine didn't have a sprung cover like the phones in the film while my mates one did.
Remember that Ericsson phone that had a motorized flip mechanism? I remember sitting at a pub and my friend who had just bought one just kept flipping it open, closed, open, closed over and over again and everyone stared... Don't know how long it lasted but he was the kind of guy who swapped phones several times a year. Another friend was just so weird. He could just stand up and throw his phone into the floor or ground as hard as he could. Pick up the debris and say that it was time to get a new phone. Never understood why. Years later I asked and he had no idea of why he had thought that was a good idea. In two years he offed at least ten phones that way... Sorry for drifting so far off topic.
None of the 8110's did, they stole the idea/mechanism from the Nokia 7110 which was activated by a little silver button on the back. I worked in a phone shop at the time and had loads of customers that wanted an 8110, right up until they found out that the matrix pop out bit was movie magic. Edit: Just remembered, the coolest of the Nokia sliding phones was the 8910 - I wanted one of them so much!
You left out two of my favourite phones (loved both of these):. 1. Nokia Ngage. I loved this phone. It even had an some great exclusives: "The Elder Scrolls Travels: Shadowkey", "Glimmerati" and "Pathway to glory". 2. LG FLex. It was a flexible phone with a self-healing cover. Cmon.
I remember browsing the cingular (now AT&T) phone offerings in like 2004-2005 when I was about to get my first cell phone. I feel like there were hundreds and hundreds of options back then. My first phone was an LG C1300 from 2004.
I had a Nokia 7600. It was weird AF, but... Remember that T9 was the main thing at the time: with a little practice you could text faster and more reliably/accurately than any standard T9 set up
I had a few weird ones haha! Have to say my Gen 1 N-Gage was and is by far my all time favorite. All the looks when I had to pick up a phone call with my taco phone are imprinted forever in my brain. Still have 2 and they still work! Was also great tinkering with it and playing game boy emulators with it :D
both of the N-Gage gen1s I owned scratched the sim cards so badly they stopped working. Eventually got the phone store to trade it for a P910. which I thoroughly enjoyed, despite the lack of games.
I can’t believe you skipped over the Nokia 3300 a.k.a. the taco phone. I had one of these back in the day. And it was absolutely amazing. Plus it looked ridiculous. If we’re not considering modern-day, smart phones, I think this is one of the best phones ever made! I’m probably going to get disagreed with a lot on that one. But still my other personal favorite was a Sony Ericsson T637. It was just a basic phone, with calling, and texting, but the size. It would easily get lost in the pocket, but in a good way.
I actually had that stupid expensive Nokia 7600 and once I got used to Typing Texts with it, the Keypad in both sides was amazing because your Fingers didn't had to move so much. 😂 Loved it!
I found once I got used to it I could type messages really fast compared to other 'normal' keypad phones I passed the phone onto my brother when I upgraded....It took him only a few days to realise what I'd been raving about lol
Unless it was a Nokia, which was why they where the go to for buisness people like my parents, uncle's and grandparents, they always could use 2 types of charger, either the barrel or the proprietary one with the two slot clips on either side, and they normaly used the same battery.
Hey now, micro SD card slots aren't that uncommon. My 5G Xiaomi has one. FWIW, Nokia used basically two charging plugs so you were *very* likely to have a pile of compatible chargers. I still have a couple. NO, DAB wasn't Digital Audio Broadcasting over IP. It was just Digital Audio Broadcasting.
@@AndrewPena89 I had mine for years until losing it. It never quit working, and neither did the ports or buttons. For such a weird design, was one of the toughest phones out there hahaha
I remember a few of these being a Nokia engineer in the UK. A recent mechanical and cool phone to check (and are cheap now) is the LG Wing that may get linus attention once he realises it's abilities 😎
i love the LG Wing, i want one as an emulation device but i cant justify spending 3-400 dollars on something which probably wont work how i want to with the controller on the bottom screen and the game on the top
Adding inflation from mid 2000's, actually most of the phones compare to a $500 - $700 phone today and buying a modern phone is way more useful than these were for their price.
My first cellphone (a hand me down from my dad) was the successor to the matrix phone (the Nokia 7110). It’s the same basic design but with a scroll wheel. That thing made 7th grade me feel so cool.
That was my first phone too :) I'd just started at university, and when I got it the tech asked me to pick which mobile number I wanted off his screen. Yes kids, back in the day, you got to pick your own mobile number. It was also the first phone with built in WAP internet, which was pretty unusable. My favourite part was ending calls by sliding the mouthpiece back in, just a neat little feature.
My father used to own a StarTac, the standard black model though. He used it for many years until they upgraded the phone network and it wasn't compatible with the new antennas. That phone is immortal...straight up indestructible. I swear at some point it even got splashed by sea water and it was still working fine. I bet it still works to this day.
I was really hoping to see the Samsung Juke on this episode, the 7820 definitely filled that spot that was missing though, I don't know what it is about tall phones that I like but they're sick!
that feeling when since you are just a school kid by the time these phones released, the only phone you had used that was mentioned in this video... is the fisher price one 18:05 LOL
I HAD THE KYOCERA ECHO ❤ If they sold one with newer specs I would buy another one. Queueing UA-cam videos on one screen while watching on the other screen was a game changer for my media consumption.
Having owned the Xperia play personally the best part of it is that it was not only moddable but highly overclockable (mine ran stable at 1.8-2 GHz) and there is an app you can download for PC that converts PS1 games to run on the inbuilt Sony emulator. All controls worked perfectly.
And to think, the PSP runs at 222/333mhz depending on the game.
