Vodafone
803T

Toshiba released the 803T exclusively through Vodafone in Japan, but also outside of Japan as the TS803. It was Toshiba’s first combined 3G phone and music player. Whilst its features were not regarded as being high-end (8-Series devices were typically considered to be mid-tier devices), the design and user experience of this phone positioned it perfectly with multimedia-savvy consumers. It included a two-megapixel camera with an LED flash. It also had miniSD memory card support and a 2.2-inch TFT QVGA LCD main display. The phone’s key differentiator was its music player which could be controlled by a rocker key on the front of the device which was located below a 1.3-inch screen which displayed artist names, song length and other details. Users could also use this button to scroll through tracks and save files in playlists. The phone came with an adaptor to connect headphones via a 3.5mm jack and it also had stereo twin speakers. When the phone was launched in Europe as the TS803, Toshiba Mobile announced an agreement to offer exclusive live and pre-recorded content from the band Oasis. This came as part of a “six-figure sponsorship deal” Toshiba signed with Oasis to support its European tour. The TS803 handset was bundled with a 512MB miniSD card with seven audio tracks and seven video tracks of Oasis performing live at its “homecoming concert” at the City of Manchester Stadium in July 2005. The original agreement with Toshiba was for the Oasis single “Let There Be Love” to be released exclusively (and first) with the phone, but delays in shipping the handset resulted in this strategy being abandoned. A notable omission on the device was a front-facing camera. This meant that although users could make video calls, the caller’s image was not displayed. The company stated at the time that this was “because the focus of the product was to deliver a music player within a mobile phone”. The TS803 only shipped as a black or white model. The Mobile Phone Museum has a white unit in its collection as well as a range of colour samples that were presented to Vodafone as possible variants that could be offered, but they were never selected. Some information courtesy of Christian Legere, the author of The Flipside Story