Flashback: Nokia's first camera was also the first Symbian S60 smartphone

Nokia is probably best known for its camera phones - Lumia 1020, 808 PureView, N8 and others still carry a spark of nostalgia for longtime fans. But it all started with the Nokia 7650, the Finnish company's first model to have a built-in digital camera.

It took 640 x 480px still images, which were saved in the 4MB of internal memory. Before taking a photo, you had to open the keyboard as the lens was normally protected behind the slider. It spoiled the sleek form factor (for the time) somewhat, but it was undeniable that it was new.

The 7650 had one advantage over competing designs - the Ericsson T68 (which we talked about earlier) had a camera add-on, which was purchased separately. This add-on also had a simple optical sight, which wasn't great to use. In contrast, the Nokia came with the camera hardware built in and could display a live view of it on the screen.

This screen measured 2,1 inches diagonally, had a resolution of 176 x 208 px and was capable of displaying 4 colors. It was good enough for the time and it did its job well. In addition to your own snapshots, you can view photos that are sent to you by e-mail or relatively recent MMS. This phone had 096G connectivity, aka GPRS, which could reach speeds of 2,5 kilobits per second.

Nokia 7650

The Nokia 7650 was also the first mainstream smartphone to run the Symbian operating system - the 9210 Communicator was the first, technically, but it was a niche device. Also, it used the 80-series user interface instead of the more familiar 60-series, which debuted with the 7650.

The operating system ran on a single-core 32-bit processor (based on ARM9), clocked at 104 MHz. Users could load applications written in Java or those from the older EPOC operating system (which was Symbian's predecessor).

Nokia 7650

But back to the camera, which brought us to this phone in the first place. A single 640 x 480px photo (captured in JPG format) took up approximately 33 kilobytes of space. This is a pretty heavy compression, but remember you only had 4MB of storage to work with (and no memory card slot). There were two additional shooting modes: portrait (intended for caller ID photos) and night (which improved the ISO of the sensor).

When viewing photos you've taken, you can zoom in for a closer look and rotate them as needed. Soon, however, you'll need to connect the phone to your computer to upload the photos and make room for new ones.

When the Nokia 7650 was introduced in Barcelona in November 2001, then CEO Jorma Ollila called it the most significant launch of the year. Indeed, Symbian has helped Nokia conquer the smartphone market and its passion for photography has been a key driver. That's why the 7650 deserves a place in the Mobile Hall of Fame.

Nokia 3650

The phone came out at the end of June 2002 and cost € 600, cutting edge technology always comes at a price. The following year the more affordable Nokia 3650 was introduced - it ditched the slider design but had almost the same hardware (same camera, same display, and same processor, but now there was a memory card slot. ).

PS. as with other phones we remembered from the Flashback series, the Nokia 7650 was featured in a big Hollywood movie - two, in fact, Minority report et Tomb Rader: the cradle of life.