Five failed mobile devices

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Microsoft recently announced it would be killing off its Kin devices, and Emblaze declared a while back that its ELSE Intuition smartphone would never see the light of day, but what other innovative devices have been killed off before being given much of a chance?
Here we take a look at five other mobile devices that were a little bit revolutionary, each in its own way, but which sadly never went on sale.
The Samsung T700
The clamshell device (codenamed ‘Drama’) which looked like a toilet seat when closed was announced back in 2003, and while it was not a big step forward from a technology standpoint, its unusual form factor and design – made to look like a make-up – and features including a calorie calculator were expressly designed for the female market. Who, it turns out, where not in the slightest bit interested. Fickle bunch.

Samsung Watch Phone
Though the idea of embedding mobile phones into watches is certainly not new, dating back to the days of Dick Tracy, no firm has ever successfully managed to make one a hit, although many have tried and failed. Some are still trying and failing as we type.

Samsung’s Watch Phone was the firm’s first attempt at making a mobile timepiece, but sadly, it just wasn’t good enough for the big time. The good news, however, is that the Samsung S9110, the firm’s second attempt at GSM watchmaking, is still available for around $900. We’ll keep a close watch on it for you all.

Samsung F520
Featuring an innovative sensitive touchpad and dual slider design, Samsung’s F520 was a dual slider phone with a full QWERTY keypad and conventional key texting, which could be opened in two ways, a promising hybrid.
The touch pad could even purportedly “precisely recognize human touch.”

The F520 was also one of Samsung’s Ultra Edition offerings which sported the firm’s new touch UI.
Sadly, however, it seems the device was not enough to touch consumer hearts, and Samsung pulled the plug on its device.
Siemens PenPhone
This clunky looking thing was the first mobile device fashioned as a pen, a tri-band mobile phone concept with all the usual trimmings like contacts, calendar and messaging.  So funky was this phone concept that Siemens also enabled it with a handwriting recognition mechanism.

“…thanks to the PenPhone’s integrated handwriting recognition facility, they can write their SMS messages directly into the mobile phone. Whatever they use to write on, the PenPhone will interpret their hand movements as written words and translate them directly into the SMS editor…It is not yet certain whether the PenPhone will be going into serial production.” How retro!
Nokia 7700
The 7700 was Nokia’s very first attempt to create a touch-screen smartphone and indeed was expected to be the first multimedia smartphone from Nokia, and the first smartphone to use the Series 90 GUI on Symbian OS.
Features included a “visual radio,” a touch-screen colour LCD with a resolution of 640 x 320 pixels and supporting 65,000 colors, 64 MB of internal memory and a MultiMedia Card slot.
It also included an integrated VGA camera with a maximum resolution of 640 x 480 pixels, Bluetooth, USB and Nokia’s proprietary Pop-Port interface for connectivity purposes. Moreover, it was Nokia’s first device with a DVB-H antenna.

The Nokia 7700 was cancelled in mid-2004. Several theories for the cancellation were put forward at the time: Nokia was refocusing on ‘normal’ phones due to decreasing market share; the phone would be too late to market; and the phone was unattractive and bulky. It also featured ‘sidetalking’ like the N-Gage, a feature that had attracted a great deal of negative publicity.
As you may have noticed, most of these devices were unique and possibly even too unique. If we were to be kind we’d say most were ahead of their time and although they never went on sale, they did pave the way for other more successful phones later.
Will the same happen with the first NFC Nokia device today, after Nokia has announced that “All smartphones we release in 2011 will have NFC.”
History, it appears,  keeps repeating itself.