Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “When Phones Were Fun: Samsung’s “Matrix Phone” (2003)”.
Stylized earpiece snaps open to answer calls with speed and conviction.. That’S all I’ve ever wanted.. It’S the dawn of a new century.. China launches its first manned space.
Mission., The human genome is finally sequenced. And in North America, over 50 million people, myself included, lose power for the better part of a day due in part to a software. Bug. In short, technology has woven its way into so many facets of our lives. That movies, like The Matrix Reloaded, are coming out to critique and yes consumerize, that infestation. The year is 2003..
The device is the Samsung Matrix phone., And this is episode, one of When Phones Were Fun. (, upbeat music ). It’S my distinct pleasure to welcome you to my new series and I’m not gon na talk like that.
Hi friends welcome to episode, one of When Phones Were Fun. And I just wanted to quickly clarify the title.. Don’T get me wrong. I still love my smartphones., But you’ve got to admit for the past few years. The design language of the whole category has gotten pretty stale. Yep.
The smartphone world has been shepherded by the twin forces of software design and economic pragmatism into an endless sea of slightly varied rectangles.. That’S one of the reasons I’m so excited for the foldable revolution. And if you look at the experimentation and the risks being taken in that space, you get a taste of what it was like to buy. Your phones in the first decade of the 21st century.
No form factor was too wild, no concept too alien.. It was the Wild West of design. And even if you couldn’t afford to buy most of these handsets like I couldn’t it was an unreal amount of fun. Just to watch from the sidelines. ( upbeat music ). Now, even against this backdrop, the Samsung SPH-N270 was an anomaly. See this isn’t just a throwback device.. It was envisioned and produced as a collector’s item built by a Samsung that was still on its way to becoming the global tech Goliath.
It is today.. The Samsung of 2003 still had to contend with fierce competition from companies like Nokia, which of course had famously used. The original Matrix film to make an icon of its 8110 cellphone.
Well by inking, a 100 million dollar product placement deal with Warner Brothers for the sequel Samsung, not only bumped Nokia. Out of the movie entirely. It worked together with the film’s designers to create a brand-new phone that would not only serve as a prop but could also be sold to real people for at the time real money.
Dodge that., Of course, jumping from 2003 to 2020 means the money only gets realer And I had to drop a pretty penny to secure this one from eBay.. Fortunately, though, the listing was accurate, the shipping was quick and the phone is here., So let’s unbox it., Okay, I’ve waited four or five days to get into this thing., And if I’ve waited that long, I can wait 20 more seconds to show you some of this Period-Specific accoutrement. Pin back hot hot heat.
Great times.. This is a period-specific Yankee candle smells like honeysuckle.. Oh, that takes me right back to my first apartment in Virginia Beach., And these are Samsung. Smartphones from the period will come into play later as well.. But let’s have me: stop talking.
( upbeat music ). This is what I remember seeing photographed. With historical unboxings. I always like to take a look at the retail packaging and see what they were advertising..
First of all, you have the Samsung logo, obviously, but also Samsung DigitAll.. I remember that being on a ton of their stuff for years., Everyone’s invited., And here it is., Really really good shape so far.. It is so much smaller than I expected it to be.. I mean it looks huge.. It looks like a chonk in everything in every piece of content. I have seen.. The release mechanism is ( chuckling, ) Yeah. This is gon na be fun., As you can probably tell it’s wild for me to have this thing. In my hand, 17 years after first seeing it in a Phone Scoop article on my Toshiba laptop in a college dorm room. No doubt while I was supposed to be studying. And yet in the hand it’s much lighter and much smaller than you’d expect.. As much as I lament the unimaginative state of current phone design, at least those feel substantial., The Matrix phone feels hollow with a build.
That’S mostly plastic, except for the arms that prop up the earpiece.. That said, it’s really well-designed. Hit the button and the slider snaps up with speed and conviction.
Just like it says, on the box.. I always thought it clever of Samsung not just to emulate what Nokia did, but instead reverse the slider concept. So the display is the thing protected when closed, rather than the keypad. Part of the screen stays exposed, even when the phone is closed for basic information like signal strength and battery level and caller ID. Now, just in case you’re worried about accidental exit requests.
