It’s been a good 2 weeks since I’ve posted…I’ve barely started and I’m already slacking.
Anyways, I’ve been reading a number of blog posts by people giving their history of phones and I figured I have almost my entire history of phones in one easy place: iSync. I haven’t removed old devices from it (save my first phone I synced with my laptop, because this is a different laptop). And yes, this is just from the past year.
The phones (and a pda):
From left to right we have:
- A Sony Ericsson Z520a. A decent little feature phone, hindered by a horrid memory leak that required restarting fairly often.
- Motorola SLVR. Small, thin, and overall not a bad feature phone. It even includes the iTunes client so I could sync with my laptop and listen to the tracks I purchased off of the iTunes Store. Unfortunately at this time I was still locked in to the idea that clamshells were better.
- Motorola RAZR. The phone so many of us now love to hate. Honestly I wasn’t a fan, but I happened to have one laying around, and wanted a clamshell that didn’t require regular restarts, so I used it for a short while.
- Nokia 6682. This was the phone that made me really want an S60 device. I had played with a number of others before it (the 3650, N-Gage, 6600, 6620, 6630) but they were all either huge, or oddly shaped, or whatever. And coming from a non-smartphone background (I was doing J2ME/BREW software at the time) I looked more at those capabilities than others. Then the 6682 came around. A Cingular handset (this was also before I got into the desire for unlocked devices) that had 3D support (JSR184 support was first introduced in this feature pack with the 6630, but that was never officially released in the US) and honestly a pretty clean look to it. I still have it, albeit it with a slightly scratched up screen.
- Palm TX. Ok so this isn’t a phone, but it replaced the features I came to start using on the 6682 (calendar, to-do, etc.). I used this plus a non-smartphone for a while, with bluetooth tethering. Unfortunately having to carry “one more device” just proved to be too much of a hassle and over time I started carrying it with me less and less. Still, a good device overall.
- Nokia N80. My current phone. It’s the first slider I’ve ever been able to stand (most don’t leave enough room above the top row of keys to be able to quickly type). It convinced me that T9 text input can be fast enough, and that WiFi in a phone is a godsend. It’s also the phone that took me from liking phones, to really liking Nokia phones more specifically.
Now I’ve used quite a number of other devices. I’ve done years of mobile development and have used dozens of handsets, but this is the list of devices I actually used for any duration of time personally. I have some phones that weren’t listed, such as the Sony Ericsson T616 (the phone that really started getting me in to phones) and one of the original N-Gage’s (was sent it by a company I was doing a contract for, who went out of business while I had it, and I never found out who to send it back to). As for what’s next, well, I have a few devices I’m looking at…
- The Nokia E61i. A qwerty phone, with WiFi, and a decent little (by today’s standards) 2mp camera. I’ve been looking at the E62 locally and my main concern other than it being a branded locked phone, is that the keys were too close together. I didn’t mis-type too often, but I FELT like I was, and feel means a lot. The E61i has a newer keyboard that has a bit more spacing between the keys. And even if the resolution is lower than my current N80 (320×240 instead of 352×416) the larger screen size means I can zoom out on web pages and still read them better.
- The Nokia E90. The new behemoth communicator. But really, hardware 3d acceleration powering an 800×352 resolution screen for GREAT web browsing, an insane amount of ram for running more demanding apps, a nice qwerty keyboard, WiFi, GPS, etc. etc. etc. My major concern here is that for what this thing is going to cost I’d need to try it first, and I doubt there’s any way I could get my hands on one.
- The Nokia N95. Speaking of hardware 3d…here’s a more media oriented phone that’s out now. A decent 320×240 screen, built in GPS, TV-out, and really just too many features to mention. And all of the postings I’ve been reading about this are just making it more difficult.
However, I’m waiting on a new phone for a while. Atleast I’m trying to wait…who knows how successful I’ll be. Why? Well as ashamed as I may be to admit this…Nokia is due to launch their new N-Gage platform in a few months and I want to see what phones will support it. Now it’s true that the original N-Gage died a rather miserable death as a phone/gaming system here in the US, and they made a lot of mistakes. However from what I’ve seen of the new platform, and the fact that it’s a platform running on phones, instead of trying to sell a phone as a game system, makes me a bit excited. They just seem to be getting enough things right with it (and the interface is slick from what I saw at this past GDC). I guess I’ll just wait and see…
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