Extra vids for Floaties! www.floatplane.com/channel/Th... Car Channel: / @garbagetime420 Game Channel: / @helloimgaming Drum Channel: / @the.drum.thing . Custom iPods by Elite Obsolete: eoe.works
My first mobile! Still got it! Used just about everything it could do including the composer. Used it for ages and it always worked. The replacement was slightly more compact but not as much fun to use. Towards the end I got laughed at a few times until I opened it up. I'd still prefer a built-in decent sized miniature keyboard built in to the onscreen ones if it could be part of a decent device.
4:02 It'a actually interesting what they did here, the RS232 communication standard only requires two data wires and a ground wire to function. So the use of a audio jack, which has exactly what it needs, makes alot of sense. They had to use a serial plug for the input as the phone needed a serial interface to be able to use external devices like a modem.
Whoa that phone is pretty baller! When you unfolded it I was like "whoa it's like a mini-laptop!" and then realized so is the smartphone that I'm typing this on lol.
honestly the game boy is a great example of a very durable object It survived a bombing and still functions Only thing that rivals it is the legendary Wii remote, that if you literally throw it at something like a TV there's a high chance the TV will break compared to the remote itself lol
When he opened up the keyboard flap, It felt the most revolutionary thing to ever exist. I can feel people going real mad to get one of these. Its beautiful
@@TheDudey i don't think so, the samsung flip phones's idea based on old flip phone like "what if we make smartphone like flip phone" but in 1980 it's really new like u never seen it before or think about it about flip phone idea i think?
@@Churbas dude i remember my old phone, it might have been an old Sony Ericsson Walkman nugget or something, and Buried deep in the rabbithole that is the Menu for that phone there was this thing for making real basic Songa. It was great
I owned one of these once. Great phone for their time. You didn't need a data plan to fax either. You could compose and fax via your normal telephone line. No spyware / adware / bloatware like todays phones.
the reason for the charger was most likely due to being short production and it being cheaper to only have to manufacture the charging adapter vs having an entire charging brick made for the units. It comes down to price availability and safety in a short schedule
@@dae1925 Ah, yes. "Abcd Xyz," the channel with the most _original_ name in existence, accusing me of being a copycat for making the most obvious observation of the video and commenting about it despite the fact that 400+ other people are sure to notice it. Who made the bot that you stole your username from, BTW?
@@TheDwarvenDefender I heard your dad once showed you a presentation on the consequences and implications of having unprotected intercourse All the slides were pictures of you.
haha. But to be honest; I'm kind of like a 'tweener'... like too young to be called a boomer; too old to be called a millennial.... I remember that when I was a young kid in early 90's, we had a phone where you actually had to dial a number; you know, with a circular plate where you had to bring each number back to zero.
I did the Leo DiCaprio finger pointing thing at the RS232 connector. I use that at work. It's a port which is now hooked up to a wireless antenna, but basically the port is used for transferring files. The fact that there was one for a phone like this is surprising to me, but makes sense. Nowadays it's either via USB cables or Bluetooth, which goes to show how things changed over time.
I know there’s a few TV brands that use RS232 for maintenance stuff, so if it’s acting up the TV tech can hook up a dedicated diagnostic program and have a look.
Worth noting: if you find a USB to Serial adapter, you may actually be able to setup a modem connection over that and get this on the internet. The question being if it can render anything worthwhile
The Action Retro youtube channel has a non-HTTPS site designed for pre-1994 Macs that converts news sites to basic HTML. The Nokia should easily render that.
Or you can just buy a cheap used work oriented pc from any of the main manufacturers and it will still have a serial port. Serial ports are still being used today for all kinds of shit in the industry.
I've watched for ages. But seeing this dude have this much fun with an expensive device from '96 and even make a meme reference with the Composer tool... Subbed, bruh.
6:54 This thing was actually more like two mostly separate devices in one casing, a regular Nokia brick phone and a PDA. That's why it's complaining the phone is turned off. For 1996 it was an absolute marvel of engineering.
