My Mobile Phones

Here is a picture of every mobile phone (bar one) that I've owned. The one that's missing is my first, a Motorola A130. That was the first phone to be used with a prepay mobile service in Ireland, back around 1997. A few weeks back I desperately asked for help identifying this phone. Des came up with a very close answer but after finding the manual in the attic a few days ago I now know for sure that it was the A130 model.

The phones are in chronological order, left to right, top to bottom, and my descriptions of each are more personal than technical.

• Motorola A130: Slagged off as being a brick with a pop up aerial, this simless analogue mobile made phone calls and thats about it. I think I mashed it up with a hammer with the analogue service got turned off, can't be sure, but it was definitely "dismantled" anyway. 

• Siemens C25: This was described as being tiny, it wasn't! The aerial alone could be used as a weapon. The main selling point with this was the ability to compose crude monophonic melodies and use them as ring tones. Oh the horror of it! I remember spending an evening transcribing Mike Oldfields Tubular Bells. Hardly original but it was a lot more accurate than some of the other "homemade" versions I heard sequenced on this phone. 

• Nokia 7110: The "Matrix" phone... only it wasn't, that was actually an earlier model. This phone was truly a milestone in mobile telephony. It's still one of my favorites, its a real pity it turned itself off one night and wouldn't turn back on. It had the best interface on a phone I've used. I wish my other phones had scroll wheels, it made navigation a breeze. It was also the best phone to text on, simply because the slide down cover allowed your fingers something to grip. After using other phones since, I now firmly believe all mobile phone designs are upside down, the keys should be above the screen, which allow you to grip the whole phone when texting. 

• Nokia 6110: After my 7110 died I needed something quickly. I got this second hand. A solid phone with the important feature I used often on the 7110, an infrared port. Before all those "crazy frog" company's you see on the backs of magazines, I was there making operator logo's for people on my laptop, sending them to my phone via the IR port and then forwarding them to their phones over the network. Try telling the kids of today that, and they won't... care. 

• Nokia 6210: Fairly soon after the 6110, I bought this new. A lovely phone to hold, similar in shape to the 6110 but slimmer and without an external aerial. Again, it had an IR port which got a lot of use but eventually became unused. I remember one of the accessories for this phone was a customised plate for the front (the little silver thing at the bottom). You could order one from Nokia with your name on it. I thought it was utterly pointless, even if you used it in a business sense to identify phones.
  

• Nokia 7650: This was another coveted flagship model from Nokia. My first phone with a Symbian S60 OS, a colour screen, a camera, and bluetooth connectivity as well as all the other bits and pieces. I got it relatively late in the day and other newer models were beginning to pass it out, most notably regarding its non-support for expandable memory. It was primarily for this reason that I retired it some years later. The S60 OS got a lot of use though, and its amazing how much you can store on 4MB if you're careful :) I remember thinking how well it looked as a phone; solid! Now I see it as an obnoxiously sized brick! 

• Nokia 6670: This was my most used phone ever, even to this day it gets the odd bit of use. I read dozens of ebooks on it, watched hours of videos I transcoded, sent and received emails, programmed in Python, used it for time lapse photography, hung it from my neck on a lanyard in nightclubs with giant scrolling text on the screen (fantasy #87alpha, I have the software but not the bravery). It was the only phone I owned with changeable covers too (wow thrilling feature). It was a great phone really, but it had to go when the "0" button started to act up. 

• Nokia N73: Much the same as the 6670 only now with 3G and a "theoretically" superior camera. I say theoretically because while the quality was a lot better, the slowness and always on flash was a real pain the hole. The slowness of the phone in general was the reason for dropping back to a S40 OS model for my next purchase. Mobile internet got a lot of use on my N73. I also used it as a 3G modem for both my laptop and Nokia N770 Internet Tablet. It was getting very slow so I decided to flash the firmware, as I did a few times before. It was the last thing I did with the phone, it never survived the procedure.
  

• Nokia 6500s: My current phone and so far so good! No S60 OS but its as nimble as Speedy Gonzalez with his balls on fire. The camera while outputting images at the same resolution as the N73 is much much better! Fast start-up, quick focus, auto macro selection, a flash you can turn off (not just for super sneaky shots, but now macro shots aren't ruined by the flash!) Nice slide action, nice memory expandability, solid feel, stainless steel body. A wonderful combination of business phone and cretin phone features (all that crazy frog shit) to make it practical and still fun. I can live without S60 OS because I augment the 6500's feature set with that of the N770 running Debian Linux.

Two final trivial facts: 3 dead phones, 2 still in existance. And there's a trend running through the phones I owned... a slide covered phone after every 2 candybar shaped phones.