Nokia still holds a special place in the hearts of many people to this day, especially for most young people today, as the Finnish company’s phones were dominant during their childhood and teenage years. With the wide variety of these phones back then, they left an indelible mark. Before its collapse at the end of the first decade of the millennium, Nokia was undoubtedly the largest phone company in the world, where it controlled 50% of the global phone market . This dominance gave it the courage to offer unique designs for its phones that challenged traditional concepts and reflected the spirit of innovation for which it was known. True, touch screens were not the dominant technology at the time, and the race for screen sizes seemed ridiculous, but that gave Nokia space for creativity and innovation. In this article, we will review some of the weirdest and most shocking designs that, while not always commercially successful, left an unforgettable mark on their owners.
The Weirdest Phones Nokia Introduced
Nokia N91 Phone
The phone was released in 2005 and marketed as a “music phone” as it featured speakers from Harman Kardon and had a 3.5mm headphone jack, as well as dedicated tools and buttons for media control. To this day, it seems just like a phone with a new idea that sets it apart from Nokia models at that time. However, the really strange – and I want you to grasp this – is that it had a hard disk drive (HDD) instead of using traditional flash memory for data storage. Yes! Nokia collaborated with Toshiba to provide the N91 phone with a mechanical hard disk drive, making it the smallest HDD in the world and functioning similarly to computer hard drives with disks and needles for data reading and writing. It was easy to hear the moving parts inside when using the phone in a quiet environment. Not only that, this hard drive was available in a 4GB capacity and could be replaced with an 8GB one. This experience was not repeated in later Nokia models, as the company seemed to realize that having a hard drive with moving and sensitive parts in a mobile phone was not a good idea!
Nokia 7600 Phone
This phone was released in 2003, following the great success of Nokia’s first phones with color screens. However, instead of the traditional rectangular shape, the Nokia 7600 came with a design closer to a square with two sharp corners and two curved ones. And certainly, using the phone required the use of both hands due to its strange shape and the distribution of buttons on either side of the screen. The phone did not achieve high sales, but it was not intended for mass market sales. It could be said that it was closer to an accessory or an art piece rather than a practical phone.
Nokia 3650 Phone
At first glance, this phone looks very similar to the beloved Nokia 6630, using the same rectangular design in the upper part and a semi-circular shape on the bottom. Although Nokia considered the 3650 as a smartphone because it operated on the Symbian Series 60 system, using it was not easy at all due to its strange keyboard. It seemed to be an attempt to imitate the way numbers were distributed on old phones that used a rotating dial.
Nokia N-Gage Phone
Influenced by the huge success of the portable gaming console “Nintendo Game Boy Advance” and considering that mobile phones usually attract a large user base, Nokia decided to release a competing phone that combines the features of a phone and a portable game console at the same time. The result was the N-Gage phone and its successor, the N-Gage QD. Both offered an impressive collection of games, including a version of Call of Duty. However, overall, the device was bad as a gaming console and worse as a phone. So the company quickly stopped its production after disappointing sales that did not exceed 3 million units (compared to 81 million units of the Game Boy Advance).
Nokia 7280 Phone
This phone was released in late 2004, and for some reason, its design resembled cosmetics tools! To the extent that it was known at the time as “The Lipstick Phone,” and its design was based on black and red as the main colors of the phone. The cloth piece bearing the name Nokia and appearing from its side added to its resemblance to cosmetics tools more than to being a phone as well. With its very small dimensions (115×32×19 mm), this phone lacked a traditional keyboard. Instead, it relied on a rotating ring to input numbers and letters, which also functioned as the four arrow keys for directions.
Nokia 7700 Phone
While this phone never actually reached the markets, it deserves mention in this list because it was supposed to be Nokia’s first smartphone focusing primarily on media. The phone announced in 2003 had a large 3.5-inch touch-sensitive screen, with a touch that relied on pressing the screen rather than dragging, which was still a breakthrough at the time. It did not have an integrated keyboard, but a keyboard that appeared on the screen. It was also supposed to include a full web browser similar to computers. However, this phone was never released in the markets, but a similar model, the Nokia 7710, was later released in 2004.