@@blunderingfool slightly different running native code on the PSP vs emulating it but I can see your point. This was a very capable phone once overclocked but at the time it came out most flagship androids where moving to dual cores so it quickly got outclassed.
In saying that PS1 games smoothly emulated on it even at its stock clocks which was all the more impressive (and kept battery life reasonable)
@@marcbusby3625 I was more slagging off my Radiant Red PSP 3000. Don't worry. ;P
The PS1 support was pretty cool on this device. These days most phones can run PS1 via emulation, but not back then. My biggest issue with it was the lack of at least one proper analog stick (instead of those touch fields). Also, I had a PSP and it got the job done.
Damn thats so cool. I remember how much i wanted this phone when it released, but I could not afford it
I had one of those Sony Play phones, it was amazing! Linus missed the fact that it came with a custom version of Minecraft which fully worked with the buttons and it also had a store for other popular games which had the controls integrated, it was great!
yours had Minecraft pre-installed? I had Crash Bandicoot but no Minecraft. Hmm I wonder if it was a regional thing
IIRC (it was freaking ages ago so I may be remembering wrong) but Minecraft Pocket Edition came out first on the Xperia Play and only came to other devices later. So it was genuinely the first device to get what would eventually become Bedrock Edition.
It was my first smartphone and I absolutely loved it!
I had the Play when it first came out back when I was a big Sony guy. It was a really good phone especially for emulation. I would play PS1 and GB games on it. The only thing that wasn't so great was the "analog sticks". Really, at around that same time, the Vita came out (which I still have in my possession) and seriously didn't understand why they couldn't have built that OS into the phone. Sure, it would have been missing like, all the apps, but a Vita that you had with you at all times seemed like such a real thing that should have happened.
Fun fact: Minecraft pocket edition was actually exclusive to this phone for a while
As someone who is somewhat of a PSP fanatic, the Xperia Play is such a cool device. I remember being super jealous of a classmate who used to have one.
Also very interesting how much they borrowed from the PSP Go for the physical design
I briefly had an Xperia play but found it too Chunky to carry everyday as a phone in my pocket also was quite a weight when moving around with it in pocket all the time ended up selling it and got the much thinner Samsung galaxy s2 😉
I remember wanting one so bad, even though I was a nintendo handheld fanboy as a tween.
@@Anon-21j exactly the same for me, i was so jealous of my classmate back in school. but then i never had a psp either, was stuck on my gameboy advance
I worked at a mobile phone retailer for 15 years starting in the early 2000s, I not only remember but used, sold and set up every single one of these phones over the years... aah, memories.
@@chutcentral lmb
@@chutcentral Jealousy is an ugly colour my friend.
My brother had the Playstation phone and it hard to use now
@@AvgBlue It wasn't much easier when it was new 😂
a few of these were before my time or outside of my offerings but i very much sold the echo and play station phone at RadioShack back in the day
The funky Nokia shapes absolutely did sell massively. Most people had standard brick phones but there were bragging rights with having one of the weird or high end ones. Phones didn't do much and designs were so varied that a weird keypad wasn't really a problem
Yeah. It was a fashion accessory. Not like it was meant for every day user. Those leafs and lipstick phones were something one would see with fashion models and rich people who wanted something fashionable. Probably not even their only phone. Plus the classic: if you are rich enough, you don't need a complex phone with lot of features to get stuff done. That is what the always hanging around personal assistant is for. The VIP couldn't text for the death of them on their lipstick jog wheel. They didn't need to, they had an assistant with communicator or other big productivity phone to text around organizing bosses day and ordering stuff.
All bos needs is a phone with phone book (maintained by PA) and call and answer buttons. You call other people you care to talk to and answer friends and other important peoples call.
Would every small town have person for such phone? No, but Nokia had global reach. Globally they would absolutely sell thousands of even the lipstick oddities.
Plus those were statement phones by makers. Engineering and design statements. There was a war going on for example for *smallest* phone. Not the today's, who makes biggest blank. Exact opposite. Lead to stuff like the Nokia Zippo model (nick named as such for being about size of zippy lighter, big feat at the time.) and the lipstick model.
I was little surprised hey didn't have the taco talk N-gage for this round up.
Reasonable people bought the reasonable Nokia phones.
I owned a Nokia N95 8gb... I still consider it the best phone I ever owned.
You could slide the screen up for the keypad.. or down a tad for access to media controls. It wasn't super fancy compared to some of the phones Linus showed, but at least it was functional. :)
@@aritakalo8011 A lot of people didn't text at all so it didn't matter.
@@unlokia You are so right and it is strange realising this was ~10 years ago. We weren't in 100 group chats, you just texted your mates to meet up or your mom to tell her you've safely arrived somewhere and that was basically that.
Finnish people are currently and have always been massive fans and consumers of Nokia, seeing how it's a Finnish company. I think Nokia's biggest mistake was not adopting Android earlier, and instead trying to develop their own OS which was worse in almost every conceivable way.
I feel deceived, that isn't Linus' hand in the thumbnail photo.
Would have been nice to have someone there to explain the phones after Linus was done guessing and exploring. Seems like there's a lot of cool stuff going on in each phone that's being glossed over.
Watch Mr. Mobile's 'When Phones Were Fun' series. He does cover most of the phones that they had here, and goes in deep for a few phones.
Get dankpods in for a collab 🤩
@@lukasnielsen1034 He would just tell you about how much of a smelly dingusnug the phones are
I remember most of these phones, or ones like them. Honestly, he managed to figure out the most interesting things about them. Although yeah, some of them are interesting enough that they could have had a video all to themselves.