@@oliviersavard8676 128kb maybe? it's got 2mb of storage so I'd not expect much... for modern standards, the thing must have felt like skynet back in the day
Genuinely astounding. Not only does it look like a shoe, but it is legitimately impressive. For one of the actual first smartphones ever to have so many features and also be (mostly) well designed even by today's standards is astounding.
@@lero.official Probably some spam, only bots and fucking retards post comments containing a single link without any explanation. Just report his ass, that's what I always do.
Honestly for 1996, this thing is so freaking COOL. A proto smartphone and mini laptop for the time, it's so charming! And it's two years older than me.
Movies like The Matrix used technology like this when I was a kid before Smartphones were invented. Basically Smart devices are malware imo they log your keystrokes and sell your data I am about to go back to being old school if they got 4G basic phones.
I was 13 when this revolutionary piece of technology dropped. Now I'm at the age that this is required for me to look at _the facebook,_ call my kids all the time *(AND WASTE A BUNCH OF MINUTES)* over simple questions that are not important at all, and "manage" _stuff_ with spreadsheets. I never wanted something so bad in my life.
Serial RS-232 Cable - The original USB. Seriously. Nearly all the original Palm Pilots used Serial like the one you have, USB adoption wasn't widespread until 1996-1997.
The Communicator Series were fun, I had the 9210i and the 9300, That antenna actually boosted signals, Side Note when it said turn on the phone it meant the Phone on lid, the phone on lid actually had a different OS, I am not sure about the 9000 but the later verions has S40 OS on lid and S80 inside, I bet it has snake and other games on the lid phone,I was hoping you'd turn on the lid phone
09:14 "What an incoherent ditty" - DankPods, 2021, commenting on the Nokia 9000 Communicator's polyphonic rendition of Edvard Grieg's "Morning Mood" from his 1875 incidental music, "Peer Gynt", written as an accompaniment to the 1867 play of the same name, written by Henrik Ibsen
Weirdly enough, this has the same philosophy behind the Galaxy Fold. They both are designed to be used as a phone folded and as a computer unfolded. We may have better technology, but we still have the vision of 1996
Bruh, usually when RU-vidr goes like "it's gonna be hillarious"? or "you gonna be shocked" I usually really sceptic, because it's not really easy to impress someone by a RU-vid video, but DankPods said those phrases twice and both times he blew my expectations out of the water! Great job!
You know, it's been a little over a year since I first found this channel and the growth from "just iPod Mods" to "vintage and modern tech overviews without being reviews" is pretty excellent. Wade, here's to the 1M mark soon. You've been nothing but incredible the entire time.
I believe the "phone" part and the "smart" part are physically distinct, and you covered only one of them. That's also probably the reason why you got a "phone is not on" error. Although the "phone" part is likely to be much less fun than the "smart" part, I'd be very curious to see it
@@jderrick1994 Yeah the phone is not turned on, I remember the vertical bar line on the right when the battery died and you plugged it in. Also idk if this is the case with this phone, but when you had set the alarm, it could ring even when the phone was turned off.
Yup, it took until the Nokia E90 for a Communicator to run the same OS on the phone and PDA sides (i.e. you could start an app on the cover screen then open the phone up and carry on with a bigger screen). (PS - I also have a 9300!)
Both my mom and my dad had different versions of this when I was a kid. I remember the internet running well here, and how it blew everyone's minds when we showed them how we can access the "information superhighway" on here
My friend's dad actually had one of these, it runs DOS! It's a full PC, You can install DOS games on it like commander keen and Wolfenstein etc as it has an Intel 386 cpu.
I had one (I'm old). It doesn't run MS-DOS. It uses PEN/GEOS as an OS. That's powered by ROM-DOS, which is MS-DOS compatible... mostly... kinda... it's compatible with certain versions of MS-DOS.
@@thelastmotel I very vaguely remember my friend's dad showing me dos games and command prompt on it circa 2001 when he'd upgraded to a 9210, I'm 35 years old now for reference.
