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Comment by RajT88 | Hacker News Reader

I miss the days when you had bonkers phones like this. I agree with most people that life is a little dull with our iPhone clones. It's nice for watching videos (which I don't do too much), and less nice for typing (which I do rather more). The E90 form factor is still my dream phone.

If you think the Nokia phones were nuts, you should dig up stuff coming out of Japan 2000-2010, like the Hitachi WOO Ketai H001 (yes, that's a real name). All kinds of flip/fold/swivel/etc. with TV tuners and DVR functionality, digital cameras, music players, etc. Sharp Aquos 912SH is another one which comes to mind.

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Japanese phones get left out of the conversation because these topics spin into nostalgia and the Western audience doesn’t have any experience with them. Likewise the JP discussion wouldn’t fondly remember all the Nokia variants.

On a side note I have a pet theory that Japanese cell phones helped push display technology forward. The English alphabet can be displayed very easily with limited pixels but kana and kanji cannot so there’s less pressure for Western manufacturers to innovate displays. For a phone to first be successful in Japan it needs a very high resolution display.

The same was true of computers. Japanese PCs had high-resolution graphics way before American PCs because of the need to draw kanji with enough detail. This led to a parallel universe of not quite PC compatible standards like the NEC PC88 and PC98 lines.

I thought the list was missing Japanese phones too! I went on holiday to Japan in the early 00s, and I remember thinking how all of the phones were way ahead of their time. Phones with flip-and-swivel screens, phones that looked sleek, metallic, sexy and modern, phones with full colour displays that were not some Palm monstrosity, phones that didn't look like phones and instead looked like some leather-and-metal accessory (only took calls), so many cool phones! I wanted them so bad.

I wonder why they never became popular overseas. The iPhone, sure, but there was a whole period before the iPhone where Japanese phones were way ahead of their time.

No interest in marketing them overseas.

There was also the not insignificant cost of completely re-engineering the RF frontend and radios. As back then (an partly still) Japan used cellular bands and technologies that ware completely different from other countries.

It kept the competition out, but also made it hard for them to compete abroad. And then iPhone happened and many of those manufacturers are no longer in the biz.

Because the user interface was a godawful nightmare. Looked like a fish, built like a fish, usability of a pig.

>Hitachi WOO Ketai H001

I remember that one! The aughts were a truly a golden era in Japanese phone design. The technology was also waaay ahead of the west. We're just now starting to actually use the QR code thing, which was everywhere in like 2005. And 1seg? That was really fun tech. TV on my morning commute was truly like living in the future.

For iconic phones, though, I was always a big fan of the au Design phones like the infobar (2003) and Design Skin. The color schemes are legendary.

I think it's kind of sad that we went from "let's see if we can add a phone to this" in the 90s/2000s to "lets see if we can add this to a phone" in the post-iPhone era.

Given the scarcity of phone connections I suppose it was inevitable, but man was it fun for awhile.

We all like crazy designs like these because they are a breeding ground for innovation. However they tend to flop unless one of their innovations proves truly revolutionary.

Early personal computers and even laptops had interesting and varied designs before everyone coalesced around the optimal desktop, tower, and notebook designs.

A big part of the problem is software. If a phone maker puts out a truly unique form factor today, they are stuck in a situation where most existing software was built assuming the user is on a giant rectangle.

More crazier models: F-04B, F-07C

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