Nokia is probably best remembered through its camera
phones – Lumia 1020, 808 PureView, N8 and others still
carry a spark of nostalgia for long-time fans. But it all
started with the Nokia 7650, the first model from the
Finnish company to have an integrated digital camera.
It shot 640 x 480 px stills, which were recorded to the
internal 4MB of memory. Before taking a photo, you had
to slide open the keyboard as the lens normally sat
protected behind the slider. This ruined the sleek (for the
time) form factor somewhat, but the novelty of it was
undeniable.
The 7650 had an advantage over competing designs – the
Ericsson T68 (which we’ve covered previously) had a
camera add-on, which was purchased separately. That
add-on also had a simple optical viewfinder, which
wasn’t great to use. In contrast, the Nokia came with the
camera hardware integrated and could display a live view
from it on the screen.
That screen measured 2.1” in diagonal, had 176 x 208 px
resolution and was capable of displaying 4,096 colors.
This was fairly good for the time and it did its job well.
Besides your own shots, you could view photos sent to
you over email or the relatively new MMS. This phone
boasted 2.5G connectivity, aka GPRS, which could
achieve speeds of 40.2 kilobits per second.
The Nokia 7650 was also the first mass-market
smartphone to run the Symbian OS – the 9210
Communicator was the first, technically, but that was a
niche device. Also, it used the Series 80 UI instead of the
more familiar Series 60, which made its debut with the
7650.
The OS ran on a single-core 32-bit processor (based on
ARM9), which was clocked at 104 MHz. Users could
sideload applications written in Java or ones for the older
EPOC operating system (which was Symbian’s
predecessor).
But let’s get back to the camera, which brought us to this
phone in the first place. A single 640 x 480 px photo
(captured in a JPG format) took about 33 kilobytes of
space. This is quite heavy compression, but remember that
you only had 4 MB of storage to work with (and no
memory card slot). There were two additional shooting
modes – portrait (meant for caller ID photos) and Night
(which boosted the sensor’s ISO).
When viewing photos you’ve taken, you could zoom in to
get a closer look and rotate them if needed. Pretty soon,
however, you would have to connect the phone to your
computer to download the photos and free up some room
for new ones.
When the Nokia 7650 was introduced in Barcelona in
November 2001 then-CEO Jorma Ollila called it the most
important launch of the year. Indeed, Symbian helped
Nokia conquer the smartphone market and its passion for
photography was a key driver. This is why the 7650
deserves a place in the mobile Hall of Fame.
Nokia 3650
The phone came out in late June 2002 and cost a hefty
€600, cutting edge technology always comes at a price.
The following year the more affordable Nokia 3650 was
introduced – it dropped the slider design but featured
nearly the same hardware (same camera, screen and
processor, but now there was a memory card slot).
PS. as with other phones we’ve reminisced about in the
Flashback series, the Nokia 7650 was featured in a big
Hollywood movie – two, in fact, Minority Report and
Tomb Rader:

So?

Why do we need this?