@@adamreid5901 You could kinda get it to run some MS-DOS stuff, but it did it sketchily. Lot of crashes. It ran the stuff that came installed on it well, but anything you added, not so much. (I'm 50 in a few weeks. Time flies, it really does.)
That thing is actually super cool, and it could genuinely still be useful to this day. I bet there are people out there still keeping their diary on one of these things!
These were quite popular in the tech community, particularly amongst sysops. Being able to remotely fix a server when on call was game changing. That cable that you thought looked useless is a serial cable that would let you plug directly into a server on site and troubleshoot problems / reboot without having to carry a heavy laptop around. You kids today are so spoiled. 😂
i remember going through a college couse with some early cisco networking classes in 2011 (never went much further than that) and needing a specific model of laptop, provided by the school, because it was equipped with an in-built serial port. the moment he pulled that cable out i knew that this would definitely be a dream device for any sort of IT bigwig in '96!
Man that’s so cool, thanks for this little info bite! Were you one of those sysops perchance? I love hearing about this era and all the crazy stuff they were figuring out
@@Andy.Bennett No, but I was working as a web developer for an ISP in the mid 90s and my colleagues did. Many of them worked shifts or needed to be on call 24/7 if something broke. Much easier to have one of these than to carry a laptop out to dinner or the pub on a Friday night.
I still have my win95 pc in the basement, WITH a floppydisk-drive, because, according to my dad, I will need it for school! Well, by the time I needed to use the pc floppies were no longer used. Sad really, I like them.
@@Masterofcreat they took soo long to write so little data and still managed to corrupt it somehow, one of if not the worst digital storage solutions ever
The ‘headphone jack’ is just a 2.5mm barrel connector. While the majority are used for audio, many people have had a device that uses the 2.5mm jack as a serial connection- a graphic calculator like the TI-81, which you can actually overclock and even run games like Dune on.
The Nokia communicator was a baller phone throughout its different iterations. Also pretty much every Nokia phone up until about 2010 came with a CD because most computers didn't have drivers to talk to phones. Was useful for data/music transfer etc. And I did use the IR transfer which was incredible at the time. "WOW my file just appeared!" I love the music part! Hahahaha!!
I miss the days when phones were differentiated and replacing an older one with a newer model actually added new features, not just a number in software.
well back then they were not limited by water resistance, content aspect ratios and so on. The market was so young the posibilities looked endless but we reached peak smartphone like 2 years ago, since then phones look kinda the same, they are just faster with better cameras
@@nolkerss It is if you're ready to buy a new phone anyway. I think people get hung up on the idea that _every_ phone release is meant to be a reason to buy a new phone. That's as silly as having every car model year be a reason to buy a new car. Ride it until the wheels fall off. Material science and engineering hasn't changed enough that you're going to witness a revolution since this time last year -- stop expecting it, and you won't be disappointed. Then the "exorbitant price" for "one feature" is just ... what a new phone costs, for a whole bundle of new features. It's probably still not going to change your life, but it's a mature device. It's not the 90s anymore - there isn't as much room for improvement. It'll just be a nice upgrade to do all the things you rely on that tool to do for you. That should be enough.
I don't wanna sound like know it all... but most stuff lasts longer than 2 years. My phone for example is over 5 years old now. My old pc still works. I still upgraded after like 7 years. If you take care of your stuff it will last you.
Broooo, that serial cable adapter is so baller, I'm a systems/network admin right now and I actually use serial every single day, that thing is so cool. Imagine configuring a switch from that thing.
Ahhhhh, old tactile phones I miss them. You basically had to drag my blackberry from my hands. I loved that thing, so I would have adored this back in the day. Also your dad sounds like my Mum (R.I.P.) it took forever to get her to text back, especially on quick easy reply stuff.
It's AWESOME that they put in the composer feature instead of being like "this is a business phone ,do you think anybody is gonna sit in their spare time and make music ? " So cool !! also , I was not ready for the unfold !
