[@NickyColman]

After seeing another thread reminiscing about a few of the pioneer 3G handsets, I thought Id see what everyone else thought about the 3G handsets of yesteryear!

Handsets like the early Motos and Nec's including the infamous e606!

Id love to hear peoples thoughts and opinions on what they were like !

It'd also be great if people could post any pictures they took with the handsets, and any pics of their current condition so we can see if time was gentle on these "trailblazing" handsets!

Any user reviews and what initial thoughts people had with them would be appreiciated too... it could just bring back a few good ;) memories!


:D

[3togone]

I had the E808 which was a rather wide clamshell thing with a QWERTY keyboard. Great for text and email (when email was free) and it cost £20 with a 3-to-Go contract. The handset has long since gone but I still have the USIM.
Picture size was 352x288 at best. Came with two chargers which were placed strategically at home and work. Added extra car charger in case journey home took longer than 30 mins.

Replaced with an A830 which I still have :)

[3GScottishUser]

I had an NEC e606 for about 5 months back in 2003. It was shocking. Big, clumsy, battery munching call dropper that was so poor 3 let me out of the contract 7 months early. I sold the wretched junk on e-bay for £90 amazingly!!

The old Moto a-835 was a brick and exhibited similar charictaristics to the NEC e606 on 3 but as 2G phone it's fine (now on 02 3G its also pretty good). It has a lot of quite nice features but its size makes it one to keep at home really.

Worst 3G handset of all time was the NEC e606/e808 of course but a close second place must go to the abysmal Motorola c975. This rank thing just cant hold calls on the 3 network and call failures are so common two tin cans and a piece of string would have a pretty similar success rate. Come to think of it the LG U8120 was another horror that ended up a Watchdog star and there was the bug ridden NEC e616.

All of the above were frightful and I dare say a certain network will have paid a very heafty price for unleashing such lemons onto the market, happily most have now been replaced but the horrorible c975 lingers on as a cheap pre-pay offering. Can the price tempt you? Looks are only the start!

[getti]

If anyone has a 606 or 808 they would sell me please send a PM. I want to get one again :D

[3g-g]

I had, and still have, an unbranded test equipment Nokia 6650. Nokia's first UMTS handset I think. It's as solid as a rock! Had it before Orange had even launched their UMTS offering and was my pride and joy, minus the video calling, for a good 18 months! Never had any problems with it, it Bluetoothed up to my laptop no problems and was great as a 3G modem, really there wasn't much more I could ask for... untill my 6680 came along. *drools*

[Ben]

I remember when I first opened my e606... I'd only made it as far as the car and, somehow, when I first looked at it I didn't see a big clump of useless plastic but an amazing device that'd shot straight out of the future. My enthusiasm even lasted until I'd got home, charged it up and turned it on!

Ok, I lie slightly, my enthusiasm was dampened when it turned out the phone can't charge as fast as it's consuming power while it's plugged in to the charger, meaning I had to wait a while for it to get some charge, but that was soon forgotten...

I tried carrying it around with me for the first few weeks. I took pictures with it, video called, and complained to The Link for telling me I could use it as a 3G modem and some chap at Three about their adverts suggesting you can videocall without needing headphones. It was really too fat to fit in my pockets, and I soon got incredibly irritated by the slow operating system and impossibly rubbish texting interface.

I couldn't really understand why this superdooper £200-on-a-£50-per-month-contract next-generation videocalling 3G handset a) couldn't be used as a modem b) was the size of Milton Keynes c) had awful battery life d) was deathly slow and e) kept dropping calls.

For a couple of months I tried to use it for reading the news on and things, but I ended up using my N6100 and a T610.. and probably some other phones.. instead.

Oh, then I had the Z1010 3 months before Orange went live which got replaced 4 times.

Happy Days! Thank goodness we've made it this far.

