Nokia Communicator

» see nokia.com/communicator as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

turkey was a nokia country in the 2000s. by 2004 almost everyone i knew at university had some nokia in their pocket, mostly the cheap 3310 or the candy-bar 6230 tier. the communicator was a different category. it was the phone the business uncle owned. you would see one open on a cafe table in ankara and it looked like a small laptop running an email client. the clamshell would fold out and there was a real qwerty keyboard under it. the device cost about a thousand dollars at launch, which in 2001 turkish lira was an absurd number for a phone. i never owned one. i never seriously considered owning one.

the line ran from august 1996 with the nokia 9000 communicator. it moved through the 9110 in 1998, the 9210 in 2001, the 9210i and 9290 in 2002, then the 9300 and 9500 in 2004. the e90 communicator in 2007 was the last device in the family. the os started as a pen/geos derivative on the 9000 and 9110, then moved to symbian series 80 starting with the 9210, which is when the line became a recognizable smartphone in the modern sense. the e90 shipped with symbian 9.2.

nokia killed the brand quietly. the iphone was revealed in january 2007 and the e90 was unveiled at 3gsm world congress a month later. inside nokia the e90 was already understood to be the end of the format. the e75 in 2009 and the e7 in 2010 were marketed as spiritual successors, but neither carried the communicator name and both had a slide-out keyboard rather than the clamshell. by then nokia was busy trying to figure out what to do about the iphone and the answer turned out to be nothing that worked.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually was ~

the communicator was a phone you opened sideways. the outside had a number keypad and a regular phone display. the inside, when you flipped it open like a laptop, had a wide 640x200 lcd plus a full qwerty keyboard. the 9000 in 1996 shipped with email and a real web browser running over a 9600 bps gsm data link. it had a calendar app and a working terminal. for 1996 that was the entire pocket computer concept arriving five years before anyone called it a smartphone.

the keyboard was the point. nothing else on the market in 1996 let you type a real email from a moving train. by the 9500 in 2004 it had a color screen and wifi. it could run third-party symbian apps that were mostly business productivity tools. blackberry was building the same category for north american corporate buyers, but in europe the communicator was the device. middle east and east asia followed the european pattern more than the american one.

~ the day it ended ~

there was no announcement. the e90 simply got no successor. nokia turned its attention to the n95 and then to the n900 and the meego project, none of which carried the communicator dna in any obvious way. the brand quietly stopped appearing on any new nokia hardware after 2008. by 2012 nokia was a phone company being eaten by android from below and the iphone from above, and the communicator was already a museum object.

~ the long tail ~

the keyboard phone idea kept being reinvented after the communicator died. the blackberry passport in 2014 and the blackberry priv in 2015 both tried it. the planet computers gemini in 2018 and the f(x)tec pro1 in 2019 came later, each selling to a tiny audience that still wanted a real keyboard in a pocket. none of them moved units like the communicator did at its peak. the format the communicator owned for eleven years has never really come back, and the closest modern equivalent is a folding android phone with a software keyboard, which is not the same thing at all.

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