It is June 2002, and Nokia has just released a device that feels like it fell off the back of a spaceship. The 7650 is a landmark for three reasons: it’s the first Nokia with a built-in camera, the first with a colour screen, and the first to run the Symbian OS (Series 60), making it a “smartphone” in every sense of the word. To use it, you slide the top half of the phone up to reveal the keypad and, more importantly, the VGA camera lens hidden on the back. It’s a chunky bit of kit at 154g, and it’s about as pocketable as a small dictionary, but for the £500 price tag, you’re buying the most advanced piece of consumer tech on the high street.
Technically, the 176 x 208 pixel, 4,096-colour display is the best we’ve ever seen, making the grainy 640 x 480 photos you snap actually look half-decent until you move them to a PC. Under the hood, it’s powered by a 104 MHz ARM9 processor with 4MB of internal memory—which sounds loads until you realise there’s no expansion slot, so you’ll be constantly deleting photos of your lunch to make room for a new ringtone. The Symbian interface is a revelation, allowing for actual multitasking and third-party apps, though finding a GPRS connection that doesn’t drop out is still the national sport. The battery life is the Achilles’ heel, struggling to last a full day if you’re actually using that fancy screen, but as a glimpse of the future where our phones are also our cameras and computers, the 7650 is the undisputed pioneer.