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Jul 2, 2009

Top 5 Mobile Products over half a decade

At the time, mobile devices were becoming PCs worthy of note, and it's been my job to champion handhelds as tiny personal computers, not just as extensions of the 130-year-old telephone system.

That used to be a fringe idea. Now it's mainstream. The objects formerly known as cell phones are, increasingly, handheld computers with a voice phone tacked on to them—take the iPhone 3GS, for instance. The next generation of "cell phones" I see coming out soon may finally do away with the traditional, circuit-switched voice calls that we've used for more than 100 years, replacing them with some sort of VoIP capability. In some ways, my first five years as a phone analyst may be my last five years as a "phone" analyst.

I haven't gotten all of my calls right. In 2006 and 2007, I shouted that "The unlocked cell-phone revolution begins now!" and tried to get people to break free of their carriers. Total failure. People love cheap phones. They're fine with iron-clad contracts and carriers holding them in a vice-grip, as long as they can have cheap phones. Lesson learned.

On some things, we were just ahead of the game. With Jamie Lendino, I helped launch Smart Device Central back in 2006, with a mission to review (among other things) lots of mobile apps. The app reviews flopped. On some reviews, we got tens of page views. Now, of course, our mobile app reviews are huge.

The difference in that case is the iPhone, which gets me to the real topic of this column: The five most important products I've reviewed over the past five years. (In my next column, I'll discuss the five most interesting failures. Then I'll stop congratulating myself until 2014.)

The Motorola RAZR

When the RAZR came out in 2004, it blew my mind. It blew everyone's minds. In many ways, it was the first true "fashion phone." Yeah, sure, there was the Qualcomm Thin Phone and a few entrants before it, but the RAZR made style a major part of the mobile-phone equation. It also buoyed, then doomed Motorola. "One product can't sustain a company," I say, looking warily at Apple.

The Motorola E815

One of my favorite phones ever, Verizon's Motorola E815 got voice calling almost perfectly right. It had great reception, terrific sound quality, and a marvelous keypad; it was everything a voice phone should be. I bought one with my own money, and if I could rewrite the review today, I'd make it even more positive. As we move into a world where handheld devices become more computers than phones, it's a little sad that many phones can't surpass the kind of voice quality I heard in 2005.

The Audiovox SMT-5600

Nokia had already been making consumer-style smart phones for a year or so when this HTC model hit the market. But in my mind, the SMT-5600 set the bar for many consumer smartphone experiences to come: It heralded the rise of HTC, it was a high point for Windows Mobile, and it was a small, well-designed and stylish device. I see echoes of the SMT-5600's sleek lines in the super-successful BlackBerry Pearl lineup, for instance. And it says something tragic about Windows Mobile's lack of progress that the SMT-5600 still feels current in many ways.

The Nokia N95

The Nokia N95 had so many features when it came out in 2007, it seemed to have "dropped out of a time warp from the future." It's taken years for the mainstream to catch up to Nokia's super-powerful smartphone vision, including a 5-megapixel camera, DVD quality video, and a really good Web browser. But the N95 was also misleading, in a way—it stoked my enthusiasm for the unlocked phone market, which largely flopped over the next few years.

The Apple iPhone

From my perspective at TechnoUptodate, the iPhone is the most important handheld of the past five years. The iPhone finally changed the conversation to be no longer about devices, but about apps—not about gadgets, but about platforms. Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, and Symbian had been trying to do that for years, but just as it took the iPod to popularize digital music, it took Apple's marketing brilliance to popularize mobile apps. The iPhone has set the tone for the next five years of mobile coverage at TechnoUptoDate.com.

These are just five picks. I could have picked five other phones. I'd love to hear in what you think are the most important phones of the past five years, so go ahead and let me know in the comments.

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