Mobile Phones

[slycat]

I've been using mobile phones since 1997/8 and so I thought I would make a post to document all of the phones I've used over the years:

Motorola M3788 (?)	My first ever phone. It was the best (or so I thought) of the phones on offer that I could get free on a contract deal with Cellnet (now O2). This was back in 1998 I think and this was the first time phones had come down to the golden price of zero due to having their cost subsidised on contract. It was an absolutely terrible phone because it couldn't match incoming calls texts with the internal phone book so you would have to write down the number and then check the phonebook to work out who texted you and type the number back in to reply. Needless to say, my experience of this phone put me off Motorola for life.
Nokia 5110	This was the desirable phone of the time as it just had excellent software (meaning the phonebook intergration was miles ahead of the Motorola) for the time. I got it off a friend at work I believe and was my first taste of Nokia. Of course it also had the fantastic first version of Snake :D
Nokia 7110	After The Matrix came out in 1999, this phone got released as inspired by the film. The phone's clame to fame was the spring loaded sliding front cover and the fact it was the first ever WAP enabled Nokia phone so it catered to my gadgety needs. The phone was excellent from what I remember, however the WAP intergration was very much in it's infancy and so pretty much useless. Sadly this phone died a death after I answered a call on it after playing an active game of DDR and my sweat killed the phone.
Sony CMD J5	After killing my last phone, I had to get another pretty quickly. I ended up getting this phone by Sony (before their alliance with Ericsson) which seemed to be the most swishy on offer and in my price range. It was the first phone I owned that featured polyphonic ringtones and had a funky 3D like menu. However I remember it having a pathetic vibrate compared with my previous phone and the ringtones were really quiet so I was always missing calls.
Nokia 3510	After learning to hate the Sony, I decided to go back to Nokia and got this, one of the first colour screen phones. The colour wasn't that great but it was good for the time compared with the greyscale screens of previous phones. It had the familliar menu system of the previous Nokias I had and so found it to be a good reliable phone.
Nokia 6600	Having decided to stick with Nokia, I got one of their first smartphones running on the Symbian S60 operating system. I found it to be a very versatile phone due to the applications available. It also had a web browser of sorts so pages more complex than WAP were possible.
Nokia N80	I almost forgot I even had this phone, but I knew I must have had something between the 6600 and the N93. This was basically just an evolution of the 6600 with pretty much the same OS but a bit shinier and also a slide out keypad. However this phone was also my first 3G phone which gave more depth and speed to the internet applications.
Nokia N93	This was a phone which was supposed to have it all. It had a 3x optical zoom camera which could also record decent resolution videos and had a powerful processor for gaming and video playback. The twisting clamshell was very good for using the video camera function and there were again loads of apps for the phone as it was again Symbian S60. In fact, this phone was so desirable to the gadget freak I am, it was the first time I moved operator to get a phone, moving from O2 to Vodafone. However it seemed that the phone couldn't live up to all of its promises so while it had a lot of great features, due to the OS, it was really quite sluggish and a pain to use.
Sony Ericsson Xperia X1	On to my current phone. I again decided to move away from Nokia after seeing the decline of the Symbian OS and the fact that it felt like Nokia weren't keeping up with the times in terms of functions and features. This was again a very desirable phone which was supposed to have it all. GPS, 3.2 megapixel camera, slide out keyboard and HSDPA 3.5g speeds. However, which it was no longer on Symbian which I had learned to hate, this phone was on Windows Mobile 6.1. It worked OK as a phone but I found the smartphone features somewhat lacking. 1 year after owning the phone, I decided to work out how to unlock the phone so I could flash it with "cooked roms". This resulted in giving the phone a new lease of life as I now have the very latest version of Windows Mobile running on it (6.5.5) and I also have a very nice HTC skin stolen from the HTC HD2.

I've currently got the HTC Desire and the Nokia N900 on my radar for my next phone, however I'm quite keen to dabble with the Android OS to be honest. My current contract is for two years and will be up in October and so I expect there will be a number of new shiny phones available by then. There's even the 4th iPhone which will be out by then but I doubt I can be convinced to get such a restrictive device.

Comments

[sphelx.livejournal.com]

"My current contract is for two years and will be up in October"
"There's even the 4th iPhone which will be out by then but I doubt I can be convinced to get such a restrictive device."

Like looking in the mirror!

[kytheraen.livejournal.com]

I've only had three. A 5110, a 3100 and a 7360.

[enteirah]

You have sweat that can destroy phones? Now that sounds like one hell of a superpower to list. =:D

I was tempted by an iphone, but surprisingly it was the fanbois trying to sell it who talked me out of it. I could not get myself into a community where that style of love seems to be so common... o.o

[slycat.livejournal.com]

Well the older phones weren't brilliantly made and the sweat got inside the casing and fried the chips it seems. Never worked after that day. Was a shame as I loved my Nokia 7110. Shame they'd never make a phone like that these days.

[gaz-a.livejournal.com]

I had the 7110, it came from somebody who did phone replacement for one of the networks, I think I paid £70 or so. Apparently there were reliability problems with the microphone - you can probably remember that it was on the end of the slide and connected by a pair of copper tracks and sprung contacts - I think either the springs fatigued or the tracks corroded.

The 3510i is also a fantastic phone. I bought my parents and aunt one each off ebay (under £10 each several years ago) and they are very solidly built, have excellent battery life and are straightforward to use. The idea was that if they all had the same phone they can help each other out using them, and it worked!

[rallicat.livejournal.com]

I too started with the Motorola 3788, and also converged with you again on the 3510 *tick*. Today it's iPhone, and I'll likely plump for the next one when that comes out. I hear Android is also good. These days I'd generally tell most people to start from the assumption that they want either an iPhone or Android phone, and go from there.

IMHO - not all Android phones are created equal http://www.tuaw.com/2010/01/11/droid-doesnt-have-touchscreen-accuracy-that-is/

[slycat.livejournal.com]

As you can probably tell from my phone history, I've always gone for the most gadgety phone available at the time. As a result that's resulted in me having a lot of phones which struggle with what they're trying to do and are sluggish to use, etc and further iterations improve on performance issues.

One thing the iPhone can easily say is that it is very responsive and so this would overcome my main annoyance with all phones I've used since the 6600. The iPhone also has a lot of features to keep me interested and has a billion apps. However I have two problems with the iPhone. The first being the restriction Apple put on to the device and the second is the whole Apple person thing which I could never buy into.

There are other phones with the responsiveness I need such as the N900 and the majority of HTC Android phones released since the Hero. Also, both platforms have plentiful apps on offer but not the attention from many professional developers that the iPhone seems to have attracted. However, that may change as Android has overtaken the iPhone OS in terms of devices running the OS available.

Ultimately with regards to what ever I get next, it will depend on what is available in October when I can upgrade so I guess I'll wait and see!

[mattlazycat.livejournal.com]

I'd heartily recommend the HTC Desire, although there'll probably be a better version with a dumber name by October :) The N900 is a piece of crap. Shiny piece of crap, to be sure, but it's plasticky (especially the screen, which is a scratch-magnet) and slow and if you think the iPhone is restrictive, you should see what a pain in the dick it is to develop software for anything by Nokia :)

[kenai.livejournal.com]

My first phone was a Ericsson GH-688, would never die except for the antenna :p

should make a similar list I guess. My history went down the Ericsson and Siemens way. Always thought the Moto's were crap.