While it’s in your pocket, there is indeed a lock slider around back., You just switch it home and boom no openings.. Now, surprisingly, despite its high price, the feature list doesn’t go much further than that. And it’s not just because it’s a 17-year-old phone. The spring.
This came out. My daily driver was the Samsung A500, which, like the Matrix phone, was exclusive to Sprint here in the US.. Actually, the N270 and A500 have a lot in common..
The TFT display at a then common resolution of 128 by 160 is, I think, the same exact panel. And the user interface has basically been ported over wholesale.. It’S actually hilarious, because Samsung also brought over the camera aesthetic for a menu option, which is here because it’s meant to showcase the optional digital camera accessory for the A500., But the Matrix phone has no camera at all detachable or otherwise. Same goes for the A500’s. Pcs Vision, web browser, which didn’t make the jump to the special edition phone. And because Sprint’s text messaging at the time, relied on PCS Vision to work. You just couldn’t send texts from the Matrix phone at all. Now folks. I very much wanted to get the phone activated for this video, so I could at least make a few calls, but sadly, Sprint stopped activating phones of this vintage in the spring of 2019..
The most I can do is make a call to Customer Care and boy compared to our modern Voice Over IP. This call quality was not great., [ Digital Female Voice, ] Problems and are unable to process your call.. Please try again later. Well.
At least I got to do that. No speakerphone either. Those didn’t become standard until a couple years later., But from most of the user reviews I’ve read, it was a delightful phone for the time with strong reception, despite the rare internal antenna., Some fella in Canada loved His so much he found ways to keep it alive until 2012., And if you make a lot of calls, you can see why.. This was one of the first phones to feature speaker-independent voice dialing, which lets you just say a name to dial without having to train it.
First. [ Female Digital Voice, ] Commands please., Oh and despite the lack of a camera, you could assign an image to a contact for caller ID purposes.. This came over from the A500 as well.. I have fond memories of getting a call from my friend Courtney and having this cat face pop up for some reason. Yeah 2003 good times.. Finally, how was it as a movie tie-in? Well, over the years I’ve seen people come down on this phone for not being an exact one-to-one match for the prop seen onscreen.
But honestly, I think that’s picking nits. Samsung put many more custom, wallpapers and movie cut scenes in here than I expected, given the tiny sliver of onboard memory. And the ringtone selection gives you pretty much every relevant sound effect from the film. [ Male Voice.
]. Why? Oh, why didn’t I take the blue pill? The attention to detail goes down to the OCR font on the keys and the green back-lighting behind them, working together with those animated wallpapers to evoke the ominous digital rain code. The titular Matrix is built on..
The Matrix phone was never gon na, be for everyone, and purists will always say the only true Matrix phone is the Nokia 8110. Sure. But to me the N270 is much more interesting.
It launched at a time when features we today take for granted like color screens and intuitive interfaces were just coming to pass. The A500 which preceded it, solidified Samsung as a manufacturer that could deliver a small and powerful Cellphone to American buyers., The A600 that followed proved that Samsung could deliver the same package with a camera inside. And in between those two, the N270 Matrix phone showed that Samsung wasn’t content to do these things quietly.. It was all finally starting to come into focus back in the days when phones were fun., (, upbeat, music, ) Folks, if you’re as interested in this era of smartphones, as I am check out, Samsung Rising by Geoffrey Cain, which has a ton of anecdotes from exactly This period., This isn’t an ad., It’s just a recommendation.
And to close this out a request. That SPH-A600 I mentioned a second ago. It was one of the first camera phones to come to the States, and it was my first camera phone.. I very much want to cover it on a future episode, but I can’t find one anywhere. If you have one in good shape that you’d be willing to.
Let me borrow: please drop a line in the comments. And also, if you have a specific request for a model, you think is fun and I mean fun, no Galaxy S or HTC One, I’m thinking 1999 to like 2009 drop that down there too. And folks.
If you wan na help me justify the purchase of this Matrix phone, please subscribe and share this video. If you enjoyed it. And keep in mind that Mr. Mobile does not produce paid reviews., This was made using an eBay-purchased, N270 and Samsung didn’t get any kind of preview or copy approval rights.. That means, if anyone there is watching it they’re, seeing it for the first time right alongside you.
Until next time, thanks for watching. Stay, safe and stay home and in spirit stay mobile, my friends. ( upbeat music, ) .