Nortel’s Orbitor - the Phone which Begat the iPhone
In the mid 90s I was a co-founder of the world’s first mobile internet portal - Genie Internet. Genie was developed by a small team at BT Cellnet (now O2) and we had a huge amount of fun in our little office in Richmond-upon-Thames, far from our colleagues in BT Cellnet’s head office on Slough Trading Estate. It launched as a beta in 1997 and rapidly grew due to being mobile-network agnostic. Anyone with a mobile in the UK could register and send text messages from the web to any UK phone. This may seem trivial nowadays, but it took the other UK networks years to copy Genie, and by then it was becoming a global force.
I was the business development manager responsible for smart phones, before we had smart phones. WAP standards were still being developed after all the mobile networks could not justify the business cases for buying boutique client-server solutions from each manufacturer for their specific internet-enabled smart phones. In amongst all this mayhem one manufacturer was already developing a full Java-enabled smart phone with a touch-sensitive graphical user interface and a client-server solution for downloading apps. This was Nortel, the now defunct Canadian telecoms giant, and in 1997 BT Cellnet joined forces as their lead customer, developing customer scenarios and the full business model.
In 1998 the first working prototypes were ready and Nortel announced their handset at the GSM World Congress in Cannes. I had been over to Nortel’s HQ in Ottawa to work on the scenarios and interface with their design team headed up by Don Lindsay, but even so, up until that point we had only been working with screen shots, and I was desperate to actually see the hardware they had developed. To say I was disappointed was a huge understatement.
I guess I would describe the shape as being like half an Easter egg. It felt huge in my hand, and in a time when phones such as Nokia’s Zippo-like 8810 were all the rage, we wondered if people would accept something so large. However, Nokia were selling their 9000 communicators (anyone remember them?!) and so perhaps it was not so bad, and look at how large Samsung’s tablet/phones are nowadays. But just a few weeks later the project came to an abrupt end.
Nortel was a telecoms data network equipment manufacturer and those at the top of the company were getting cold feet. Handset manufacturing was not a core skill, and a product such as the Orbitor would require updating annually, and not every five years as was the case with their core business line. With the project ending, Don Lindsay and his design team soon found a new home at Apple, but it would be some years before the first iPhone would be launched, drawing heavily on the design principles of the Orbitor.
Not long after, the dot com boom of the 90s began to burst, and Nortel became one of the largest casualties. Genie disappeared too, swallowed back into the BT Cellnet fold when it was decided to rebrand all products and services to O2. These were great days, some things worked, many others didn’t, and much of the time we did not really know quite what we were doing. My first mobile, the Nokia 2110, still works and I bring it out in lectures and presentations as a wonderful example of design thinking. Sometimes when reading excellent books such as Business Model Design it’s as if nothing happened in the 90s, but as I said, I have fond memories and just thought I would share this lesser-known story from someone who was there on the inside.
