My mobile phones over the last 14 years

I recently upgraded my mobile phone. Some might say this is hardly newsworthy; for me, however, it was quite a big deal because for the fist time in about a decade, I’d be moving away from the Finnish mobile giant Nokia. I’d been a devout fan of the Espoo-based handset manufacturer since I owned my trusty Nokia 6110. Over the years I migrated from handset to handset, each time upgrading ever so slightly to something a little better, a little more advanced. I’d like to share my experiences in owning these handsets.

Alcatel One Touch Easy

My very first handset was, in fact, not a Nokia. It was the quintessential brick mobile phone. Hefty, sturdy, and with minimal functionality, my Alcatel One Touch Easy was my first foray into the world of mobile telephony. I never managed to quite figure out how to send an SMS, but at least I could make and receive calls with relative ease. To be fair, the coolest features of the phone was the little aerial which one would ceremoniously pull out when answering a phone call, and the fact that the 25 phone numbers you needed to know were pre-programmed into the phone memory. To this day I’m still not quite sure what happened with this phone.

Nokia 6110

Next up was my very first Nokia – the 6110 I mentioned earlier. Man, I loved this phone. I could easily send SMS messages, I could change my operator logo, and above all, it was pretty to look at. That wonderful blue/green/purple metallic cover was just the coolest!

Nokia 3210

Next up was the Nokia 3210. Equally sturdy, with a slightly larger screen and a space for a few more contacts on the SIM card.

Nokia 7110

After that, I got the Nokia 7110. The extractable antenna made a not-so-welcome return, as did the slider. Using this phone, I experimented with WAP sites for the first time, but all things considered, it wasn’t all it cracked up to be, which explains why I only ever did it once.

Nokia 6310i

Next up was my Nokia 6310i. A very smart phone for it’s time with its sleek silver design, it had a beautiful light blue backlit LCD display, with 32 shades of monotone blue shades, instead of the usual single green backlit LCD display all the previous phones had. It had Java and much more storage capacity, a handy voice recorder which you could use to record conversations. I very much liked this phone.

Nokia 6820

Next up was my first foray into what many now consider to be a “smartphone”. My very first phone with a full colour display and a full QWERTY flip-out keyboard and a camera! Although the display was quite small and the pictures were horrible quality, the immediacy of being able to take a photo and send it to someone halfway across the country via something called a “multimedia message” or MMS for short, was just phenomenal. Or, at least, the idea of it was. In reality I had to wait quite a while before anyone else I knew also had a phone which could actually receive a MMS… After a few weeks with this phone, I was turning into a real power texter, with the ability of using both thumbs to type enabling me to churn out messages rapidly and accurately.

Nokia N70

My next upgrade phone was the fantastic Nokia N70. At least, that’s what I thought for a while. It was everything the 6820 wasn’t – wonderful big screen, a much better camera, a much improved user interface. Except for the QWERTY keyboard which I admittedly missed quite a bit. The ability to download and install applications (like Opera Mini, Mxit, etc) was also quite nifty. The built-in music player and FM radio was also quite awesome. However, after a while the slowness of the user interface started annoying me.

Nokia N95 8GB.

What a phone! All the annoyances of the N70 were nowhere to be seen on this phone. It truly felt like an evolution. More speed, more features, more megapixels on the camera, more everything. Admittedly, in the two odd years that I used this phone, I’d become slightly jaded about the concept of a smartphone, with the rise of Android powered phones, and the iPhone which was released shortly after I upgraded to the N95. I was very happy with this phone, nonetheless. My only gripe would be that almost none of the really cool applications I read about on the Internet were available for this phone because, like many other Nokia’s before and after this phone, it runs on Nokia’s own Symbian operating system – which means applications either have to be Java-based (which means they’ll be slow) or a seperate, Symbian version of said applications have to be coded. And for most companies, this isn’t a viable option. And this left me wanting.

HTC Desire

I’d decided early on that my next phone was going to be Android-powered. I finally decided on the HTC Desire, and to be honest, I am blown away by this phone. The advances that have been made in the smartphone arena in the last two years, are simply breathtaking. The list of talking points on this phone seem virtually endless: multi-touch touchscreen interface, voice recognition (across the board, accessible in many applications).