As with most things, this is something that just changes far too often for me.
Flash back to 2001. I was in the games industry and frankly scoffed at the idea of games on a phone (I took the N-Gage as a total joke, as did the rest of the industry). I had a cheapo little Samsung phone from Sprint because it’s what I had, and I had it for a couple of years. I just wanted to make calls and (VERY) occasionally check movie times or something.
Then I got a mac, and suddenly a phone with bluetooth and the ability to use my phone as a modem for dialup GPRS became important to me. I was traveling fairly often for work so it gave me internet access at hotels that didn’t offer it yet. So, I switched to Cingular to be on the same carrier as my wife, and got a Sony Ericsson T616. I thought it was possibly the most fantastic phone ever. It had well supported bluetooth and it did what I want – it dialed up the internet over bluetooth and I could leave it on a desk plugged in and use my laptop on the bed or whatever. Frankly at this point I just wanted a small GSM/GPRS dialer that I could access via bluetooth and I’d have been happy. Let the Mac’s Address Book dial via bluetooth, and use a bluetooth headset to talk. I’m still kind of interested in a phone like that…just a little device with a battery, and a few radios (gprs/bluetooth/hopefully hsdpa these days). More recently I have a friend whose Motorola RAZR’s screen broke off and he continued using the base of the phone like this for a while…I was tempted to buy it off him.
Then a year later I went into the mobile industry. And I realized how terrible that T616 was at playing games, and immediately began looking at other phones. Working at a mobile company I just borrowed various phones and popped my sim in there to test out. And thus I got into feature phones, actually caring about their abilities to run games / apps, used custom themes, and started looking at picture taking and what not. I was at this point still in love with flip phones (the t616 got so banged up it helped reinforce that love) and was a fan of the Motorola V180 as it was small but ran things pretty well. I’ll note that at this point I absolutely HATED Nokia S60 devices. They almost all had some sort of issues with their java implementations, so the J2ME games we made for them were constantly having to include hacky workarounds. Plus the sheer size of phones like the Nokia 3650 was unimaginable for me at the time.
But then Nokia came out with the 6600 and 6620 and suddenly they started to grow on me. And yet a lot of the things I like about S60 now are things that annoyed me then. What do you mean apps will keep running in the background killing my battery? And the menu interface to installed apps was WAY more complex than just hitting a button and choosing the “Games” option. I stayed on the fence until we got our hands on the 6630 and really the 6682. I was won over. They ran 3d java games smoothly and the 6682 was a pretty sexy device. Finally having a reason to care I looked into it more and saw some of the other apps the 6682 could run (Google maps etc.) and decided maybe these S60 phones aren’t so bad after all.
So I got a Nokia 6682 and used it a good bit. I got it setup to pull down my email and sync my contacts and calendars. I tried to get good about adding to-do items to the to-do list just so I could use that functionality (it hasn’t stuck sadly). Even the camera was pretty good (compared to the feature phones I had been using). But after a while I decided it wasn’t the device for me and continued the search. There was nothing in particular I didn’t like about it at this point other than I knew it wasn’t right. So, I decided instead of a smart phone I could carry a feature phone, plus a PDA…
And for the next 6 months or so I made do with a Sony Ericsson Z520a and a Palm TX. After all, with a huge touchscreen and wifi on the TX, it had to be better right? And in fact it was pretty nice. The Palm OS kind of reminded me of the Amiga in that it’s an older OS whose users refuse to let die, and make all sorts of nice apps to keep it alive. So I installed a custom launcher and a few other apps and got the TX to the point where I really liked it. The wifi was great and the large screen was important to me for video viewing / web browsing. My biggest complaint was an issue caused by the web browser and the fact that the Palm OS doesn’t multitask. One thing I got into the habit of was going to a web site on the Nokia 6682, reading some info, and switching over to the messaging app to email it, and hopping back (or vice versa, going to a website, hopping to an email for a username/password, and hopping back). Unfortunately since apps are closed when you switch to something else, switching from Blazer to check my mail and back meant Blazer was relaunched to an empty page, not where I had left it. Simply including a local cache of the last page you were viewing in Blazer would’ve fixed this. But that wasn’t what eventually did this in for me – it was requiring two devices with me at all times. If I just went out I wanted to grab one device not 2, and on top of that the Z520a had an annoying memory leak that required me to restart it fairly often making the experience a bit less enjoyable.
