Motorola
Accompli A008

The Accompli 008 was one of the first devices that launched as a part of Motorola’s interesting “sub-branding” effort.  A number of execs joined the mobile group from companies such as Nike, NutraSweet and Proctor & Gamble to bring their vision of fast moving consumer goods to the mobile world. Motorola created a brand “compass” with four sub-brands:  Accompli (for high tech early adopters), V. (style conscious), Timeport (work phones), and Talkabout (leisure/”Mom” phones).  The numbers Motorola used corresponded to a direction on the compass; hence the 008 was a nearly “true north” high tech product.  The Wings campaign set the branding effort into motion, using the Rolling Stones song “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” (a puzzling choice for starters), and to make things worse, the “Wings” campaign conjured up less than desired images in the UK for its relationship to certain feminine hygiene products.  (Yes, this came from brand people.  Go figure.) Anyway, the Accompli 008 was created as a European version of the Motorola 6188 touchscreen phone, code named “TaiChi.”  Well before the existence of the iPhone and other touch screen products, Motorola brought a touchscreen device to market with a homegrown OS that allowed users to install java midlets – one of the earliest forms of downloadable applications.  The 6188 sported Chinese handwriting recognition which was absolutely amazing for users, as they could simply draw characters on the screen.  When the 008 came to Europe, Western handwriting recognition was added to the device. This was also the first Motorola phone series to feature “airplane mode” so that you could use the device as a PDA while in flight.  Quite simply, this was a foreign concept to flight attendants who would often still make you turn the device off completely.  The 008 was also one of Motorola’s early GPRS devices.  As it supported 1 uplink slot and 3 downlink slots, the typical download speed for data was approximately 28 kbps.  The phone also supported both POP and IMAP email, so you could connect your Yahoo mail or corporate mail up to the device.  Due to the slow download rates, email would download only the headers first.  That way, the user could pick and choose which messages to fully download.  Another fun feature on the 008 was a ringtone composer.  When you brought up that up, it showed a little piano keyboard on the screen, and you could tap out and store a ringtone of your own making! As the device did not support Cyrillic character recognition, a special edition was created for the Russian market that had a Cyrillic keyboard.  A very small number of these were produced for that market.  One of the most exciting features of the 008 was its support of Java midlets – an early form of downloadable application that could be installed on your phone.  An early “app” store was at the link midletcentral.com.  Independent developers would also simply post their files in public to download and try:  A008 Chat was for example an IRC-based midlet file you could install.  While the Accompli 008 did not receive the same above-the-line marketing investment that other products did during the short-lived branding phase, it did see some success particularly in the Nordic markets and amongst more early adopter users.  PDAs were separate devices to the mobile phone at the time, and the Accompli 008 was one of the first efforts to bring the two together in a single touchscreen-driven device.  The fact that you could also download new applications in the form of Java midlets was essentially a crystal ball into the world we take for granted today of putting apps on our mobile devices.