Nokia
7110

The Nokia 7110 is primarily known as being the first WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) phone. It was unveiled at the GSM World Congress in Cannes, France in February 1999. WAP was a rudimentary way of connecting to the internet from a mobile phone to get access to various types of content. At the time, Nokia gave examples, including “news, weather reports, stock prices, e-mail, flight schedules or wireless banking and electronic commerce”. It also announced a partnership with CNN to provide content via a CNN Mobile “wireless news service”. The 7110 was the first phone to use Nokia's new Series 40 user interface which went on to power over 200 of Nokia's subsequent phones. At launch, it supported the WAP 1.2 browser. There was an expectation it would get upgraded to WAP 2.0 but this never happened. Another key feature of the Nokia 7110  was the spring-loaded “slide cover”, which could be snapped open by pressing a button on the back of the phone near the antenna. The design was considered to be biased toward right-handed users as the button was perfectly positioned for the right index finger. This spring-loaded design feature was popularised by a bespoke version of the Nokia 8110 featured in the first Matrix movie.  However, this capability was never actually available on the commercial variant of the 8110, so the 7110 is sometimes confused for being the “Matrix Phone” when it was actually a modified 8110 that featured in the film. The first prototype version of the 7110 had a black casing and the initial production run had the game 'Pong' installed which was subsequently removed due to licensing issues and replaced with a tennis game.  This phone was also the only Nokia device to feature the multifunction NaviRoller – a small clickable roller located below the screen with keys on either side to select items from the dynamic on-screen menu. Rather than just allowing users to scroll through the menu and phonebook, they could also click on the roller to make a selection. This had the added benefit of making it easier to navigate web pages accessed via the WAP service. User interface designer, Christian Lindholm talks about this in his book, Mobile Usability. Nokia did not persevere with the NaviRoller, one reason being that it became a magnet for dust and dirt which over time made it unreliable. The phone is also notable for being one of the first commercially available handsets to support T9 predictive text input, a technology developed by Tegic and licensed by Nokia. The antenna design on the Nokia 7110 was done before the days of active antenna tuning so optimising it to offer the best performance in the multiple use cases offered by the phone was critical. Before the 7110, the primary use case focused on holding a phone to your head and talking into it. The 7110 added extra complexity because it could be used with the slider open or closed. Furthermore, the phone could also be used for 'single-hand browsing” with the slider open. This new scenario had to be taken into account to optimise the radio and antenna performance. At the time this was a very novel use case and the 7110 is arguably one of the first devices used in this manner. These days, it’s the dominant mode of use for a phone.