Nokia's Banana Phone From The Matrix is Back (theverge.com) 93
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).
Images? (Score:1)
WTF, The Verge? I can read the article but there's no images?
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UBlock Origin installed here.
Can see article images fine.
No ads (unless you count the other Verge story plugs at the bottom).
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Boma Phone: http://www.commonsenseevaluation.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Obamaphone-Program-Is-Rife-With-Corruption-1.jpg
Bama Phone: http://alabamanewscenter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Haleyville-featured-image-edited.jpg
Marx had it backwards (Score:2)
History repeats itself as Farce then as tragedy. It's a tragedy nokia lost their mojo and is reduced to cannibalizing itself.
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You think Nokia isn't doing anything but playing on nostalgia?
Nokia produces solid smartphones---with vanilla Android and minimum two-year updates. The phones are otherwise comparable to the competition, and this is exactly the distinction I care about. I plan on buying a Nokia when my current phone is outdated.
Their lineup has been out for roughly a year, and a new generation is in the works. Unfortunately, they launched in Europe first with the current lineup, so the next gen may not be available statesid
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If you're going to troll, at least meow should try inventing meow more credible, meow like meow meow or meow trojan, meow?
Meow.
Meow Wars (Score:2)
Callback to alt.fan.karl-malden.nose two decades ago [xahlee.info], I take it
It's the best, beats the rest (Score:4, Funny)
FireFox derived OS basically HTML (Score:2)
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
Whoah (Score:2)
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I always wondered what would happen if you take both.
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Obligatory XKCD https://xkcd.com/566/ [xkcd.com]
Re: Whoah (Score:2)
The point of the third movie was that the Red Pill was a separate but more acceptable fantasy for some (Neo's god-like powers). The moral of the story is when somebody tells you there are only two choices, don't accept their false dichotomy. Use your mind and make your own decisions, or you'll just hop from trap to trap. Neo was lost to the Red Pill fantasy (making the trilogy a tragedy).
It's too bad the moviemaking didn't live up to the value of the story.
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That's a very interesting theory if they had ever actually made sequels to the matrix. Did you get access to the unproduced scripts?
Re:Whoah (Score:4, Insightful)
iirc red pill was for tracking your 3D meat body, perhaps like a radioisotope tracer but with brainwaves, then they can locate your connection/battery pod.
Blue probably knocks you out, which might prevent the effort of the wake-up hack, not unlike your remote machine going to sleep. Or maybe they can unplug you anyway. It might also be a short-term memory wipe, for whatever grade of hollywood amnesia dust.
It might be a question of time-until-effect, or effect duration. Or maybe the question wasn't serious to begin with and I wasted keystrokes while waiting for quitting time.
Nostalgia. (Score:2)
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.
Screw nostalgia - give me something that works (Score:2)
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 "smartphon
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I think people's nostalgia for Nokia products is largely misplaced.
Because they weren't the smartphone of today?
They are of course judged their competition of the time.
Relative Ericsson at the time when people started to move over I guess the two features Nokia may have had over Ericsson was the antenna not poking out of the shell and possibly better battery life. Did snake or easy of use / the use of just one button for navigation affect anything too?
T28s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"The T28 was the lightest and slimmest mobile phone at the time, with a weight of on
They misunderstood who the customer was (Score:3)
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
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Did you ever try to get a Nokia phone to talk with a PC circa 2000-2005? I did with multiple devices. It SUCKED.
I used Gnokii on Linux back in the day, it worked amazingly well, far better than any of the windows software.
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No. 2000-2005 I had the T28s without GPRS and later the C55 with but never used it for either. IRC was still my favorite communication medium. I had very cheap 10 mbps connection but using the phone can't have been cheap at all.
SMS has always been for idiots. The price of a text message here in Sweden was 2 SEK, which is 1/4 USD.
I only used my phone for phone calls, sms and alarm, the later has been the largest issue I guess since I have a hard time waking up from anything.
Wish they'd resurrect the N8, though (Score:1)
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, ;-)
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The new one does not have sliding contacts. The cover is just a piece of plastic.
The microphone is below the keypad in the main part.
Definitely not for teens (Score:2)
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 :)
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What are you, a reverse hipster? "I hated things after everyone else already hated it."
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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 :)
That's got nothing to do with being a teenager. I have teenage children of my own and I can use 0 minutes of talktime a month and 1GB of data a day. (although usually my allocated 5GB lasts me a month). I hate talking on the phone, and most people I know do too.
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Teenagers hate to speak on the phone, they only use texting via various apps (SMS, Messenger, whatever), or facetiming with iFacetime or Messenger.
Shit. This describes pretty much everybody under 50. The only people who ever call or want to be called by me are my parents (70+) because they can't figure out texts or email. Other than that it was various business I was dealing with, and one call from both my girlfriend and my neighbor in the last year. Phones are like FAX, antiquated, inefficient service that is only good if it is required by one of the parties or you need proof of contact at that moment.
i will be buying one (Score:2)
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I would want a mixture.
