8 votes

When phones were fun: Samsung's "Matrix Phone" (2003)

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  1. Greg
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    Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long time... Fun though it is, this Samsung always had a little bit of a "mall ninja" air to it, even at the time. The Nokia 8110 was chosen for the first...

    Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long time... Fun though it is, this Samsung always had a little bit of a "mall ninja" air to it, even at the time. The Nokia 8110 was chosen for the first film because the filmmakers thought it looked like what a hacker would use; the Samsung was injection moulded to look stereotypically hacker-y and imitate a film prop. It was an interesting piece of kit, and the marketing tie in was definitely a big win for Samsung, but actually owning one of these was a step too far for most people.

    That said, my favourite phone, to this day, is the Nokia 8910 which is one of the only other handsets I know of to feature a working pop up mechanism. The 8110 didn't actually do that, it was just rigged with elastic by the props department to (successfully!) make it look cooler.

    Sadly I doubt my old 8910 is still usable on modern networks - it was very obsolete even when I bought it around 2008, but the build quality was phenomenal and the design was a genuine conversation starter; I'd love to see a modern design in this vein.

    6 votes