1999 – A Nokia 7110 smartphone showing a WAP service in German language. Photo © Mark Zanzig/zanzig.com
The story behind the image
1999. The Internet had left its infancy and was now heading to take over the world in a storm. Businesses around the world wanted to be a part of this revolution. And more silently, there was another revolution going on: the mobile revolution. The combination of both revolutions – mobile Internet – was set to be the next big thing, really. I was working at CompuServe in Germany back then which had been acquired by America Online (AOL). My task: to define visionary mobile Internet services of the future and implement first prototypes. It was truly exciting.
I had arranged a lose partnership with Nokia, the Finnish mobile phone giant in Germany. As part of the agreement, they had supplied us with devices for testing, prototyping and demonstration. I had been working on a mobile application demo for the IFA 1999 (a big German consumer electronics trade show) and thought it might be a good idea to do a somewhat commercial shot of the Nokia 7110 showing the prototype. So I placed the Nokia 7110 phone on a white background with the entry page of the demo service showing on the screen. Both the phone and the service were real, not mockups or barely working prototypes. The site had been programmed using WAP, the Wireless Application Protocol. WAP was a lightweight protocol that had been specifically designed to avoid bandwidth consumption on the notoriously slow wireless networks. WAP should bridge the time until faster wireless networks (i.e., 2G and 3G) were widely available.
The Nokia 7110 was the one phone every geek wanted to own (or, like me, at least use.) Not only did it look different from the typical ‘brick phones’ of the time but it had built-in the Internet! To support the launch of the phone, a slightly modified variant (the Nokia 8110) had been placed in the movie The Matrix (1999) which became an iconic, futuristic hit around the global.
And I? I was proud that I had been able to show how folks of the future would be able to use mobile applications. Of course, in 1999 we were happy with black-and-white LCD matric displays and slow Internet connections. The German service I had pulled together showed:
- Yellow pages (Branchenbuch)
- Flights in Munich (Flugauskunft MUC)
- News Headlines (Schlagzeilen)
- Dictionary German-English English-German (Wörterbuch D-E / E-D)
The demo was a smash hit but it took another eight years before the mobile Internet really could lift off, and it was not Nokia enabling this. Apple entered the market with its iPhone in 2007. And changed the world forever.
Anyway, these were exciting times, and I remember them well. I am extremely happy that I did this shot in the summer of 1999.
Design ideas
The high resolution image
| Capture Date | Summer 1999 |
| Location | Munich, Germany |
| Camera | Canon AE-1 Program |
| Image Source | Fuji Slide Film |
| Digital Image Source | EPSON Perfection 4870 Photo |
| Digital Image Source Format | TIFF, 48 bits/pixel, sRGB |
| Edited Image Format | JPEG, 24 bits/pixel, sRGB |
| Edited Image Dimensions | 4301 x 6524 Pixels |
| Copyright | © by Mark Zanzig/zanzig.com |
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