Having had a couple of these, the most interesting thing about these phones, and most old phones in general, was the shape of the phone. The only notable exception would be something like the phone with WinMo on it since there were a ton of apps you could get for it and, like windows desktop, it was very customizable. It's biggest downfall was the power of mobile chips of the time would often mean the display was kind of laggy at times.
Other than that, the rest were just standard phone software outside of the playstation phone.
It's crazy to realize how far tech has come when you do videos like these
It actually makes me realize how little innovation there has been. Like, sure it's faster, but at least back then companies were willing to take a risk by trying out something new.
Its really really impressive tbh
@a1r592 uh samsung literally takes risk all the time. It wasn't that long ago that they risked a big phone that was mocked. Today, everyone adopted it.
Samsung took a risk with the Z Fold, etc. It payed off.
LG relied too much on risks. They no longer make phones.
Especially when you now have phones like Fold which can work as phone, tablet and even mini laptop. Basically a pocket PC.
@@a1r592 agree all the innovation happened over a decade ago, now its just stuffing more Ghz and memory in the same phone.
I loved this episode. Brought back memories of all the Pre-Smartphone Era mobile phones I used to own. I had a variety of Nokias, Sony's and Motorolas growning up. The 2 phones I remember most fondly fom those early days where the Sony Ericsson K800i and the Nokia N95-2, which was the Black version and I think I remeber it being pre-loaded with a full movie on it (I think Spiderman or something like that) 😁
my first nokia was the very first MP3 phone they released that version later on got changed to become the nokia n gage! the nokia 3300
Those two were fantastic phones.
I really do miss creative design and taking risks with phones, they didn't always work out but it was wonderful when they did.
Linus constantly discovering how cheap phones used to be is so funny.
I think he means it in the other way... He factors in inflation meaning that most of those phones were expensive af
They weren't cheap at that time, especially for the value and benefits.
Think about inflation.
@@littlebuchif the prices were corrected they would be even cheaper
@@Henrix1998 229$ in 2003 is 384.53$ today, so its more expensive
Inflation is a thing. Games are one of the few things that wasn't hit by inflation for many many years. If regular price inflation hit games, they would cost 100 bucks now. That's why they started pushing DLCs, loot crates and so on instead.
"It's android so it's not that old"
Meanwhile, android is approaching 15 years since v1.0
The StarTAC was a GodPhone: You could have a thin or "bulge" battery (as seen in video) on the lid, and then one of two sizes of backpack battery on the other side of the phone... this gave you the ability to A/B batteries without dropping a call. I called mine, a blue Brazilian-only color, "The Endless Customer Support Phone" and it was. It helped me sell a company. Still have it, with both batteries!
I think the Startac was the phone that i kept for the longest time. Like from 1998 to 2003
Exactly. This version that Linus got is hideous but back in 1996 when this came out all the cell phones were fat ugly monsters. Here in Canada they retailed for 1700 when they first came out but they were as you said, God Tier.
I still have my Startac too, still turns on.
That was THE phone for a while there
@@danielpope6498 Annnnnd, it was just a PHONE
I loved mine too. That thing could also take a beating!
Pretty cool to see how different the designs get compared to today's phones.
Do you want camera lenses in compact rectangle or long row? Notch yes/no. That's how it is today and it's pretty sad.
The increasing need for conformity is kinda scary. It's supposed to be all about choices but customers don't even have the choice to have a replaceable battery.
This is because as technology progresses, real value lies in the software capacities not the hardware designs. In reality most people care what can be done with it after the first thought than what it looks like
Can confirm the N93 was an amazing camera. First phone camera I owned that allowed me to take a picture of both pages of my school book and be able to read the text on all of it. Previously I had to take a pic of one at a time. Saved me loads of time and effort carrying my text books home.
@@markp8295 looks so cool! I had an N95 a little while later and while it didn’t look as fun, it took some great pictures for the time
Retro/old phones are fun to collect and brings back nostalgia. Cool video Linus.
I miss my Motorola Boulder. You could throw that thing off of a mountain and climb down to make a call.
Yes, and I've been collecting old phones for over a decade now. I have close to 50 phones in my collection, mostly populated by my past phones and from relatives/friends giving theirs to me.
@@DacLMKthat's really cool ngl would love to see your collection
I knew the Xperia Play would show up in this list. Underrated device - well, appropriately rated device, but the IDEA was underrated. Shocked we have not seen more devices in a similar style - not sure if it’s a marketability issue or a patent issue. Would love more Play-style phones.
Pretty sure it's a google are horrible issue. I.e they don't let manufacturers ship with google play services and third party stores at the same time. Sony would have absolutly destroyed mobile gaming if they did this well with a curated store.
I got one on release. When it came it didn't have the latest gen OS and apps stopped working less than 2 years in due to this. They also promised to release a lot of playstation games for it.. which they never did. My biggest problem with it was that it came with large games preinstalled in main memory that you could not move to a SD-card and the remaining memory was not enough to do anything really. Good idea, bad implementation.
I wanted it because they had minecraft on it before the original mobile version came out lol.
i had this back in 2011 and it was a blast especially when you download all the emulators... i remember one night i was trying to get metal gear solid to run on the ps1 emulator with no hope then at about 4am i finally got it to work... you should of seen my face when mgs loaded up
It worked reallllly well for emulators back then
You didn’t even mention that the lobster phone has a credit card reader built into it
Time when Nokia made cool and fun mobile phones. Just looking at the in displays or on advertisements was a moment of wonder.
Owned Nokia 6760 and it was the most memorable phone I've ever own: slide up with qwerty, gps, symbian with PyS60 for light scripting. The amount of available customization back then was great (relative to its peers). Only drawback is the screen size.
They didnt have as much data as before, so they just tried everything that could have made money. Now the companies play on guaranteed sales.
