Phones come and go, today's tech is tomorrow's yesterday if you know what I mean... Go back a few years in time, I "upgraded" my mobile contract and received a Sony Ericsson W810i and I thought wow what a phone! I remember being able to download RSS feeds and emails really easy on the phone and having some of my favorite songs with me and being able to listen to it. This was not the first phone to do it, but it was really easy to do it on and it was not a smart phone.
Today, we have a handful of phones that can do this, even entry level phones. After the W810i, I had a few other phones, Nokia N95, iPhone 3G and recently the Blackberry Bold.
The N95 was a big step up from the W810i, running the Symbian OS you could install a lot of apps that where available. The Symbian OS was also easy to customize to your preferences and easy to use. All though Symbian had certificates for some apps that needed to be signed, if you knew what you where doing you could bypass the app signing. Web browsing on the device was not to bad, email also worked well and you could also load Skype and other IM apps. The picture and video quality was really good. Overall a very nice phone to have, even today as a backup phone.
iPhone 3G, what a phone! You only have a few buttons, the rest is up to your fingers, yes there is no stylus, you use your fingers! Apple must have best touch interface that I have ever used, including top of the line HTC phones that run the acclaimed Windows Mobile. Everything just worked on the iPhone, or did it. The interface was really good, you could use your thumb or index finger or any other finger for that matter without struggling. Email on the device was out of this world and web browsing, that was better than IE on a desktop. At the time I had my iPhone OS 2.2 was still mainstream and we where waiting for 3.0 to launch. One thing the iPhone could not do was running multiple apps at the time, for example, having the IM client open while browsing or viewing mail, you could however listen to your music while browsing or doing anything else on the device, but that was it. The App store was something that worked very well, i recall having about 100 apps on my device, and yes I only used about 10 of them daily or more than once, but that was the great thing of the app store, there is so many apps available that you are bound to find what you are looking for, from simple weather apps to funky games and even telnet clients. Another thing the iPhone also did not have was proper push technology, this is something I could only really and truly understand when I got my new device...
Push technology and BlackBerry are synonymous with each other. I've experienced push technology like never before, sometimes having mail on my device before it's in my mailbox, or IM messages. Actually I used to hate BB. At the previous company i worked for, the CEO had a BB Curve and he wanted to use this device, guess who had to set it up for him. I could not get the thing to work and the interface was really crappy, he had one of the Curve models, could be that it was just an old model with an old OS on. So one day a friend of mine got a new Curve and I played around with the thing and saw that it was not that bad, maybe he had an upgraded OS on the device, later on i played with a Bold for a few minutes and thought to myself, this amazing, I wondered how BB made the leap from the Curve of the CEO to the Bold. There was one more thing that really attracted me to the Bold, the data plan, for us South Africans data is really expensive, so getting a BIS account for R59 a month was a bargain as it was unlimited data on the device, except for video and audio streaming. So I got myself a Bold. Playing with the device the first day I know that I did not make a mistake. After installing the Facebook app ad playing round a bit a friend phones me, and there is his profile pick, WOW!! Then there was the IM apps, always online, always receiving IM's, you are always connected. Email was pushed to the device, I do however have a problem with Exchange mail but think I got a workaround for that. The browser is not on the same level as the iPhone, but it's still a good browser. The keyboard works really well and another thing that I never thought of was the little LED indicator. When your phone is in the pouch that is boxed with the device and it's on the desk and you receive an alert, you get an LED that flashes, it's really useful, I can leave my phone in the pouch and just look at the LED to see if I have any alert on the device, whether its a missed call, message, IM, email or even Twitter update. Talking of Twitter, yes we don't have an app store yet in SA, but I hope that BB is working on it, otherwise you can bypass that and still have the app store in other countries than the current defaults. As an all-in-one device I do think that this stands out above any of the current devices that are available, in the same breath I must say that I must still get hold of an Andriod device, that looks like an awesome alternative to the Bold and iPhone.
So what will we think of today's devices four years from now? Will it be the same feeling as I had about the W810i, wondering how could I have lived with this device?? Well back then needs where simple, unlike today? Like I said earlier I still want to try out the Android devices especially the HTC Hero with the new Android Doughnut OS on the device. Another device that I'm looking forward to is the Nokia N900, that device also looks like it is a step in the right direction. One thing that I would love to see though and regardless of what device you have, and this is not the manufacturer's fault but rather the cariers and this is unlimited data plans, like the Blackberry's.
So what do you want in your next generation device??
