Retro Cell Phone Phlashback: The Samsung Uproar
Imagine in 2001, a device that could text and play music–AT THE SAME TIME!
Think back to the dawn of the 21st century. All the way back in 2001, I bet at some point you were wondering: while on the go, there’s got to be a better way to listen to digital music than with this clunky portable CD player; wouldn’t it be cool if I had a portable device that allowed me to listen to music on the go?
Think back again: sure, the iPod would be introduced at the end of 2001, but you couldn’t wait that long-you needed your music on the go INSTANTANEOUSLY! Sill, music on-the-go just wasn’t enough for you-child of the 21st century; you wanted to send and receive calls, as well as text messages, on the VERY SAME DEVICE.
Luckily in 2001, Samsung introduced the first ever phone with a built in mp3 player: the Samsung Uproar. Also known to techies as the Samsung SPHM100, the Uproar not only had an mp3 player, but it could also access the interweb. (I know, how futuristic!)
What about music; you asked for music? Well, you got music in spades on the Uproar: the 64MB memory inside the phone held up to-get this-AN HOUR of mp3 tunes. (Maybe more, depending on how technologically proficient you were with encoding mp3 files). If that wasn’t enough, the Uproar came with a handy belt clip that let you fast forward, rewind, and skip songs-at the touch of a finger.
Like the cell phones to evolve afterwards, the Uproar came with a USB cable that allowed you connect to a machine running WindowsXP (Still the best Microsoft operating system out there in 2011) and Windows 98.
The Uproar weighed in at just a little over four ounces, making it remarkably compact for a dual purpose device. Besides the mp3 functionality, the phone also had a voice recorder that allowed the user to store up to FIVE WHOLE MINUTES of recordings. Incredible!
Sure, you might be tempted to laugh at the Samsung Uproar now….but just think about how outdated that new iPhone is going to be in 2021. We’ll probably just have phones implanted in our heads by then. Hopefully our brains will give us more than 64MB worth of storage space.
In: Smartphone · Tagged with: Cell, Phlashback, Phone, Retro, Samsung, Uproar