[miffed]

I Had an E808y :)

I have to say it was, hand on heart , the worst phone I HAVE EVER OWNED ! - and that is including old analogue phones I had years ago - at least they functioned well enough to use !
I had gone from a nokia 9210i (Which did virtually everything - only not over GPRS unfortunately :( ) to this "State of the art" Videophone / PDA ( lol !)
The device was so slow that is was pretty much unusable - and the whole "Graphics" feeling reminded me of my PC booting up ( BIOS ? - excuse me , I am not very techy )

What a horrible , horrible device ! I refuse to believe that they were actually approved for release by anyone - and Three must have pushed NEC on the launch date leading to a premature launch

[3GScottishUser]

'Premature' would I suspect explain rather a lot of the issues surrounding the dissatisfaction with many of the inital 3G offerings. It really was'nt a good business plan to put products into the marketplace that were worse than the previous technology. Sure price shifted a load but that looks like it could have been a costly exercise that far from benefiting 3g may have harmed its reputation for some time.

[Hands0n]

Hark at you lot ............ "yesteryear" indeed! :) Blimey is it that time already??? Okay here goes.

My first 3G phones were a brace of NEC e606 on 3ToGo at the launch, bought from The Link for the best part of £400. I was that keen!! Like Ben, they couldn't charge up quickly enough for me. Phone calls were great where I live, as were Videocalls. How novell. Then it happened! The batteries died. WTF????? Its only been a few voice and video calls, plus a few texts. The penny started to drop. Grrrrrrrrrr, pathetic batteries were wayyyyyy too small in capacity for the handset to be used for any meaningful length of time.

Off to mobilefun.co.uk (plug plug plug) for some accessories - several tens of quids later a couple of high-capacity batteries, desktop chargers and some other stuff landed on the doormat. Great!! Yukky charging time (of course) but now the e606 would last a couple of days on a full charge, even with it flipping in and out of 3G/2G/3G/2G all day long whenever I left my home area (I must find out where that first transmitter was placed - I've had 5 bars signal since day one!!!).

Anyroadup, the e606 was not too bad at all for me. It even looked good in my trouser pocket :D Very much the Buck Rogers stylee that I liked. But unfortunately I had yet to reckon with 3's Customer Services and the ever-self-cancelling Direct Debit syndrome. After several battles with them I gave up, they won, and I walked away.

Fast Forward several years (oh, okay then ..... quite a few months .....) and I relented when the Motorola E1000 came out. It was gobsmackingly beaut, I had to have one and this time I went to a local dealer (3SellerNW will be proud of me!!) rather than 3 or The Plink. Local laddie sorted me out just fine, nice contract, what I wanted, didn't talk "at" me, and sorted out a bijou problem soon after the start. Excellent! I can recommend using the small guys, solus 3 or otherwise..

I enjoyed the E1000 a lot, it still has pride of place on my desk of various 3G phones. I also bought up a small collection of Motorola A835s, several LG U8110/U8120 and [latterly] a Motorola A1000 which now lives on Orange 2.5G. The family has also had an NECe338 but that lasted a few months before physically breaking - and seeing as 3's repairer denied any mechanical fault, wanted £95 to repair it, it now resides in its original packaging. We won't be buying NEC ever again!! My latest and greatest is the Nokia 6680 (pas'e I know) on my 3 contract, and I'm loving it. The best 3G phone I've used to date.

So what do I think in general ........... Well for me 3G signals have been almost 100% in the area where I live and work since the start. Kent seems blessed, perhaps the MD of 3 lives somewhere here! So for me all of the 3G handsets have worked just fine, within their own limitations of battery life and functionality. Even unlocked/debranded and tried on Vodafone PAYT 3G the LG and Motorola E1000 handsets work beautifully for voice and videocall.

I've enjoyed all of the above handsets with the exception of the NEC e338. That particular unit was a dog and deserves to be in the place that it now is.

[bsrjl1]

I had, and still have, an unbranded test equipment Nokia 6650. Nokia's first UMTS handset I think.

Did you get it in a black-plastic enclosure? It was like Christmas being allowed to open it up & finally see what it looked like after so long. There was a handset before that which looked like an old NEC GSM handset with a Nokia badge on the front. If it didn't turn itself off during a call, it had to be reset before you could make another one. Pull-out aerial as well! ;-)

[oranashicola]

I still have my Motorola A835. I personally think it's the best phone 3's ever offered. I have been able to successfully connect it to my PC over Bluetooth, and use it to successfully serve content over the 3 network to other 3 customers (tested by connecting an NEC e616V to the A835's IP address whilst connected to the PC).