@@timurklc4431 Nokia Mobile was *huge* during the 90's until early 2010's (it ended when Microsoft bought Nokia's smartphone division). They had garanteed sales, because of the quality and plurality of their devices.
More like so incredibly stupid that they were alluring, even if once you got one you wanted to smash it into wall due to them being so ass to use.
Well from those videos we can understand how they came to bankrupcy. Literally 1 out of 2 phones they made was completely unusable
I had the Xperia Play, and loved it, great for emulation as there weren't a ton of games that supported game pads in the play store at the time. They dropped the ball with those specs though. Wish Sony would give it another go. The native game market has way more options than it did back in 2011. Also there was probably something wrong with that hinge, mine never had that much play.
they actually did, kind of, there's an Xperia 1 IV with gaming accessories that makes it a gaming phone (but no slide out controller like the original)
IIRC the Xperia Play had the same specs as the Xperia Arc, their flagship phone of the time, so the specs wouldn't have been lacking vs other devices available then. I remember playing Galaxy on Fire on my Arc, which was a fantastic gaming experience vs what we'd had before.
@@me2olive it was comparable to their own highest end but there was alot of other phones with superior specs, I also owned one and was very much disappointed compared to what it could have been! Was a fun novelty for emulation even tho n64 emulation struggled on it at the time 😢
I remember seeing ps1 games running on it. Didn’t Sony include ps1 games with that phone? As a little kid I was amazed that there was a sort of psp that worked like a phone.
I still can't believe that nobody ever made another phone with a built-in gamepad ever again. Back in the day I thought the Xperia Play was the future of mobile gaming. To this day I *still* don't play phone games cause I can't *stand* to put up with gaming on a touchscreen. All I need is my PC.
13:32 I love the fact that the editor decided to do Linus dirty here 😂
The Xperia Play was amazing, but you definitely needed a custom ROM and kernel to get the most out of it, you could OC the CPU to 2Ghz. I developed the Aurora Play ROM 10 years ago for it and still use it sometimes today, runs all PS1 and below consoles but since android 2.3.7 is dead now you need to side load most APKs.
Wow cool to hear that. 😮
As an emulation device it was pretty cool indeed, software restrictions killed it :c
This is absolutely amazing! Wish there was a way to keep legacy tech like this more current.
@@PsRohrbaugh back when oreo was still new someone got a nexus 4 to run oreo
@@litlsnek This is impressive. Honestly the hardware can handle it. The issue tends to be with mass market phones and locked bootloaders, and other anti competitive practices. My first smartphones all ran windows CE, before it become windows mobile. I've been in this game for a while.
I honestly hoped android would bring the desktop Linux experience to smartphones - but the hardware became so locked down it's terrible.
- written on a 512gb note 9 with 1tb MicroSD that I paid $1500 for on release day that you'll pry from my cold, dead hands. Long live headphone jack! To say nothing of the pulse oximeter which I use frequently.
You feel kinda old watching this video and remembering the majority of those phones 😅 Sidenote about Nokia - they were just so big at the time that they could do all kinds of crazy phones, the lipstick one was from a series ''La Fleur'' if I remember correctly, all of them were kind weird like that, but considered very cool at the time
mid 2000s was about making phones tiny as fuck so prob didn't help to make a chonky monster.
@@nesamdoomyeah, remind me of the butterfly😅
13:55 the “lmao” as a subtitle for Plouffe’s hysterical laughing absolutely sent me
My friend was so hyped to get the Kyocera duel screen phone, fun fact, it came with 2 batteries because with the duel screens they knew it would burn through them fast.
I remember loving Kyocera. I feel like they always had the coolest phones and features in the day
@@lioneification i had one of their slide out phones in 2013 with the keyboard and i used to love it because you could map keys to the controller ingame. was so fun
Unexpected blackface at 6:15
I noticed that too. I don't know how anyone ever thought that was a good idea
Its insane how no one is talking about it
That had me like 😧
They must’ve re-uploaded because it’s gone now 6:14
@@santiagoaguilar8429 how did that make it through quality control the first time around
I had a Nokia 7600 and absolutely loved it, easily my favourite pre-smartphone phone.
It didn’t take me long to get used to the split keyboard and there were some great games on it.
Never felt as old as I did today remembering how badly i wanted some of these phones when they came out 😂
I was hugely surprised how cheap the Matrix phone was, but in hindsight
it makes sense
i owned 2 xperia plays between the years 2011 and 2015, The phone was actually amazing at the time, With lots of support on XDA around custom roms it extended the life on this phone quite a bit.
Was hoping to see a Helio Ocean
Given all the old tech LTT has gathered over the years, I think it might be a heck of an idea for them to open a tech museum. I mean why not! That way all the tech is preserved and people can go somewhere to learn about it all!
sounds neat, but how's it gonna make any money? they'd need (yet more) physical space, and then have to have people come visit it, etc. nerds would like it, but how many times would they go? and normies just wouldn't care.
@@tzxazrael > How’s it gonna make any money?
Already existing museums: “That’s the neat thing, you don’t”
Everything you’ve described has been a problem faced by every museum ever. Up to a certain point they’re all kind of solved problems, so long as LTT actually cares to attempt it.
@@bubbledoubletrouble except that LMG is a business, and doesn't get government funding. so whatever they're going to do it needs to at least pay for itself somehow. literally paraphrasing what Linus himself has said in a recent video; if it doesn't make enough money to pay for itself, they can't really do it.
$20 entery fees
@@desiredditor won't even put a dent in what it would cost to buy the space.
