Smartphones
are a relatively recent invention: the first so-called smartphone,
Ericsson's R380, didn't ship until early 2000. In the 1990s phones had
modest specs, proprietary operating systems and the ability to make and
receive phone calls, sometimes.
Today's phones haven't improved
much on the calling front - for all their noise cancelling and
cleverness, they still drop calls like they're hot - but everything else
has changed dramatically in just 20 years.
The
numbers have changed too. In 1994 Motorola was pretty chuffed about
selling 12 million handsets in a year. Today, Apple can do 10 million
iPhones in a weekend. So what else has changed? Let's go back. Wayyyyy
back.
When we think of early nineties mobile phones the Motorola
8000X brick phone tends to spring to mind, but while that behemoth looks
so odd now was indeed on sale back in 1994 there were more interesting
and much smaller phones such as Nokia's excellent 232.
The Moto X
in 2014 is very similar to the Nokia 232 in 1994: it's not too pricey
and it delivers a lot of power for the price. Of course, what power
means in 2014 is a bit different from what it meant twenty years ago.
Let's see what's really changed in two decades.
Design
Frank
Nuovo's design for the Nokia 232 was intended to be futuristic, and at
the time it was: the neat, compact design was aimed at style conscious
customers and even featured in the film Clueless.
The 232 won a
stack of design awards and, inspired by Swatch watches, was the first
phone to ship in a range of colours - although the cost of phones at the
time meant most people stuck with plain old black instead of having
different phones for different outfits.
Phones are a lot more
homogenous today - there's only so much you can do with an enormous
touchscreen, a camera and a couple of hardware buttons.
The Moto X
mimics the Nokia in its customisation options: you can choose the back
and front colours, the trim and even encase your phone in real wood. But
there's no mistaking the huge changes phones have gone through in 20
years: in today's phones the software, not the hardware, is the real
star.
Display, Interface and Operating System
The Nokia
232 had a 16-digit LCD display with additional indicators for signal
strength, battery life and key features such as whether you were in a
call or if somebody had left you a voicemail.
The phone ran
Nokia's own proprietary operating system and was controlled with the
keypad - so for example to experiment with the extensive selection of
five ringtones you'd hit MENU, 2, up or down and STO to confirm the
setting.
The Moto X has a 5.2-inch, full HD AMOLED display
delivering 423 pixels per inch and protected by the third generation of
Corning's Gorilla Glass.
The display is a touchscreen, the
operating system is Android KitKat and there is a 2MP front-facing
camera and a 13MP rear-facing one capable of recording Ultra HD video.
The
user interface is customisable and via apps the phone can pretend to be
anything you want it to be, from a musical instrument to a sensible
tool. It's controllable by voice too.
Connectivity
Forget
4G: the Nokia 232 was 1G and ran on analogue phone networks known as
AMPS (Advanced Mobile Phone System) in the US and TACS (Total Access
Communication System) in the UK.
Those analogue networks were
prone to noise and interference, easy to intercept and generally
rubbish, and analogue phones were easy to clone too.
You could
receive 14-character messages to notify you of missed calls and use DTMF
tones to make choices on automated switchboards, and you could also use
the Nokia 232 as a modem, although that required a separate data
adaptor or car kit.
Let's take a deep breath: the Moto X has NFC,
Bluetooth 4.0 LE, dual-band 802.11a/g/b/n/ac Wi-Fi, GSM, GPRS, EDGE,
UMTS, HSPA+ and 4G LTE. It has GPS and a Micro USB connector and it can
connect to the Moto Hint wireless earbud, Android Wear smartwatches,
wireless speakers, health and fitness monitors and in-car entertainment
and navigation systems.
To give you an idea of the difference
between speeds then and now, in 1994 Network World magazine tested
multiple cellular modems and found that the fastest one transmitted
graphics at 71.2 kilobits per second.
In theory 4G LTE is capable
of 300 megabits per second, which is 4,213 times faster. That would
download a 5GB HD movie in just over two minutes; on 1994's networks,
that would have taken seven days - assuming that the connection stayed
up that long and that conditions were perfect, neither of which would be
very likely.
Battery life
The Nokia 232 had various
removable batteries depending on what you bought and where you bought
it: a 380 mAh nickel cadmium battery offering 50 minutes of talk time
and 10 hours standby, an extended 800 mAh NiCd offering nearly two hours
of talk time, and ultimately the Ultra Extended nickel metal hydride
battery delivering a whopping 2 hours and 30 minutes of chat and 32
hours on standby.
The Moto X ships with a 2,300 mAh battery that
promises up to 24 hours of mixed use, although as with all battery
figures that depends on signal strength and how you use your phone.
Comparing
that to the Nokia makes it look like we've gone backwards with
batteries, but of course the Nokia battery didn't have to drive a
five-inch full HD display, lightning-fast 4G and a quad-core Snapdragon
processor clocked at 2.5GHz.
The Nokia's simple features required an entire phone; now, they're just another app.
Price
The
Nokia 232 launched with an RRP of £49.99 (with contract, which equates
to £82 today), which doesn't sound like much - but back then a pint of
lager was £1.58, the average wage was just over £17K and the average
house price was £50K.
As with all technology, prices fell fast:
by 1996 you could pick up the little Nokia for as little as £19.99 with a
Cellnet contract.
The Moto X comes with the usual dizzying array
of contract deals, so for example it's currently available for £119 up
front and £18.99 per month on T-Mobile. SIM-free versions are currently
around the £400 mark. In real terms, then, the Moto X is much cheaper
than the Nokia was 20 years ago.
Isn't living in the future brilliant?
