Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “When Phones Were Fun: AOL Mobile Communicator (2001)”.
This video is sponsored by noom in 2021, the notion of only going online when you want to sounds like a vacation in our current era of personal area networks and connected convection ovens. It takes a lot more effort to sign off than it does to log on, but 20 years ago the opposite was the norm. Going online was an intentional process. You sat down at your family’s big beige gateway or packard bell. You asked your brother to hang up the phone, and then you dialed up your internet service provider, prompting an acoustic cascade that to this day never fails to get my dopamine flowing.
If you were like me, and about 20 million others, the isp on the other side of that techno concerto, was america online welcome, which had spent the prior seven years bombarding every mailbox and retail counter in the united states with enough free trial disks to amass a Market value of over 200 billion dollars at its peak america online can do all that, but aol wasn’t content to stay synonymous with the desktop internet. Instead, it wanted to redefine what it meant to be online by selling a device that would live alongside the phone on your belt so that you would never have to be offline. If the aol mobile communicator looks familiar to some viewers of my vintage. That’S no surprise! It is, in essence, a re-badged blackberry, the first blackberry, in fact, to be a bonafide hit for the canadian manufacturer that in the year 2000 was still called research in motion or rim. It was called the interactive pager 950 and it was extremely limited compared to the blackberries that would come to dominate the next decade. In fact, it didn’t even have voice capability, which technically means it doesn’t belong in this series about phones. But i won’t think too hard about that, if you don’t, but as brilliantly described in the book, losing the signal which i will link in the description, the 950 put blackberry on the map, precisely because it didn’t try to do everything instead, rim reveled in its limitations And made what it could the best mobile email device possible it squeezed in a full keyboard optimized for thumbs, with a metal dome beneath each key to give it that signature, click to save space numbers and functions were duplicated on some keys and instead of a d-pad To navigate the interface rim included a jog dial inspired by the track wheel of co-founder mike lazaridis’s vcr remote, even keeping it powered up was simple. When the juice ran low, a top-up was just two dollars away at your local radio shack. Who could sell you? A new double-a battery that would power the device for three weeks thanks to the more efficient than expected intel cpu at the heart of the unit, scotty, would have been proud today. The blackberry 950 is rare enough to be prohibitively expensive. So i’m grateful that an anonymous friend of the channel loaned me this compact branded rebadge. This is important because it shows what the software looked like before aol came into the picture, in addition to slinging mobile email and bbm messages, the 950 offered personal information manager functions like a calendar and an address book.
It functions whose absence would not go unnoticed when this blackberry morphed into its aol equivalent and showing you that titular device is also a fun opportunity to kind of pull back the curtain on just how involved a process doing a video like this can be at times The first aol mobile communicator – i was able to ebay, arrived in great shape, resplendent in that translucent, cobalt blue. That could have come from no other era than the late 90s, but it wouldn’t power up. Even once i swapped out the included double-a for a fresh one. Well, a quick google unearthed the blog of someone named caspen who’d done his own, revisit on this device back in 2016 and uncovered what this old house might call a bit of a surprise, an additional lithium-ion battery inside the unit, some more googling uncovered the user manual, Which told me that when that pack was depleted, it could take a new double-a battery six to eight hours to bring it back to life and sure enough. After just a little while, i was greeted with a plaintive bleep from the onboard tweeter and a lock screen. Yup, if you’re the kind of ebayer who sells a working product but fails to mention it’s locked behind a code that you can’t remember. Well, don’t be that kind of ebayer to rim’s credit. Not even inserting a pin into the reset hole on the back side would get me past this prompt, so it was back to ebay for several months, more of fruitless searches.
Until i finally came upon this new old stock example, oh – and we get 700 free hours see it looks like we got a duracell that expired march, 2004, [ Laughter ]. Now it’s even easier to stay in touch because you can send instant messages and emails anytime from anywhere without a pc. It’S a better and more polite way to communicate in restaurants, the library, theaters, etc. Save money unlimited access to long distance, even international, even even international email folks, but while i loved the privilege of unboxing a 20 year old product for the first time, all that time sitting at total discharge had completely ruined the power supply with not even the hottest Of batteries prompting so much as a peep, nothing is going to happen, nothing’s going to happen for a little bit. I know why. I know why we are not going to lose hope, so i busted out the ifixit repair kit and a couple of torx screws later.
I was inside the thing staring this surprisingly large lithium-ion battery right in the face. It didn’t take a big leap of imagination, of course, for me to realize. Maybe i can maybe i can swap out the battery a few minutes and thankfully no lithium-ion fire fountains later. I finally had myself a working mobile communicator, all right, hello friend wow, that only took eight months, [ Laughter ], the six line. Grayscale lcd was immaculate.
