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Nokia's Banana Phone From The Matrix is Back (theverge.com)
The Verge: Back in 1999, Keanu Reeves was famous for playing Neo in The Matrix, and not for looking sad on a bench. Nokia was also the "world's leading mobile phone supplier" back then, and it used this popularity to feature its Nokia 8110 "banana phone" in The Matrix film. At the time everyone who considered themselves cool (definitely me) wanted a Nokia phone just like Neo's, but most of us had to settle for the Nokia 7110 with its spring-loaded slider. Now HMD, makers of Nokia-branded phones, is bringing the Nokia 8110 back to life as a retro classic . Just like the Nokia 3310 that was a surprise hit at Mobile World Congress last year, the 8110 plays on the same level of nostalgia. The slightly curved handset has a slider that lets you answer and end calls, and HMD is creating traditional black and banana yellow versions. The Nokia 8110 runs on the Smart Feature OS, so this is a basic featurephone and you're not going to get access to the Android apps found on other Nokia Android smartphones. The Nokia 8110 will be available in May for just 79 euros ($97).
WTF, The Verge? I can read the article but there's no images?
#DeleteFacebook
A friend of mine caught some type of malware that went through every file on the local machine and changed each occurence of "right now" to "right meow". It's horrible.
cellular, modular, interactive-odular
This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.
I do remember using these phones for a while, and they were crap. Specifically the sliding contacts would invariably get dirty or corrode or wear out or whatever, and then the mike wouldn’t work half the time, or the phone wouldn’t answer a call when snapped open. I hope they fixed that obvious weak point this time.
Regardless of the crap quality, I do get nostalgic about the coolness factor. Taking it out and *snap*ping it open would never fail to turn a few heads.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Teenagers hate to speak on the phone, they only use texting via various apps (SMS, Messenger, whatever), or facetiming with iFacetime or Messenger.
My daughter can use 1GB per day of data but 0 minute per month :)
This Nokia phones are for old farts like me or OP who wanted to be cool in 1999 but had no money for a 8110 :)
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
because i also have a tablet for android and android apps, and i dont use my phone much for apps anymore i just use it for phone calls and txt msgs. and i want to uncomplicated my phone, so i wont be installing any third party apps, and will only check for software updates to the factory operating system on the phone, thanks Nokia i love that phone
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I do remember using these phones for a while, and they were crap.
Every Nokia phone I owned was crap for one reason or another. I owned a steady stream of them from around 1997-2007. The hardware was reasonably durable and the battery life was ok but everything else about them was pretty crap. (unfortunately so was most of the competition at the time too) The software absolutely sucked, most features aside from making/receiving calls were borderline useless, heaven forbid you needed to have your phone communicate with a PC, address books sucked, etc. Their "smartphones" would have features like web browsing and email but if you actually tried to use them it usually was painful if it worked at all. I think people's nostalgia for Nokia products is largely misplaced.
Regardless of the crap quality, I do get nostalgic about the coolness factor. Taking it out and *snap*ping it open would never fail to turn a few heads.
I'm sure it would but is that really why you want a phone? I'll take something that actually is useful for more than showing off.
First and foremost, someone should have re-posted the Ars article about it that I read this morning --- that's got pictures.
So I guess because it comes in yellow that media is calling it a 'banana', but I'm pretty sure at person in the late 90's never called that a banana phone back then. Why that stupid ass name all the sudden to garner some reader attention? I'm ok with the the 're-issue Nokia Neo-from-the-Matrix spring slider phone' which already got my attention.
I was actually trying to dig up some super old e-mails or eBay history because I do remember having a Nokia phone where you could swap out the front bezel with different colored one, and after 'The Matrix' premiered, I remember the landslide of Nokia bezels that appeared on eBay had the spring slide-down on it. Truly cool. I wish I would have kept that phone and bezel around just to reminisce.
This is not so much a recreation of the Nokia 8110 that was in the movie as it is an "homage". It's a completely new, designed-from-the-ground-up piece of hardware (AND software) that just happens to bear a resemblance to the original and takes some design cues from it.