13:33 the best cut in the history of LTT
The Xelibri Phones are one of the most fascinating pre-smart phone mobile failures, marketed to be upscale iconic status symbols more about fashion than function. They released the first 4 designs in one wave, and then another 4 designs in the 2nd, and last wave, and just as an example, the Xelibri 6 was a literal compact mirror phone and the Xelibri 3 was a voice control only phone you'd wear around your neck.
The StarTAC was the pinnacle of phones during it's day, maybe not the rainbow one, but the normal ones. If you were a serious user of mobile phone, that's the phone you had.
HTC HD2, that is what you should get, runs Windows Mobile 6.5 Pro (Original OS) but can also be upgraded to Android (which came after the phone did interestingly) and it can even run Windows Phone 7. For the record you can actually triple boot this phone.
triple boot on a phone. mind=blown. people barely did dual boot on PC/laptop ten years ago.
I actually thought about buying one when they came out (as my contract was ending ) I was looking to upgrade from my HTC TYTN II, I waitied and got a HTC desire HD a year later.
Few years ago I tried to run Minecraft server on a HTC HD2 running desktop Ubuntu 10.10, it ran noticeably better than on a Nokia N810 (which has the same TI OMAP 2420 SoC as the Nokia N93 in the video). Not that you'd really want to host a Minecraft server on either of them
One of my friends was kinda rich and had this phone .
As teenagers we were confused when this mf pulled up on a Sunday and told us his phone is running windows .
We were like what ?
you got a low powered pc running there ?
We thought windows meant computers .
I had a HTC HD Mini and it was the worst phone I ever had,
I'll never forget that Kyocera folding phone. My cousin had one and used to marvel at how huge temple run looked on it. When the more recent folding smartphones started to come about, I used to argue with my coworkers that they are NOT the first, but never remembered the name of that phone. Thanks for reminding me.
While I really liked this video that the price was mostly not in dollars made it really hard to tell how close Linus' guesses were. I think it would have been a lot better if you did a currency conversion for the year the phones were released just so it's easier to tell how well he's doing
completely agree, seems like such a basic oversight
Especially since he’s guessing in dollars when like 80% or the prices are in Euros.
Plus it was kinda never made clear whether he was guessing with or without inflation. Is it today's dollars or whaf
@@DimT670 yes exactly, what it's worth now or when it came out.
@@DimT670 Definitely an oversight the video producers should've checked. Not because it's an extremely important detail, but it's basically half the point of the video (to guess the prices), so not doing that well-enough is like losing half the content haha. I could barely guess if any of those were prices at the time, were prices now, or if the prices were SRP, or if they were the prices of the used units they bought, etc.
when you happen to have notifications off but it was posted 30 seconds ago
For me 3 mins
plez change it to when you happen to have notifications on (if that’s what you mean cause it hurt my pea brain reading this a bit)
I'm just getting mine now, 12 minutes past posting. Thanks UA-cam Severs 🤡
@@poluefemussame 😂
For me 39 seconds
Those phones were so different and so original! Just think of the lipstick one, imagine how weird would it be to carry it around and how cool it would've been if it had like a roll out keyboard or a laser keyboard! Now every phone has the same features because it is what makes companies sell their product (even if they're pretty much saturating it and it's becoming difficult for them to have the customer find a reason to buy their smartphone with respect to others) but in the old days of experimenting with new stuff it was incredible the number of designs they came up with.
The golden age of phones - predating the iPhone launch - were the best years, literally something for everyone. The Sony Ericsson P910i was my daily driver, I was the unofficial source for Samsung sliders on Howard Forums (D500 mostly), and the sound of closing flip phones still coloured the soundscape of daily life. Good times - but only after 6pm.
The M600i and then the P1i were the best smartphones ever made
To this day, my favorite phone was my LG Rumor 2. If I could get a smartphone version I would be the happiest boy
i had the w910i walkman phone. still one of the best built in audio players on a phone
Oh God. I forgot about the weird phone plans that were time specific. Unlimited calls after 6pm. Unlimited texts on weekends.
Howard Forums. Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time.
7:49 The larger port is most probably Nokia‘s proprietary headphone-microphone combo jack.
I had a similar port on my Nokia 6020.
Also used as data cable when connected to PC
It really is mind blowing how far phones have come in just a couple of years.
I still have my original Nokia N93 that I got when it was new, so I definitely want to give more info on it! It actually has an optical zoom lens, a real lens that moves when you zoom. It had for the time a powerful GPU that was rumored to give you PS1 level graphics, and I was very impressed of some 3d games that it had, they were buttery smooth higher resolution, meanwhile every other phone had pretty slow games that lagged. It also has an external display that you could use to see what music you were playing and control it from the side buttons without opening the phone, making it a very good MP3 player at the time. The screen also rotated horizontal so you could lay it down like a laptop and play games using the arrows as a pretty easy dpad. It had a Symbian OS that didn't really have a lot of software. It was pre android and I always felt the phone was ahead of its time. The audio quality and volume on the speaker was actually pretty good too, since it had a bigger secondary speaker just below the external display. It came with a fancy cloth pouch that I used to carry the phone with me. There was also N93i and N92 models, from which the N92 model was veery interesting, it actually had a tv tuner inside that you could use to watch tv channels live from your phone. It used DVB-H technology, at that time, it was crazy and neverheard really. Even this day when phones are super fast and intelligent, they don't really come with TV tuners inside, so it was something that we didn't see much after that. Anyway, good times, it was nice to see that phone in your video, so thank you for that.
I really wanted the N93. But it never came to Canada
I remember the Nokia N93. I coveted it, but I ended up with Sony Ericsson phones by then.
Imagine if Sony make a case that slides a gamepad as the old Xperia Play. That would be a smashing hit.