It’S blue backlight, recalling the old timex indiglo watches i last wore probably around the last time. This display was powered up on some qc bench somewhere in waterloo. Now, while i wouldn’t have as much luck finding a network connection in 2021 without an aol, email or instant message, account, there’s not much, i would have been able to do anyway because remember that’s all the mobile communicator could do remember those extra blackberry features the calendar.
The address book, the calculator none of them – made the jump to the aol device, even reviews of the time called this out, and it seemed a weird oversight so to find out why i called up frank, sander, currently senior executive at nationwide marketing group, but 20 years Ago he was a vp at aol and general manager of the team that launched the mobile communicator and what he told me would bring the short life of the first aol mobile device into sharp focus that story. After this. This video is sponsored by noom the health platform that taught me something new, literally the first minute after i opened it see from the first week spent in lockdown and the apartment i started not so lovingly calling the fish tank back in march 2020. My health has waned and folks, i know i’m not alone.
Nume taught me that in this case, that quarantine period is what’s called a trigger and it’s part of something called a behavior chain, one that, in my case, leads to stress eating well noon, combines human coaches. Psychology and science to empower people like me and you to break those chains and take control back nume is a whole new way of thinking about your health, because learning not dieting is what leads to change and noon gives you a whole toolbox of resources to make That change last, it’s quick and easy to create your custom plan, so click the link in the description to take your free, noom evaluation. Today, thanks to noom for sponsoring this ears, video aol, vp, frank satner reminded me that back at the turn of the century, almost nobody had experience optimizing software for mobile data devices, because not a lot of mobile devices existed.
So while aol did a very good job, rewriting the blackberry 950s interface for the mobile communicator, that work used up almost the entirety of the device’s two megabytes of onboard memory. So it could only do email and instant messaging, because that’s all the software aol could fit on the device. The way satner puts it.
Aol had found itself in the tricky position of shipping a feature, not a full product. That being said, i remember what i was like 20 years ago and for me a fully fledged aol addict. When this launched in november of 2000, the lack of a calendar would barely have even registered.
I mean email on my hip. My aim buddy list with me all the time, complete with away messages and cheery notification tones when my friends logged on awesome. So why didn’t this product take off? Well, it seemed like a lot of would-be buyers had the same problem.
I did. I didn’t. Have the dough, according to my new favorite website, radioshackcatalogs.com simple, one-way pagers, like the one i carried at the time, cost between 50 and 80., with an annual subscription fee of something like 100 bucks, the aol mobile communicator launched at 329.95 for the device and then 19.95 A month for the service, that’s on top of aol’s monthly, unlimited plan, which was another 21.95 a month. The device price would come down the following august to 99 bucks, but when it did, the service price went up to about 30 a month and, unfortunately, for aol that same summer of 2001 is when mobile phone prices started to come down.
Thanks to generous subsidies from wireless carriers eager to coax people on to their new 2g cellular networks, i turned out to be one of those subscribers. I skipped the mobile communicator and for 130 and a plan of 45 bucks a month got a fully featured cell phone. Instead and while sprint’s cdma network was positively pokey by today’s standards, its maximum data rates were 18 times faster than the older mobitex network. The communicator ran on now.
Mobotex deserves the praise, it gets for reliability and robustness, but it also had problems keeping up with the instant part of instant messaging. It just wasn’t built for the kind of data rich future. We ended up getting and neither was the mobile communicator to its credit. Aol saw that future coming thanks to its aol anywhere initiative.
I already had aim included as part of the wireless web package on my new phone, seeing the writing on the wall. The company stopped taking orders for the mobile communicator in july 2002 and instead offered would-be buyers a 100 instant rebate toward the t-mobile sidekick, which launched in the fall of that same year, see previous episode. The sidekick featured broad email compatibility and aol instant messaging baked right into the os features. That would also come to blackberry palm and every other smartphone of note right up until aol became more remember when than must have goodbye today, most don’t remember, aol’s abortive in-house blackberry at all.
Some who do like frank satner, take it as a learning opportunity, a reminder that the market can move fast and in his words, you can get steamrolled in a hurry. As for me, i tend to see it in a more generous if ominous light, aol predicted a world where everyone would want to be online all the time it just didn’t foresee the lengths to which that obsession would extend as a commenter. On the flyer, talk forums asked an aol, mobile communicator owner at the time. Do you really use the im capability during the day while it does sound slick? I don’t think i would want my buddy list having 24 7 access to me.
I get enough messages from friends and family at work. Whenever i have an im app loaded now, i just leave it off unless i’m trying to get in touch with someone now that right there got to be honest, that sounds like a world. I wouldn’t mind going back to special thanks to frank santner, for taking the time to talk with me about his time at aol to the anonymous donor of that compact blackberry 950 and to the immense list of writers and reporters whose work i’ve referenced for this video. All of them are linked in the description below.
As always, no company covered in this article was given input concerning its editorial content, copy approval rights or an early preview. The loan sponsor of this video is nume until next time. I’Ve been michael fisher thanks for watching and stay mobile.
My friends .