Not only that, but neither the original 8110 nor this new version actually have a button-triggered, spring-loaded release for the keypad cover. That was something designed specifically for the movie, and IIRC the phones in the movie were not even functional: they were props that had been gutted of any real functionality and then fitted with the spring-loaded mechanism which, given the era, was impossible to fit into the phone while leaving the actual phone guts intact.
There was a Nokia model, the 7110, that actually had a spring-load keypad cover that vaguely resembled what we saw in the movie, though it was not as "exciting".
-- Nathan
Just an FYI, the slider is not spring loaded, like it was in the Matrix (something they added for the movie).
The Matrix has its own article tag icon? I sometimes forget just how old this site is, and just how popular that movie was.
I am getting tired of all the Nostalgic revivals. I don't mean trying to look back and see what was good about the old technology that may have been lost (as I type this on a mechanical keyboard) and bring this technology back, and bring it align with the feature of the new technology. Often a technology will become obsolete because factors involved means its trade offs are worse then the other products trade offs.
As time goes on new technology advances making such trade offs lessen and should be brought back, so you get regain some advantage that had been lost.
Lets look at Linux as an example:
Linux was for the most part a clone of the Unix system. Built for high end mainframes.
Unix was around for a long time, however it ran on big iron systems. 32bit processors dozens of Megs of memory.
When the PC came out priced to the public. They had 8 or 16bit processors and kilobytes of memory. (enough for most software to run for 1 person, hence a personal computer) All the features in Unix systems were overkill of these systems, took two much power away from these devices for features that were not to be used. So DOS which was fast and lightweight and with the features that a desktop needed. Which made using such desktops useful. At the trade off of such features such as multi-tasking, networking, multi-user security... This is all fine and good, because if you locked you keyboard on a PC then no one can access your computer.
Then by the mid-late 1990's PC were roughly as powerful as the old Mainframes. 32bit 386/486 processors, 16+megs of RAM. So this allowed us to revisit the Unix system again, this time on the PC. However some things have changed, the growth the Graphical User interface, means there was a rush to make Linux user friendly enough (with KDE and GNOME) compared to the old mwm. Also TCP/IP and the World Wide Web came out and became popular so a better networking stack needed to be made, as increased browser features. By the year 2000 Linux was its own system and not a nostalgic copy of the Unix system of old.
However today, we have taken the action to revalue past ideas as a response thinking what we have today is bad and we need to go back to the good old days.
The good old days normally equates to the time frame when you were 15-25 years of age. Where this stuff was absolutely new and exciting, and not a incremental improvement of older technology. Plus you were living in an optimistic world full of opportunities and potential. Where the weight of the world didn't drag you down, and having to make choices of what you want to do vs what you really need to do. This time of your life is where most people have their peak freedom/responsibility ratio. So when they look back when they are older, those old tech re-spark the feeling you once had. And normally forgetting the emotional turmoil that was happening at that age.
A little bit of Nostalgia is fine, Listening to the music from you childhood, Watching a few episodes of an old TV Show. However trying to bring back your glory days by remaking outdated technology of old, just isn't healthy. Because you are trying to live in a world that doesn't exist anymore to make it worse, you are living in an idealized version of that world, not realizing that we had solved a lot of the problems from that period.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The Matrix was a great movie, too bad they never made any sequels!
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
History repeats itself as Farce then as tragedy. It's a tragedy nokia lost their mojo and is reduced to cannibalizing itself.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Callback to alt.fan.karl-malden.nose two decades ago, I take it
the OS is a fork of FireFox called KaiOS they claim 30 million already in the field... and IPv6 native
ironically steve jobs wanted phones to use the web as "apps" personally I think it's a good thing it only has a browser and phone capability, less to screw up !
I wish them luck, I hope it sells a shed ton
Bananaphone
Operator get me Bei-Jing Jing Jing Jing
OK, I get it, "smartphone" has Android, iOS, GPS, big screen, lots of mem & proc.
But a "basic featurephone", wat?
Because they weren't the smartphone of today?