I would want to be able to run my bank id, my Steam authenticator, send e-mail I guess and track activity with the phone too. Browser and camera is nice to have.
I guess with a mirror-less camera and with an activity armband I could do without those.
The problem is of course that with plenty of sensors and a quality camera and such it would start making more sense to have an expensive phone in general.
But for ~â300 I would be ok forgoing some performance, resolution, RAM and built-
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"Yeah we did call it banana phone." -no one ever
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You're thinking of the Nokia 3210. There was quite an aftermarket for the bezels.
Yeah, not so much (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:Yeah, not so much (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Yes, it's quite different in many ways. Obviously the connectivity is different, because most phone companies no longer support GSM 900 with SSMS gateways.
But they have taken some shortcuts elsewhere too, like the buttons, which are way different from the original, and not in a good way.
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.
And, perhaps the biggest cheap shortcut is that the microphone is not in the slider, where it can be put in front of your mouth, but is on the phone itself. That completely ruins the advantage the 8110 had over all other phones in that you could put the mic in front of your mouth, like with a real phone. Especially for people with full beards (this is slashdot, right?), this makes quite a difference.
I'd say the slider mic is the defining feature of the 8110, and replacing it with just a sliding lid completely misses the entire point of having the slider in the first place.
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And, perhaps the biggest cheap shortcut is that the microphone is not in the slider, where it can be put in front of your mouth, but is on the phone itself. That completely ruins the advantage the 8110 had over all other phones in that you could put the mic in front of your mouth, like with a real phone.
Seriously? It's just decorative now? Actually it's worse than that. You could remove the slider entirely and it would be a better phone.
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Seriously? It's just decorative now?
From what I can tell, it still works as a switch hook to let you answer calls or hang up. But the microphone being extended was kind of the entire point of the phone...
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The 7110 was actually a very decent phone. The spring-loaded cover was a bit gimmicky, but it actually did work surprisingly long (longer than most contemporary phones work altogether...) and it lasted ages on a single charge. Often I forgot where the heck that damn charger was because I didn't need it for weeks sometimes.
Yeah, impossible to imagine today, a phone that you don't have to charge constantly...
Thinking about it, the only functionality I'd miss from my current phone compared to what the 7110 was
Slider not spring loaded (Score:2)
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Not to mention the ultimate coolness that resounding "clack" gave you, one could literally feel everyone around going "whoa!".
Nostolgia Epidemic. (Score:2)
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 b
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Huh? Unix was originally developed on a PDP-7 (18 bit, maximum 64K words memory), and became popular on the PDP-11 (16 bit, 64K bytes, although later models extended that with virtual addressing). Minicomputers, not mainframes, definitely not "big iron."
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True... however wasn't the Unix as most of us know it. By the time Linux was being developed, Minicomputers were on their way out, and Unix was popular in more of the Mainframe type of system.
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If you are re-watching a show and learning something new from it, then that is great.
B5 was a budget Show. And a lot of things didn't age well. That said, you are willing to suspend belief, and focus on the story vs. just the details. You can find a lot of relevant things, that were showing an inkling of.
Having watch B5 in the past, a lot of the stuff seemed like Hyperbole, however 20 years later, it feels alarmingly close to home.
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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.
Well yes...but when enough is lost, pining for the 'good old days' goes beyond nostalgia and becomes the hope for a renaissance.
Nostalgia looks back and forgets lots of DRM systems that were used in the earlier days. One can avoid doing that while also looking for some sort of sensible compromise that reduces casual copying while also not requiring the draconian levels that are present today.
Nostalgia looks back and exclusively remembers good discussions on Usenet. One can look back and remember the spam an
The Matrix was a great movie (Score:2)
The Matrix was a great movie, too bad they never made any sequels!
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Ohhhh, I read that script for the sequel, it would've been soooooo cool. The chase scene right at the start. Neo learning that he ain't the first "One". Smith making his own "Anti-Neo". His battle with Neo, and Neo finding out that Morpheus is pretty much a fanatic with no regard for humanity and that all he wants is to win the war so he stays in the Matrix, with the cliffhanger for the third movie...
Plus all the in-jokes referencing the first one... I still say they should make it, even if 20 years late.
What the heck is a "basic featurephone"? (Score:2)
OK, I get it, "smartphone" has Android, iOS, GPS, big screen, lots of mem & proc.
But a "basic featurephone", wat?
and in case they run out of things to resurrect... (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] :-)
Fundamental question: (Score:2)
Will the slider be spring-loaded, like in the Matrix?
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According to another comment, no, it won't be spring-loaded.
I'm ashamed, but I have to admit.. (Score:3)
I want to know more, but not likely a fit (Score:2)
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