Hey peeps!
Since the year 2003 I have been acquiring new phones which I have lived with and learnt to love over the years of using them. Currently, I have the a brand new HTC Desire and I had fallen in love with this phone straight away. I knew its strength and weaknesses and I knew it was the phone for me. I am now set in holy matrimony to be with my HTC Desire for the next 18 months.
Over the years I have been using the phones as pictured below and when it comes to show how technology is progressing over years, mobile phones are probably the easiest way to show everybody.
First up I had the Nokia 3310 weighing in at 133g, with a monochrome display at a resolution of 84 x 48 pixels. This is probably what most of the UK population had owned between year 2001 and 2003 as it was a reliable piece of technology lasting a good 3 to 4 days on a single charge! This didn’t really do much but the basic calling and texting function and also included the all loving game of Snake 2! This is probably the main reason I kept the phone as I am proud of my high score of 4000+ points! 😀
Next up is the Nokia 3100 weighing in at 99g, with a 12 bit colour LCD display at a resolution of 128 x 128 pixels. This included the use of internet and also had colour arcade style games. It was also the first phone I had that included polyphonic ringtones as those were the coolest things one could get to pimp up their phones. The thing I loved about this phone is its extraordinary battery life of 4 to 5 days on a single charge! This is the main reason why I have kept the phone as I do carry it with me on long distant journeys.
Next up is the good old gaming machine, Nokia N-Gage QD! This weighs 137g and included the first generation of Symbian S60 mobile phone operating system. It had a colour LCD screen of resolution 176 x 208 pixels. This allowed developers to create games for this OS and sell it. I actually had Fifa 2005 with this phone and it was fun! Battery wasn’t amazing after continuous use but it did last 2 days pretty comfortably. I guess the thing I liked about this phone was the ease of texting. I could use one thumb to text the message and the other to use the arrow keys. It wasn’t the nicest phones to slip into your jeans pocket though.
Next up is the Nokia E65 weighing in at 115g, with a 24 bit LCD display at a resolution of 240 x 320 pixels. It was the first phone I purchased to have an inbuilt camera which was 2 megapixels. This included Symbian S60 OS v3 which was absolutely fantastic at the time. The phone itself also had Wireless LAN so you could use it in your house to go on the internet and download apps. This also gave you the ability to make calls using Skype or any other VoIP provider. You could even use Tom Tom SatNav on this phone with a Bluetooth GPS module paired to it. The CPU was a mere 220MHz but it did the job. The battery typically lasted a day and a half so it wasn’t amazing. Texting on this phone is pretty easy as the buttons slide out.
Next up is my darling T-Mobile G1 weighing in at a relatively hefty 158g, with a capacitive LCD touchscreen at a resolution of 320 x 480 pixels. This was the phone that Google debuted their first mobile operating system, *singing angles* Android 1.0! The iPhone was already out at this time and this was battling it out with the 2nd Generation iPhone and I would say it was better. Obviously there would be hiccups with their first operating system so they did keep updating the operating system with over the air updates from version 1 to 1.1 to 1.5 to 1.6. Each updating making the phone feel like a new phone again. The CPU is an average 528MHz clock rate. This has a full physical qwerty keyboard you could slide out and was a dream to use! Its battery life wasn’t amazing as it did initially used to last me a day & a half but eventually dwindled down to 6 hours on typical usage. I did modify the phone though and naughtily put android 2.1 on it so those were factors as to why it had a pretty naff battery life. I will try to keep this phone as it is probably my all time favourite out of the lot!
Finally, last up is THE DESIRE! There is nothing much I can say about this but WOW! Weighs a reasonable 135g to give a good feel it’s not a toy at the same time as not being heavy. It does everything the G1 does but a lot more. Battery isn’t so wow as it lasts me a little less than a day but I will purchase a spare battery in case of emergencies which shouldn’t be a problem to carry around. This has a B.E.A.utiful AMOLED capacitive touchscreen with a phenomenal screen resolution of 840 x 480 pixels all squeezed onto an 3.7 inch screen! It’s also as powerful as a brand new laptop you would have purchased 4 years ago at 1GHz! HTC have created their custom designed User Interface, HTC Sense UI which is built upon android 2.1. It’s less of a question of what can it do but it is more of a question of what can’t it do. I could sit here and write an essay but I might leave it for another blog post!
So, as the title suggests that I got converted to Androidism and that is pretty much because Nokia have flopped with their Symbian Operating System in the UK; iPhone phones are well out of my price range as well as being restricted in what a user is allowed to do (another blog post); Blackberry are just s*** and to think they could be releasing their own tablet – the UI team will have their work cut out!
Anyway folks, who knows what my next phone is likely to be, a prototype of it is likely being designed by a designer as you are reading this post. I believe I could guarantee that is likely to be an android though!
Take care!
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