So I went back to the Nokia 6682 for a while, and started using it again. I got a bit more into the smart phone features this time, learning more of the innards of S60 (such as how to copy/paste versus reading something and switching else where and typing it again). This is also when I got into using T9 to start typing at a decent pace. Biggest complaint here was the web browsing experience. The 6682 wasn’t blessed with the most ram, and the browser options weren’t the greatest in S60v2 so web browsing was a bit of a pain. And as I was getting more into S60 and started reading more websites about it I read more and more about S60v3 devices and the new Nokia S60 browser. I’ll note that this is when I really started appreciating non flip phones, as it meant my information was there at a glance instead of having to pick the phone up and open it. But right now web browsing on my phone was important to me right now, so I had to step up…
And so the Nokia N80 came into the picture. Highest resolution phone I had ever used (352×416) so I assumed it would be far superior for web browsing, and with the new S60 browser, it largely was. The 3 megapixel camera was great (compared to the 1.3 in the 6682 and the VGA in the z520a) and the slider form factor grew on me. Unfortunately while the screen was nice and high resolution (relative to previous phones) it was fairly small, and the high pixel density meant I couldn’t zoom out web pages too much. 352×416 at 50% means an effective resolution of 768×832, but on a screen that small 75% (yielding I think 470×554) was the most I could do and still have it be reasonable readable at a distance, vs. newer phones like the N95 where I can do 50% and read it just fine (and that makes 480×640, a bit higher than the 470×554, and in landscape mode 640 wide). So the time came to upgrade to a device with a bigger screen, and I learned that more pixels isn’t always better.
A low and behold a miracle happened, and Cingular finally got around to launching the Nokia N75. The first S60 device in the US with 3g (UMTS only, no HSDPA) support. So I got one and quickly remembered why I had sworn off carrier branded devices. The theme was pretty ugly, a number of things were renamed oddly (and couldn’t be renamed back), and most importantly some things it just wouldn’t let me move / remove. It’s a flip phone which I had recently decided I don’t like anymore, and on top of that it’s rather large. Still, 3g is great right? In reality not so much. I live in the Bay Area, across the Bay from San Francisco so it’s a pretty tech-heavy area. Outside I get good 3g service. Unfortunately indoors it constantly hops between 3g and edge for data, and this constant changing actually chews through the battery incredibly quick. So between it being a flip phone, being Cingular branded, and having not so great battery life, it just wouldn’t do.
And that leads me to the current device. The Nokia N95. Their flagship N-series device, with a 5 megapixel camera, GPS, hardware accelerated 3d, TV-out, etc. etc. etc. And it’s an impressive device indeed. I use it quite often for a number of things. I actually used the navigation for the first time this week to find the way back onto the freeway after stopping for gas while a good 4 hours away from home. I’ve taken a small number of pictures with the camera (and then uploaded to flickr with the phones built in flickr support). I use it for downloading (and listening to) podcasts. But this brings up one of the two issues I have with it. I’m a mac user, and heavily invested in iTunes. I’ve purchased a good number of songs, not to mention a number of seasons of TV shows. Now sure I could say well it serves me right for purchasing DRM’d content. But I like iTunes, and I like Apple Products, and I like how easy it is for me to get an episode of The Office. So I still carry my iPod around with me most of the time. I have a number of songs on the N95 that I occasionally listen to, but since my new music purchases are all made on iTunes, my new music is always on the iPod. And issue number two is one that’s been mentioned here a lot. Web browsing still isn’t good enough. Now the web browser on S60v3 devices is impressive, and when finally loaded the pages are rendered nicely. The problem I have with this is the time it takes to render, even over wifi. I shouldn’t be staring at an empty screen for 10-15 seconds at a time. Now you could try blaming the hardware (it’s a phone, slower processor etc.) but why don’t the Nokia 770 or N800 which use similarly powerful hardware have this same problem? They both render web pages MUCH more quickly (and remember, this is all over the same wifi connection). So web browsing ends up being a when-I-have-to instead of a when-I-can and serious browsing is (again? as always?) delegated to my laptop.
So this leads me to where I am now… If I still need my iPod for my media, and I still need my laptop for real internet use, what do I really need my phone for? What features of it are ACTUALLY important to me versus what I tend to think are important. Web browsing on my phone is one of those things I constantly thing of as important, but almost never do it because it just doesn’t work well enough. And admittedly the iPhone is a device that in theory looks like it’s perfect for me. It replaces my iPod (and can play my purchased music / videos), and apparently has a pretty quick web browser (the functionality of the S60 browser, plus it doesn’t take forever to render a page?) – but that’s just based on TV ads which aren’t always the most reliable source of such things. And then there’s the development thing. I run a small mobile development company right now, and so the idea of having a phone I can’t develop for, and therefore can’t carry around and show my products on is a bit of a no-go. This is actually one place where the TV-out on the N95 REALLY trumps – plug it into a projector and show a mobile app to a full room at once without people all hunched over to watch your demo.
And so I’m left wondering what’s right for me. I could stick with an S60 device + iPod + laptop. Or I could lose a little weight and just use a small feature phone + iPod + laptop (since iPod and laptop can do most of what I use my S60 for). Or I could get an iPhone and use that + laptop when needed. And then on top of all this there’s my curiosity as to whether or not I’d prefer a qwerty device for handling typing better, easier note-taking etc.
And thus completes my journey from hating cell phones and laptops, to living on a cell phone and laptop, and not knowing where to go next…