Mobile Gazette is 5
10th
October 2008
It is Mobile Gazette's fifth birthday! We
kicked off with a single item looking at the wacky Nokia
7600 in September 2003, followed by a very soft
launch on 10th October 2003 when we examined the Motorola
MPx200 Windows clamshell.
Other early handsets we looked at were the Siemens
MC60, Samsung
E700, Nokia
3200, Nokia
N-Gage, LG
G7050, Sony
Ericsson P900, Panasonic
X70, O2 X1,
NEC E616
and the Sendo
X. Out of this whole bunch, the E700 and P900 stand
out as devices that you still might sometimes see in
use today, the rest are pretty much forgotten.
When we started out, there were only a few dozen
different types of phone generally on sale in most markets.
Since then, we have covered about 800 new handsets and
even then we haven't been able to fully keep up with
the huge number of mobile phones that have been released
over the past few years.
Back in 2003, colour displays and cameras were just
starting to be common features. Most phones had GPRS,
a few even supported 3G. But MP3 players and expandable
memory were a rarity, and even Bluetooth took some time
to become accepted as a standard. As for WiFi and GPS..
well, frankly those type of features were pretty much
inconceivable back then.
Why did Mobile Gazette get started in the
first place? Simply because back in 2003 there were
very few sites dedicated to mobile phones, MobileBurn,
GSMArena
and PhoneArena
being three excellent early sites that are still around
today, but we were looking for something with a different
perspective - a site that could be useful to those who
worked in the mobile industry, businesses and enthusiasts from
the UK.
So, armed with a vague sort of vision as to what
we wanted and a sprinkling of humour, we created a site
that weighed up the pros and cons of everything we covered,
tried to mix the unusual with the mainstream and make
something that was a little different from anything
else on offer. And that's still the same mix that Mobile
Gazette uses today.
It's been a fun five years, and it is time to say
a big thank you to our thousands of regular
readers, our army of press contacts and occasional contributors
and all those people who have put up with our bad spelling
over the years.
We will have some special "retro" articles
coming out over the next few weeks, slotted in between
the traditionally busy pre-Christmas announcements.
We hope you can stick around for those.. and indeed
we hope that you'll be reading our next birthday missive
in another five years or so..
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