I think Razer has a patent for that. I remember they made a slide-out gamepad case for the iPhone 4. I believe LG tried to make a magnetic gamepad but it never got anywhere.
@@jamesalexander5559 I remeber the Razer one. I doubt that they have any copyright for that or that anyone will have any trouble with Razer because of it. Also, the mobile game scenario in the iPhone 4 era was completely different from today. Back then we barely had mobile games that took advantage of a gamepad like that.
I had an Xperia Play and the thing was freaking awesome for emulators back then.
I played so many SNES and PS1 games on it haha
@@HappyZavulon me too! That's why I saying that if we had a phone case with a slide gamepad that would be awesome. I used to play a lot more mobile games back then, because whenever I had to wait for something or felt like it, I just slide the gamepad and I was ready to play and I didn't have to worry about always carrying a Bluetooth controller with me. Like, I finish the hole GTA III on it just playing little by little when I have to wait for something.
Now, every time I go to play mobile I have to play casual games because I never have a bluetooth controller around and I simple hate playing more complex games with the touch-screen.
A phone case that use this same concept would be the perfect solution and I would buy it without a doubt! You are loosing money, Sony!
@@ZizoMass yeah, instead of the god forsaken abomination that is the new PS5 handheld they should just release an Xperia Play 2 or an addon case pad for one of their Sony flagships.
Who ever wrote that sponsor transition NEEDS A RAISE, deserves one. I’m expecting more like this. Those transition make me wait and see and actually be interested in the product
Missed talking about the Bang & Olufsen Serene, made in conjunction with Samsung. I had one for a while, inherited from my dad who was B&O mad. Clamshell design, it had the screen below the keyboard, the camera was in the clamshell hinge and aimed out sideways, the keypad was CIRCULAR and had a spinning dial in the middle. The thing was pretty mental for 2005.
1000 EUROS!
@@pmp1337 in 2005 too, accounting for inflation that's €1500 now. That was silly money!
Man, I wish the LG Chocolate had been included. That is still, to this day, my FAVORITE phone I've EVER had, including the Fold 3 I currently use. The camera was surprisingly good for the era, the screen was not terrible, the slide up for the keypad was still considered cool, it came in a bunch of neat colors (mine was lime green), and that thing was basically a knock off MP3 player. I definitely used it more for that than actually making calls lmao!
I will say my generic $150 Motorola slide phone with a full keyboard was much better for once I got into texting. My nerdy college-age self did full text RP on it while at work when nothing was going on. Pretty sure I had an entire single-person campaign through the Vampire Bloodlines game universe on it, never showing up anywhere else. I made a pretty terrible magic vampire.
The quality control on the Sony Ericson xperia play was somethin that needed to be done better, because I had one with me that went through several situations most phones wouldn't survive today. Yet my buddies play wouldn't even open an app without crashing. I can even still use mine as an emulation player, though the screens about had it with scratches.
I owned the Nokia 7380, the updated lipstick phone with a 2MP camera. The rotary dial for typing was really fast & one handed. Perfect for banging out quick text on the go!
Back then we were very used to Nokia's T9 predictive text & knew what would come up ahead of time which would further increase the wpm of our texts. Loved that phone, I still regret selling it when I did finally upgrade!
My father had the Nokia N93i, the upgrade to the N93, most notably it did have expandable SD card storage, so no limits on recording! It also had 3x optical zoom & in a very stylish packing.. complete with a little screen on the outta case to say who's calling with out needing to open the phone.
Do I love my current phone? Yes!
But do I wish phones were not always slabs still? Yes!
Nokia 6800, 6820, 9000i, e90, N95, 8910 & 7650 are some other very cool, practical & stylish phones!
Exactly! My sister had the black nokia lipstick phone and she could write texts really fast, I used her phone a few times, the navigation with the wheel was easy to pick up and since I had a nokia phone too, I was very used to the same predictive text.
The Nokia 7600 was my first phone and I loved that thing! I learnt to text on it. It came with headphones and had space for 3-5 mp3s. It had a camera and a very locked-down version of internet connectivity. I also based my school project for graphic communication around it. It definitely didn't cost that much when I got it though. Nice to see it again!
That just reminded me of how scared I used to be, to accidentally open the Internet and burn through the entire prepay card money in half a minute.
I think they adjusted for inflation. I don't remember those old phones costing that much
@@Demonslayer20111 They were probably using the launch RRP. A few months down the line or on contract through a carrier it would be much cheaper.
That lipstick phone looks like they took the legendary Minox “spy cameras” and tried to make some modern gadget from it
4:52 i was expecting another sponsor segment tbh...
I bought a used Xelibri 2 years back, still have it and love the ringtones on it, they were mad dear and designed as fashion pieces. The keys were akward and difficult to use, however, fantastic and love mine.
14:59 thats exactly the reason why nokia started dying even before smartphones. they came out with whackier and whackier designs but nobody actaully wanted them. i know many people that bought one nokia "innovation" and never bought nokia again.
It's so nice to see a video where you could look back at a time when phones were genuinely exciting. Every brand tried to push for unique use cases, form factors, and just had fun with what they made. The wild west of mobile computing. It will just never be like this again.
You’d enjoy @Mr Mobile’s “When Phones Were Fun” series
man i had a 7600 back in the days, absolutely loved the thing. the split keypad was super quick to use with predictive text. had a lot of great app support for the time too, like clients for irc, ssh, msn, html (of course), and a pretty dope version of tetris
ah simpler times
A client.... For HTML?