I think Nokia was also known back in the day for letting people compose their own ringtones if they wanted. I heard a lot of their older phones had this feature built in
Being able to compose a ringtone was a big deal for the same reason polyphonic ringtones were. It allowed you to immediately know that it is your phone ringing. It was practical and made the phone more of a personal device rather than just a utility. And it was incredibly cool at the time to hear a recent song as a ringtone of a phone.
As someone in AV I can tell you it's crazy to see a 20+ year old phone with rs-232 we still use this protocol in so many applications. It's primitive but solid!
Hello. It's also used in router and switch debug and BIOS debug, though within the past several years this is often an RJ-45 port used with a transceiver that outputs to DB9. Data collection about UEFI modules, MRC training, CPU stepping, SPD data in the RAM population, etc. Whereas in routers and L3 switches it is used to load a secure configuration before placing the device on a network where it is subject to potential exploitation and infiltration in a zero-trust modeled environment. I think that it would be weird to see it disappear completely, given as you say it has been a reliable technology. It still has many applications in engineering.
rs232 has been around long before this and seeing rs232 on a device of this era is pretty much the only interface you could expect, irda is just rs232 over infrared, the palm pilot dock was rs232, most dot matrix printers from the 80's were rs232, every single modem made before about 1998 was entirely rs232 based (the later ones speak 8n1 serial just like a real modem but never actually convert to rs232 internally and do it all in software), it's been around since the 60's.
Yeah. It's crazy how well supported it still is! You can automate testing with different equipment that was made like 30 years apart and it still works like a charm.
4:00 Serial is weird. You only really need transmit, receive, and ground: three wires. The 9-pin connectors have a bunch of extra pins for other things that aren't just data transfer. DCD/DTE so that computers and modems/serial terminals (how you hooked up a keyboard and monitor before, ya know, computers output anything at all other than text) could identify themselves, ring notification on a modem, etc. This being a device only needs those three connections.
Technically you can get away with 2 wires... clock and data. I2C. But I think that wasn't out 'til the mid-90s, and even then it was more of a Motorola thing. Still used today in lots of stuff. But it might've been doing something similar with 3 wires.
@@MattExzy I2C still requires ground line too, and it came out in the 1980s. There is also the 1-Wire bus, developed by Dallas/Maxim, which only needs 2 wires, but it was very new back then. Also, we shouldn't forget the background: RS-232 was the main interface standard for many decades back then, and sticking to it does have its benefits.
@@AndrejaKostic RS-232 is still taught and used, together with I2C, in many embedded applications. For consumers, it is pretty much dead, but for developers and tinkerers, it's still there doing its job every day. And while the PHY and DATA layers are pretty much gone, many USB devices are actually serial devices in disguise. If it ain't broken, don't fix it I guess.
My dad on the other mocks me because i dont have viber and refuses to switch platforms and gets into arguments about the merits of viber vs messenger 😂
I was promoted to an IT Manager back in 1996 (I was just 26) and was given a brand new BMW 325i coupe and that phone and let me tell you now, using Intellisync sucked using that RS-232C serial cable. What a time though!
This actually kinda' made me tear up remembering how the tech was much fun and quirkier back in the day. Especially when you opened up the Composer. It reminded me of my 3310 and how I used to try to make theme songs from TV shows and movies as a ringtone. Great and nostalgic video! x) Keep up the good work!
I had no idea this kind of technology existed in 1996. I was blown away just that it's even had a real full pixel array. I figured it was like a digital character away. What a high quality device.
just find a way to get into a military RND station without being seen and youll realize why this is. technology doesnt evolve in a straight line - and human lives can buy some pretty cool stuff.. hence ww2 and Die Glocke
Dude i remember that in 1996. It was unreal back in the days that something so small was doing all those things. Back then internet wasn't even a thing yet and not everyone has a cellphone. Good days.
I saw this in a videogame magazine back in 1996, Edge Magazine used to have a technology section. Back then I thought this phone looked amazing. It's so interesting seeing this video after forgetting this existed for decades.
My parents had a 5390 at one point. It survived falling out of a huge pickup truck (the kind with steps to get in the cab) multiple times. I love how this thing basically has the Mario Paint music feature as an app, so you can make your own ring tones!
