For those who had been reading this blog for some time now, you may have stumbled across my blog post from 2008, regarding me buying a Nokia E90 – http://www.simionovich.com/2008/06/06/i-finally-purchased-a-nokia-e90.
Well, it’s a fact, since the year 1998, I’ve been an avid Nokia fan. I think I’ve ranged from the old Nokia 51XX, through the 6XXX up to the E61, E62 and E90 – if it was some funky Nokia phone that gave me some new feature, I most probably had it. I guess that the time I spent at m-Wise, working closely with various mobile content technologies had put its toll on me – and I became a Nokia Cell Phone addict. For many years I couldn’t imagine myself digressing from the Nokia clan. Even when my friends moved from their Nokia/Motorola/Ericsson phones to a star spangled iPhone – I remained faithful to my old habits – and remained with my trusty Nokia.
About two years ago I promised myself this: “If you ever decide to move to a touch screen phone, don’t go ala iPhone, stay for a Nokia phone” – so I waited. The initial Nokia touch phones came out. The first Nokia touch phone that came out, I believe shortly after the iPhone was the Nokia 5800, also known as the Nokia XpressMusic.
I’ve got one thing to say about this phone – “What the hell were you thinking???” – it’s a phone, not a bloody MP3 player – if I wanted an MP3 player, I would have bought an iPod. Apart from being the slowest phones I’ve ever encountered, its touch interface was annoying and disruptive.
So, I didn’t buy the Nokia 5800 – I simply had no use for it. At that point I decided to wait a bit more, and see what Nokia cooks up. Shortly after seeing the 5800 in dis-action, I met a new member of the Nokia clan: the Nokia 700.
The Nokia 700 was a totally new thing, not really a phone, not really a PDA – somewhat of a cross between the two. It was big and bulky, and I couldn’t imagine myself walking around with one of these – however, it showed some promise. Sure, it was big, bulky, slow and anything bad you can say about a device – however, it had one thing – it showed potential – something to look for. At that time, I decided that I needed a proper smart phone and purchased the Nokia E90 – and I was fairly happy with it till 8 months ago.
You are probably asking, why would an avid Nokia fan become displeased with his trusty E90 phone – the answer is simple – the plastics. The plastics are of such low quality, that after 18 months of usage, the paint job starts to peel away from the phone. As you run more and more applications, or store more data, the phone becomes sluggish and slow – to the point where you have to reset it.
So, 2 months ago I gave up, I said to myself: “that’s it, time to move forward and leave the Nokia clan” – but I still didn’t want to put myself with the iPhone clan – or to be more exact, the iPhone cult movement. While at the Amoocon convention, I came across some people who were using HTC phones, specifically the HTC Evo. Well, I was somewhat taken with this snazy piece of hardware. It was fast, it was fluid and for some funky reason, I felt at home with it. Could it be, have I found a new clan for my mobile needs? I returned back home starting to examine my options. The HTC Evo isn’t available in Israel, the next best thing is the HTC Desire.
The HTC Desire is also known as the Google Nexus-1, basically it’s the same phone. I tried using the Nexus-1, but I didn’t like it. Specifically, I didn’t like the fact that the four keys are touch based – on the HTC these are real keys, making my life much easier.
So now, I’m equipped with the HTC Desire, and apart from the occasional Android crash (not too often to be honest) – it is one of the best phones I ever had. It’s fast, syncs my life into a manageable construct and most importantly, it’s become a second nature to me. The only disadvantage of owning such a phone is that you need a massive Data plan with your carrier – this little machine can gobble up ten’s of megabytes on a daily basis. My old Nokia E90 was using 25MB of data per month, with the Desire, I consume that much in less than a day – that is an amazing number.
In order to get better into Android development, I’ve ordered an Eken M002 device. This is a 7″, Android based tablet PC. I’ll be posting information about that once it arrives.