My Symbian History

Ricky tagged me to share my S60 history, but I thought I might also add a deeper sense of history to my device usage as a reference.

Given the amount of content here focused on Nokia, readers might be surprised to learn that I don’t have a very long history as a Symbian user. In fact, my Nokia phone experience is completely due to participation in the Nokia Blogger Relations program. Before I share my device history, let me provide a brief background on where I’ve been …

I had used a few mobile phones (Qualcomm Candybar, StarTac), though nothing particularly interesting until I became a Nextel subscriber and got the i1000 which had a very (for the time) capable WAP browser and was quite good at messaging. I used a Newton MessagePad 2100 which was truly a smart device and way ahead of it’s time. When the Palm came around, I moved on …

I became a longtime and loyal Palm owner and have been through much of the line from the original through the Treo 650. I’ve had the Palm Pilot (upgraded the memory to 512MB if I recall correctly), Palm III, V (updated to 8MB) + OmniSky Modem, Vx (when the V died), m505, TC, T3 (paired with a SE T610), Treo 600 and Treo 650. I wrote a lot about the Treo on both this site as well as Treonauts for about a year…

During the course of my travels I had certainly heard of Symbian and knew about Nokia but was never tempted to switch. I was particularly interested in the communicator future devices which seem to have evolved into UIQ and the SonyEricsson P series though the price was out of reach for me when they finally arrived – not too mention I was deep in Palm-land. The Nokia 7710 was very appealing to me courtesy of The Matrix, but again I stayed with Palm. Actually now that I think about it the 6600 series also attracted me and I almost purchased this phone via Craigslist.

And then the Nokia Blogger Program came knocking… (Fall 2005)

The first device to arrive was the N90, followed by the N70 (with LD-1W GPS) and then the N91. In the next round the N80ie, N73 and N93 arrived. Somewhere in the midst of all of this I purchased the Nokia BH-800 headset, the E61 and then the N770 Internet Tablet.. Recently I’ve updated my GPS to the LD-3W… and Tablet to the N800.

Some notes… I was using a Blackberry as my primary device at work when the Blogger Program started and had put the Treo in the drawer. I needed to have Exchange access and IT refused to support the Treo… I received a GPRS datacard (which sucked) but pulled the SIM out and used it in the Nokia’s with phone forwarding from the Blackberry. Two pieces in my pocket.

From the first round of devices I was hooked! The N90 was (and still is) very slick and I prefer the rotation of the viewfinder more than the current N93 and N93i. I also really liked how I could snap photos without opening the phone. The N70 was a preferable size than the N90 or N91, but the N91 with WiFi was awesome until I bricked it. It never recovered even after a repair from Nokia and I ended up using the N70 daily for quite a while. With the second round of devices, I tried the N93 for daily use, but I need 850Mhz where I live and it unfortunately does not offer that. The N73 however is a fantastic quad-band phone and has been my daily phone for many months. I like the N80, but find the battery far too weak for my data needs to make it through a day reliably. I did switch to the E61 during the work week since it offered Mail4Exchange and synced with a more recent (and now prior) job, but switched back to the N73 for weekend use and once I realized that I could install the Mail4Exchange client on the N73 I actually used it most of the time. Camera wins…

So that brings us to today… I am very happy with the N73 still today though admittedly am getting a bit restless now that the N95 is out. I’m hoping my gadget crack dealer (aka the blogger program) will kick back in soon and offer one up!! There are some other options out there like the N76 and E65 or even E61i, but have been eyeing the N95 since it was first announced. I have a feeling it will soon replace my N73.

Ok – that was probably far too long and rambling, but I suppose that’s the point of this exercise. For the next round, I will tag people from my Twitter and Jaiku contact lists and ping Matthew Miller, Roland Tanglao and Ken Camp.

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