Counterclockwise: HTC One X, Nokia N86, Sony Ericsson Satio

TC One X, Nokia N86, Sony Ericsson Satio

Do you know which Symbian phone had an adjustable aperture on its camera? We do. That knowledge is ancient lore by now (from 2009) and has little bearing on the phone market today. Other than to grumble why modern phones don't do that and to write the Counterclockwise column, of course.

The evolution of the One

Last week we traced HTC's love of metal unibodies, this time we'll look more closely at the birth of the One series. In mid-February 2012 a rumor came out that the HTC Endeavor will be renamed the HTC One X. That one wasn't metal, instead it used durable polycarbonate, similar to what Nokia was using for its Lumias at the time.

The rumor mill soon paired the X with the One V and One XL. The HTC One XL was a Snapdragon version of the One X (which used a Tegra 3 chipset), it also had LTE connectivity (aimed at the US market) and more storage in the base model.

The HTC One S had an anodized aluminum unibody, was very thin for its day (7.8mm is great even today) and packed a 4.3" Super AMOLED display. It was powered by the same Snapdragon chipset as the One XL, which later in life proved useful when HTC ran into troubles trying to update Tegra 3 phones to Android 4.4 KitKat.

Mobile camera week

In February 2009 major smartphone manufacturers were gearing up to release amazing camera phones. Nokia unveiled the N86 8MP, which as the name suggests had an 8MP camera. It had a wide-angle 28mm lens courtesy of Carl Zeiss and a mechanical shutter.

The Nokia N86 8MP had a unique feature not found on most phones today – a variable aperture. The camera could shoot at f/2.4, f/3.2 or f/4.8 depending on lighting conditions. The phone also had a beautiful 2.6 OLED screen to view photos, stereo speakers for better sound for the VGA@30fps videos and 8GB of storage to store them. There was no xenon flash as on the Nokia N82, instead the N86 8MP packed dual-LED flash.