Seeing phones like the Motorola Flipout and the Xperia Play got me nostalgic, as I was born in the end of the 90's I grew up dreaming with a lot of phones, unfortunately in Brazil through the 90's and mid 2000's having a phone was out of this world and only for the rich. I remember my mom saved money and got a Nokia 5110, it was fantastic (and a brick). A year after she upgraded to a 3210 and I remember asking her the phone to play Snake. About the Motorola Flipout, I knew friends who had it but the Xperia Play was "the must have phone" for gaming. Damn, thank you Linus for bringing back so much memories...
This was super fun going back in time with you and guessing the year and price along with you! 😂
Sometimes I wish they would make phones like this today. Unfortunately there wouldn't be a big enough market for them. :(
With their last dying breath Siemens Mobile hoped to reignite the fire for Siemens phones by producing a whole series of mobile phones that were meant to be treated like stylish accessoires. Soon after Siemens "sold" the mobile branch to BenQ and within a few months BenQ closed the whole thing down. Those were the wild days of my mid-20s when I worked for S in the Munich HQ. But I have a lot of fond memories of those crazy last Siemens phones. One even looked like a necklace.
I actually really love the form factor of the square-ish Motorola keyboard phone. They should have included a few honorable mentions for "neat phones". The LG Ally, Motorola Droid 3, Palm Pixie, LG Cosmos, Samsung Star TV, ASUS ZenFone Zoom, and Blackberry 10 would be great phones to feature that are unique but also were genuinely great and innovative phones.
shoutout to the one other lg ally user i loved my ally
The BlackBerry Passport was brilliant. Once Apple had taken over the market BlackBerry should've gone all in on weirdness.
I daily an LG Wing and I love seeing how wacky phones used to be. My phone is wacky by modern standards but back in the pre-rectangle era it would have been completely average.
These are actually really cool, I wish they still made weird phones like this
that nobody buys ?
there was the lg wing
@@maevwat ngl, I liked the idea of the wing.
They're cool but let's be honest no one would buy them. Maybe as a collection piece.
f(x)tec actually makes phones with the integrated keyboard. I recommend checking them out
For some reason I had it in my mind that the StarTac line was as popular as the Razr was after it, surprised Linus didn't immediately recognize it
I think the problem was that the StarTac was very focused at business professionals
@@Torabaito Back then, pretty much every cell phone was. And they were priced accordingly in most cases... but yeah, the StarTac was still coveted by anyone who could afford it.
In absolute numbers it probably wasn't nearly as popular as the Razr. But as a proportion of the market, it was probably the most popular phone ever. I think 80% of phones in 1998 were StarTac.
I loved my Xperia Play. Used it a lot for roms! It was the Steam Deck of the 2010s!
Now I'm become Linus, the destroyer of phones
The Kyocera Echo was genuinely cool and for what you paid for it, seems like a steal for anybodies collection, especially since it still works!
PS: My suggestion for a second part: Samsung M7600 beat DJ. Loved that thing, in my memory the speakers and headphone jack audio was incredible compared to what was available at the time ^^
For someone who became aware of technology and phones around 2012, im surprised my guesses were way better than old man linus
I absolutely loved the Xperia play. It was one of my favorite phones. I was really surprised they didn't include the "Palm Pre", that phone was awesome!!!
I had a Palm Pre when it first came out, alongside the Tablet, think it was called the Pad. The Synergy idea where you could find something interesting you wanted to view on a larger display and easily load it from the phone to the tablet was such a great idea. I loved how small the Pre was, but all that excitement ended when everything went fire sale and Palm just poofed in a matter of months. I really wanted Palm to succeed.
@@TamNgo84 Absolutely!! Me too
Palm pre was amazing, especially overclocked!
Thank you for the trip down the memory lane. I remember looking at most of these as a kid and dreaming I'll buy at least one of them one day.
I had a Nokia N93i the N93's successor for years. It came with the best version of snake game ever.
The black face 6:11
I was a bit of a tech nerd, loved my N93, I had an 8110 as well although mine didn't have a sprung cover like the phones in the film while my mates one did.
Remember that Ericsson phone that had a motorized flip mechanism? I remember sitting at a pub and my friend who had just bought one just kept flipping it open, closed, open, closed over and over again and everyone stared... Don't know how long it lasted but he was the kind of guy who swapped phones several times a year.
Another friend was just so weird. He could just stand up and throw his phone into the floor or ground as hard as he could. Pick up the debris and say that it was time to get a new phone. Never understood why. Years later I asked and he had no idea of why he had thought that was a good idea. In two years he offed at least ten phones that way...
Sorry for drifting so far off topic.
None of the 8110's did, they stole the idea/mechanism from the Nokia 7110 which was activated by a little silver button on the back. I worked in a phone shop at the time and had loads of customers that wanted an 8110, right up until they found out that the matrix pop out bit was movie magic.
Edit: Just remembered, the coolest of the Nokia sliding phones was the 8910 - I wanted one of them so much!
@@AxR558 I had mine before the film came out, I guess my friends one was probably a 7110, but i don't remember really.
@@popuptoaster They were similar looking phones, the 7110 came in a weird colour shifting green/black that was pretty neat.
You left out two of my favourite phones (loved both of these):.
1. Nokia Ngage. I loved this phone. It even had an some great exclusives: "The Elder Scrolls Travels: Shadowkey", "Glimmerati" and "Pathway to glory".
2. LG FLex. It was a flexible phone with a self-healing cover. Cmon.
I remember browsing the cingular (now AT&T) phone offerings in like 2004-2005 when I was about to get my first cell phone. I feel like there were hundreds and hundreds of options back then. My first phone was an LG C1300 from 2004.
Xperia Play was my favorite phone. Emulation on the go and a phone at the same time!