No, because they were recognizably crap by the standards of the day. It was well known that handset makers regarded the carriers (AT&T, Verizon, etc) as their customers rather than the end users. As a result they made very little effort to make their devices especially useful post purchase. This strategy worked until the iPhone dropped and then the handset makers that relied on this distribution bottleneck (Nokia being foremost among them) found themselves in deep shit.
Did you ever try to get a Nokia phone to talk with a PC circa 2000-2005? I did with multiple devices. It SUCKED. Seriously, Nokia was absolutely terrible at consumer oriented software and interfaces. The "web browser" on my last Nokia phone was only a web browser in the sense that it technically could load a web page. But it was utterly useless for real world use. It simply allowed them to claim the phone had the capability. Same with the email on the phone. Blackberries did email ok at the time but every Nokia I ever held prior to the iPhone (and for a while after) was absolutely horrid at email. Even text messaging was a shit show unless you had a phone with a proper querty keyboard.
They are of course judged their competition of the time.
Most of the competition of the time sucked too but it had little to do with their technical capabilities. They simply designed bad devices because they thought their customer was a big corporation instead of the person actually using the device. Some of the devices like the Palm devices and Blackberries were ok for the era. They were actually usable for real work albeit with recognizable deficiencies. Nokia just never really figured smartphones out until way too late in the game to matter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... :-)
4wdloop
Badger! Badger! Badger!
Will the slider be spring-loaded, like in the Matrix?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I still use my Nokia N8 daily. It has lasted me eight years now, and still has all the features I need, and none I don't want.
I have never found another phone with an equal stability, battery-life, size, durability, ease-of-use and capability. I've used it for talk, text, e-mail, web-browsing, photos, video, sound-recording, mp3-playing, GPS/maps/driving, and watching-movies.
Okay, so I can't do fancy graphic emojis, but I thought God intended them to be made with punctuation keys, ;-)
At the time everyone who considered themselves cool (definitely me) wanted a Nokia phone just like Neo's
You're fucking pathetic.
This makes me want to put a few of theses into shipping envelopes and leave them on some of my coworkers desk. -- The intent being that when they open them, I will see how many of them I can convince to step out of the windows onto the ledge. -- Does this make me a bad person?
___ I don't respond to Anonymous Cowards, and I Never Mod them UP.
I charge it about twice a week, call quality is crystal clear and I don't have to worry about the next forced update slowing the software down to a crawl. Also it's purple when it feels like it and green when it doesn't feel like being purple.
Plus it goes *swish*... *click*.
Does your phone go *swish*...*click*?
I thought not.
"Then there's the lack of a changeable battery with external charger, which was one of the big selling points: you could continue to use the phone while another battery charged."
Intelligence agencies do not allow companies to ship removable battery phones anylonger. It would impede their crusade to make the world safe for women. Got to catch the pedos.
Purely random musings ahead.
I really truly want an alternative to a smartphone. But still have to be demanding on a couple features. A qwerty keyboard is likely something I would consider a must have, but would be willing to give something like this a try despite its lack of one. As far as the OS, whatever. I am curious about the app store. i don't use facebook but if people somehow magically got on board... Yeah, not likely. Chiefly I need a high end camera. I use my s8+ for a lot of business related and even product photography. Similar with video. Safe to say this won't meet that standard. As far as apps go, It bugs me that most of the apps I use, outside of a phone, are rendered in a browser. It would be nice if high end cloud services could be better designed to render on a mobile browser over installing an app. As far as my S8+ goes, I don't use over 99% of the features that make it a so called smart phone. To me it is a device for texting, email, navigation, and a high end camera. Those things shy of apps that are otherwise rendered in a browser on a desktop. Safe to say, for those few features I depend on, I am not going to be upgrading for a few years. It is an awful lot of fancy hardware for something that gets such limited use. I still lament the failure of BB10. With the exception of a not so hot camera, the Classic is still the best phone I have ever used.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
It' interesting that Nokia decided not to launch in US at all.
Take away Google play and my budget Android phone with 60 hour battery life is a less powerful device than my 8 year-old advanced feature-phone (Java) with 120 hour battery life.
Nuff said
'nuff said.
Where did the subject go on the last one??
In case it disappears again, it said:
25 days battery life on standby