Disassembling boxes with various junk accumulated over a decade, I came across my first smartphone in my life – Nokia 6630. Once a legendary and iconic model and one of the best Symbian devices in their entire history. I could not resist, turned it on and froze for several tens of minutes, nostalgically recalling what the world was like then.
The Nokia 6630 was released in the summer of 2004 and fell into my hands at the end of 2005. I well remember that exciting autumn day when, being a 7th grade student, I went with my father to the communication salon for the first smartphone in my life. And I even remember the price – 12,790 rubles. Another 1,790 rubles was worth a 512 MB memory card for the newly emerged DV-RS-MMC standard, which could not be found in the provinces during the day with fire.
Now let's remember the mid-zero attributes together! After all, it seems that it was only yesterday, and the water has flowed under the bridge, which is enough for the whole ocean.
Balance in dollars and other interesting conditions
Few people remember that the balance on our mobile accounts was once in dollars. We bought payment cards for 5, 10 or more dollars at the rate that the owner of the point of sale considered acceptable for himself, and then activated them by a call or USSD team. We did not have any payment terminals, mobile banks or operator salons at every step. Operators switched to ruble tariffs completely only by the beginning of 2007.
And the operators also had various chips, for example, your balance could burn out if you did not speak it out within a certain time. Or you could pay a subscription fee just like that – not for any package of services, but only for the right to be on this tariff. Minutes and messages, of course, were paid separately.
Well, how can you not remember about paid incoming? Until 2003, all incoming calls were paid. It doesn't matter if you called or you, both parties paid for the call. In 2003, the first tariffs with free incoming calls from mobiles appeared, and in 2006 paid incoming calls were canceled by law. That was the time!
By the way, it was in 2005 and 2006 that Beeline and MTS respectively made their last radical rebranding. The first one ceased to be “blue” with a bee instead of “L”, transformed into a striped yellow-black operator, and the second found its trademark “egg” on a red background. Both logos stopped depicting a SIM card, and the names of the operators got rid of the GSM postscript that had lost its relevance.
And what, 10 bucks is not extra!
In 2003, the residents of our country found out where to get 10 bucks and why they are not superfluous. It's all about the “Jeans” tariff line from MTS, which was launched to conquer a mass audience. Until 2003, people perceived MTS exclusively as a premium operator, but a large-scale advertising campaign and promotion of “jeans” tariffs helped it to get a tangible influx of new subscribers.
The Jeans sub-brand existed for three years, after which it was gradually removed from the operator's line. According to MTS representatives, he coped with his task perfectly, after which he was sent to history.
And this is a couple of those very legendary videos with Vadik:
Internet on demand
Today, most smartphones are constantly and by default online, unless the owner for some reason forcibly turned off the data transfer. And then communication via GPRS or EDGE was established on demand. We opened the browser, entered the link, clicked “Go”, and only at that moment the smartphone went online and opened the site you need. And so with any network application. You need the Internet – connected, not needed – the smartphone will turn off on its own.
And we paid for each megabyte, well if with per kilobyte rounding, since there were no traffic packets yet.
As for the speed, it was extremely low. 3G networks appeared only in the late 2000s, so you had to be content with download speeds of a few kilobytes per second. And if everything was more or less normal with the sites, especially through Opera Mini , then we had to be patient to download the files.
Opera Mini
Opera Mini, released in 2005, became a big revolution, because only then did the Internet become truly pocketable. This browser for the first time made it possible to comfortably visit from the phone not only adapted WAP-sites, but also the rest of the world wide web. In addition, the built-in compression algorithms allowed you to save a significant amount of money on traffic!
ICQ and IRC
There were no messengers in their usual form yet, but there were “ICQ” and IRC chats. In the first we communicated tete-a-tete, and in the second we communicated in groups. And on the smartphone, you had to keep the application in the background for the messages to reach. It is now usual for us that notifications come at any time, but then, in order to receive messages, it was necessary to launch the program. Ponte UINs, vanilla statuses that later migrated to VKontakte pages, and the legendary “oh-oh” or “cuckoo” with an incoming message are just some of the attributes of online communication in the mid-2000s.
Nokia has already created tablets and touchscreen smartphones
5 years before the first iPad and 3 years before the appearance iPhone Nokia already knew where the market was heading. But her developments were considered too bold and futuristic, the market was not ready for the appearance of such unusual devices. It is a pity that the Finns were ahead of their time …
Meet the Nokia 7710, the first touchscreen smartphone from Nokia. It went on sale 14 years ago and even then had a screen with an aspect ratio of 18: 9, albeit in the wrong orientation.
And this is the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet – the first tablet from Nokia that went on sale in 2005. His ideas were already correlated with what was shown to us Apple in 2010!
But both of these gadgets, like their Finnish heirs, had piece sales and remained the lot of only solvent geeks.
Screen diagonals
Analogs of modern touchscreen smartphones in the mid-2000s were called communicators, and the market standard was 2.4-2.8-inch displays. It is not just that the aforementioned Nokia 770 with its 4 “screen was considered a tablet!
Again, a device with the same diagonal display as the ultra-compact smartphone iPhone SE today was considered very large and was called a tablet!
I also remember seeing on the window of one of the stores HTC Universal with a 3.5 ”screen and thought:“ How can you use such a huge one? .. ”
No social networks, video bloggers and Chinese smartphones
In the mid-2000s, we still did not know anything about social networks, which were just emerging in the minds and computers of Mark Zuckerberg and Pavel Durov. No smart feeds, friends lists, food photos, and even the notorious wall that Pavel never got back. Today we can find almost any person on earth and find out how and how he lives. And then there was nowhere to look especially. Is that on the bases of the special services.
Much like social media, video blogging was in its infancy in the mid-2000s. There were no techno, business, lifestyle, or any other video bloggers. It was possible to shoot a video at home and become famous only through the program “My own director”.
And there were no Chinese smartphones on the market at all. The first smartphones Meizu, Xiaomi and Huawei appeared on sale only at the junction of zero and tenths. But there were legendary Nokia, Siemens SX1, Motorola MPx 200/220 and a scattering of communicators from Taiwanese HTC, which came out under several brands at once.
Moreover, on sale it was still quite easy to find devices of Finnish (my 6630 is just that), German, Hungarian assembly!
On this, perhaps, I will end the nostalgic post. What do you remember the most from those times? What device or tariff did you use? What commercials or offers from operators do you remember? Be sure to share your zeroes in the comments!