I had a Nokia 7600. It was weird AF, but... Remember that T9 was the main thing at the time: with a little practice you could text faster and more reliably/accurately than any standard T9 set up
I had a few weird ones haha! Have to say my Gen 1 N-Gage was and is by far my all time favorite. All the looks when I had to pick up a phone call with my taco phone are imprinted forever in my brain. Still have 2 and they still work!
Was also great tinkering with it and playing game boy emulators with it :D
Yes! I just posted a comment saying the same thing! You are a legend 🙌 I spent hours playing tony hawk pro skater on mine.
both of the N-Gage gen1s I owned scratched the sim cards so badly they stopped working.
Eventually got the phone store to trade it for a P910. which I thoroughly enjoyed, despite the lack of games.
I kept waiting for Linus to pick up a N-Gage next...I'm surprised it wasn't in the video.
@@EvilRSA same :(
I can’t believe you skipped over the Nokia 3300 a.k.a. the taco phone. I had one of these back in the day. And it was absolutely amazing. Plus it looked ridiculous. If we’re not considering modern-day, smart phones, I think this is one of the best phones ever made! I’m probably going to get disagreed with a lot on that one. But still my other personal favorite was a Sony Ericsson T637. It was just a basic phone, with calling, and texting, but the size. It would easily get lost in the pocket, but in a good way.
I have seen those phones, was it useful? I couldn't get the ones i had access to to boot.
Also where is N-Gage
Actually there were so many ridiculous Nokia phones in existence that it'd warrant a whole separate video to go through them :D
16:00 Sony Ericsson Xperia PlayStation phone
I actually had that stupid expensive Nokia 7600 and once I got used to Typing Texts with it, the Keypad in both sides was amazing because your Fingers didn't had to move so much. 😂
Loved it!
I found once I got used to it I could type messages really fast compared to other 'normal' keypad phones
I passed the phone onto my brother when I upgraded....It took him only a few days to realise what I'd been raving about lol
More vids like this please. Love this style of weird old tech content!
LTT likes to mix things up so I doubt they'll do more of this. Mr Mobile has got a whole series for devices like these.
Shoulda had a Samsung Juke in here -- that was a fantastic first phone back in the day!
Ah, good ol' days when you wasn't able to find two similar phones in classroom and two similar charge ports from one brand...
Unless it was a Nokia, which was why they where the go to for buisness people like my parents, uncle's and grandparents, they always could use 2 types of charger, either the barrel or the proprietary one with the two slot clips on either side, and they normaly used the same battery.
Hey now, micro SD card slots aren't that uncommon. My 5G Xiaomi has one.
FWIW, Nokia used basically two charging plugs so you were *very* likely to have a pile of compatible chargers. I still have a couple.
NO, DAB wasn't Digital Audio Broadcasting over IP. It was just Digital Audio Broadcasting.
The Nokia Pop-Port was for accessories and data transfer, not for chargers. Nokia used it before changing to miniUSB and later microUSB
Thank you for the strobe warning, it was very much appreciate!
I feel like the Samsung Juke could definitely have been an honorable mention here. The switchblade phone was awesome
Still have mine, hahahah
My buddy had that. First phone I thought of when watching this lol
Ahah my aunt had the flipout
@@AndrewPena89 I had mine for years until losing it. It never quit working, and neither did the ports or buttons. For such a weird design, was one of the toughest phones out there hahaha
I remember a few of these being a Nokia engineer in the UK. A recent mechanical and cool phone to check (and are cheap now) is the LG Wing that may get linus attention once he realises it's abilities 😎
i love the LG Wing, i want one as an emulation device but i cant justify spending 3-400 dollars on something which probably wont work how i want to with the controller on the bottom screen and the game on the top
8:30 That's impressive Linus! Even my high end cinema camera can't do 480p at 30fps and it costs thousands!
The fact that even Linus is so off on the prices shows you how normalized the expensive phones got nowadays.
Adding inflation from mid 2000's, actually most of the phones compare to a $500 - $700 phone today and buying a modern phone is way more useful than these were for their price.
My first cellphone (a hand me down from my dad) was the successor to the matrix phone (the Nokia 7110). It’s the same basic design but with a scroll wheel. That thing made 7th grade me feel so cool.
And a spring loaed face plate! My boss got one. He was excited because it was the coolest phone. I went straight for the games.
That was my first phone too :) I'd just started at university, and when I got it the tech asked me to pick which mobile number I wanted off his screen. Yes kids, back in the day, you got to pick your own mobile number.
It was also the first phone with built in WAP internet, which was pretty unusable.
My favourite part was ending calls by sliding the mouthpiece back in, just a neat little feature.
My father used to own a StarTac, the standard black model though. He used it for many years until they upgraded the phone network and it wasn't compatible with the new antennas. That phone is immortal...straight up indestructible. I swear at some point it even got splashed by sea water and it was still working fine. I bet it still works to this day.
I was really hoping to see the Samsung Juke on this episode, the 7820 definitely filled that spot that was missing though, I don't know what it is about tall phones that I like but they're sick!
you like big smithing
I'm just happy it's not another video where Linus just gets stuff for his house
It's almost like he waited for Dankpods to go on vacation, then swept in with the nugget dive!
6:17 WHAT WAS THAT ADD?
7:38 64MB RAM and 50MB Storage 🤔
that feeling when since you are just a school kid by the time these phones released, the only phone you had used that was mentioned in this video... is the fisher price one 18:05 LOL
5:00 that thing looks like some kind of futuristic s3x toy
the name
I HAD THE KYOCERA ECHO ❤
If they sold one with newer specs I would buy another one.
Queueing UA-cam videos on one screen while watching on the other screen was a game changer for my media consumption.
It looks like the ZTE Axon M a lot