2004 saw some peculiar-looking phones hit the market. Manufacturers sometimes display unfinished devices to garner interest from networks and retailers; others push technological boundaries just for kicks. One such strange-looking device was Nokia 7610's keyboard layout which seemed odd at first, yet proved very capable for its time.
Samsung also attempted its hand at manufacturing a flip phone with their SCH-V200 model, and theirs differed greatly from anything on the market at that time. Instead of folding down beneath its keypad and opening from above to reveal keyboard and display. This slim design proved very popular among customers.
Motorola made history when they released their Razr V3 clamshell phone - it was the thinnest flip phone available at that time and looked cool to boot! It sold millions worldwide and multiple variants were produced over time with each having slightly different looks while maintaining that classic thin profile design.
Palm Treo 650 was another highly regarded device that combined features of both PDAs and cell phones into one device, featuring a touchscreen interface for email, faxes, a web browser, digital camera connections and battery life of three to four days between charges - it became widely popular until BlackBerries came along and overtook its popularity.
Sony Ericsson had long been making Symbian smartphones, with their flagship model in 2004 being the P910. This device featured an alphanumeric keypad which could be opened to reveal a QWERTY keyboard, with multiple ways of text input including T9 text input with number keys, handwriting recognition on touch screens or a traditional QWERTY keyboard. Furthermore, this was also equipped with two gigabytes of external storage for music playback through its built-in Walkman MP3 player and two gigabytes of built-in Walkman MP3 playback memory - providing another layer of flexibility to text input/text input options and writing experience!
Nokia attempted their hand at being fashion phone makers with the quirky Nokia 3220, featuring LEDs on its edges which flashed various colors and patterns when someone called. Although 3G customers weren't abundant at that point, Nokia took this venture head-on nonetheless.
Panasonic began looking dated by 2004, as evidenced by their X300. This computer featured a flip-out display like that found in digital camcorders, was capable of recording video, but lacked internal storage capacity for recording or playing back videos, and featured an awkward keyboard layout - however it was replaced later by what was supposed to be more serious product but actually looked worse than before.
