Mobile phones have come a long way to become smart devices capable of replacing, in a certain way, other products such as cameras, music players and electronic diaries. Those of a certain age will probably remember the day Steve Jobs took the stage at San Francisco’s Moscone Center to present “an iPhone, a telephone and an Internet communicator”, which were not three devices, but one: the iPhone.
Although Apple’s phone was a real revolution when it appeared in 2007, it spelled ruin for some established players in the industry. like blackberrywas not a pioneer in many of its functions. Samsung was the first company to launch a phone with an MP3 player on the market. He did it in 2000, when he started selling the Samsung SPH-M100 (called Samsung UpRoar if it was offered with the American operator Sprint), which boasted this interesting novelty.
Samsung SPH-M100, the first mobile phone with MP3
In the inaugural year of the new millennium The iPod didn’t even exist.. The first version of the apple company’s music player did not arrive until 2001. There were some portable MP3 players on the market, such as the MPman F10 and the Rio PMP300, but the norm was to listen to your songs with this file format. on the computer. If you were looking for the freedom to listen to music from anywhere, a tremendously popular option was the Sony CD Walkman.
After more than a decade in stores, mobile phones had evolved significantly. They were no longer big and heavy like the legendary Motorola DynaTAC 8000X or the Nokia 2010. These devices were already smaller, lighter and more elegant. The next step? Incorporate more and more functions. Samsung thought it would be a good idea to add the MP3 playback function, something that, as we say, materialized at the beginning of the 21st century with the SPH-M100, but with several limitations.
The phone had a memory of 32 MB, which allowed it to store about 10 songs in MP3. If you wanted to squeeze more out of the available storage, you could do it with a trick: encoding the files below 128 Kbps. To transfer the files to the mobile you needed to use a cable that was included in the box to connect the mobile to the parallel port of a PC. And you couldn’t drag songs easily, you had to use Samsung’s MP3 Manager program.
Samsung also included headphones with a microphone that were used to talk on the phone and listen to music. This accessory had four buttons, which allowed you to answer and hang up a call, play or pause music, and skip to the next song or play the previous one. If you received a call, the music would pause automatically. After finishing speaking, however, playback had to be resumed manually. In any case, the device promised 10 hours of continuous production.
It was certainly a more than interesting phone for the time, although it was definitely not for everyone. It is a premium option which had a price of 400 dollars (just over $730 today). Time has passed, and some users who keep this phone have decided to put it up for sale on eBay. Prices range from $99 to $299. Of course, we are not sure if they will capture the attention of collectors like other products.
Images | Samsung | Screenshot
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