Nokia QWERTY heaven

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Andy Hagon is at it again. One of the few enthusiasts around the globe who can reminisce with real authority on Nokia hardware in general and QWERTY input in particular. In this new feature (grab a coffee, it's lengthy) Andy goes over the history of Nokia and its QWERTY hardware, detailing his own journey and providing some insights along the way.

Interestingly, and proving Andy's objective and no Symbian 'fanboy', it's the QWERTY-less, Meego-powered N9 and limited edition N950 which get the ultimate plaudits in the full article, though it's fair to say that most of the Symbian-powered hardware stole his heart at the time. Here's an extract:

Since that industry-changing year, the humble QWERTY Nokia phone has become something of a disappearing act, and now in 2013, we can look back and exclaim, “Wow, the last fully featured QWERTY smartphone was the E6, and that was 2011!” I know there has been a rash of S40 phones with full BB-style QWERTYs, but the E6 represents the last in a line of phones that hark from the Communicator days, when your full-keyboard device could do pretty much anything  and multitask like the best of them, something I don’t think the Ashas are quite capable of…yet.

For me, the QWERTY craze started in early 2010 when I purchased my first unsubsidized sim-free Nokia, the E75, which had been released about 6 months before I bought it. This phone was awesome; it had the standard numeric T9 keypad on the front, (very handy for one-handed situations like hanging on in a bus while punching out a quick text) but it also slid up to reveal a full (and rather wonderful) QWERTY landscape keyboard. At the time I was not really aware of how quick and nippy other phones could be, so its sluggishness (thanks to its rather weak 369MHz processor) and the sheer lack of RAM were things I could live with. Sure, I would type a few words and they wouldn’t appear on the screen for a few seconds, but I wasn’t too bothered by that, why should I be? (It’s funny, in 2013 that would drive me bonkers!) My E75 could email, text, browse the web, play music, take decent photos and even wake me up in the morning! It was my first taste of a smartphone that could do everything even if,  with its diminutive screen,  it wasn’t as snazzy as the iPhone 3GS. I simply didn’t care because I loved my E75. Plus – it was RED!

 

My first QWERTY, the E75

 

Nice piece, you can read on here. I'm guessing that Andy's journey mirrors that of many people reading this (it does my own, albeit with a slightly different ending!)? Comments welcome...

Source / Credit: Nokia Innovation