Nokia’s 9000 communicator turns 30, three decades after its debut
1996 Communicator packed email, fax and web browsing years before Apple's iPhone
Thirty years ago today, on August 15, 1996, Nokia quietly released a device that arguably deserves the title most people give to Apple's iPhone.
The 9000 Communicator by Nokia featured telephoning, emailing, faxing, and web surfing, almost a decade before smartphones were known to people.
In closed mode, the 9000 Communicator resembled a rather bulky mobile phone from the mid-90s. Once you unfolded it, however, a full-blown QWERTY keypad and a 4.5-inch greyscale LCD screen at a resolution of 640x200 pixels were revealed beneath.
The device was powered by an Intel 386 processor with 8MB of RAM shared among the operating system, applications, and storage space.
According to Personal Computer World's June 1996 review, the device was "quite easily the most exciting 397g we've seen for ages", while The Independent hailed its ability to get "on the web while sitting in a pub or on a mountain".
The Independent also noted the Communicator "behaved rather poorly when accessing live pages", attributing the issue to the unpredictable state of 1996-era mobile networks rather than the device itself.
Storage limitations were stark by modern standards too, with room for just ten dialled, received, and missed calls in the call log.
However, even then, the device came with a primitive word processor, a calendar, a calculator, a world clock, and even an application to compose ringtones, all made up of over 1,000 parts when its competitors used only a few hundred to make their devices.
Nokia's former CEO Jorma Ollila told The Wall Street Journal that the firm knew exactly what it had created when it said it was "five years ahead".
The firm's chief designer at that point, Frank Nuovo, told the newspaper that he was "heartbroken" at how Apple claimed ownership of ideas that Nokia had already brought out into the market.
But the price tag and large size of the Communicator ensured that it remained confined only to business audiences.
Nokia continued the Communicator line through four models, ending with the colour-screened 9210i in 2002, and reportedly had touchscreen prototypes similar in size to an iPad in development that never made it to market.
