Pat’s Point of View

I don’t know why, but I have decided to catalogue the mobile phones I have owned. Bizarre or just bored, you decide.

I’m presently happy with my Nokia 6111, a slidey phone! It seems pretty solid and has a 1 megapixel camera which I use a lot. It’s not got the Symbian OS so it’s not slow like the N90 but the interface ain’t great.

When we got back from Europe I was using a Nokia N90. It’s pretty good (2 megapixel camera and good video capability) but the OS can’t handle the hires photos. It’s constantly crashing (BSOD!), hanging and generally doing stupid things. The interface looks cool in hires and has better features than every other phone I’ve ever seen. In a few versions time I might buy another N series.

What better thing to do when your phone gets stolen than go and buy the funkiest replacement you can find? Well I’ll tell you what you could do, you could spend a packet on some out-of-date lump of plastic on the strength of one feature: an MP3 player. Enter the Siemens SL35. A truly craptacular interface was made somewhat friendlier by an annoying orange backlit screen. And to use the MP3 player I had to re-sample my MP3s down to something stupid like 80kbps so one CD would fit on the MMC card. Luckily the earphones were so poor that you couldn’t hear the drop in sound quality. I can’t believe I kept it as long as I did…about 3 years.

Up until I went to London I had a
Nokia 6210, or perhaps a 6210i, but either way it got flogged when I was working in an Internet cafe. Wasn’t bad, good solid design typical of a business phone. I found this very satisfying after the dodgy 8210, which I abandoned for this ‘older’ model.

What can I say, I fell victim to the
Nokia 8210 fad. If ever there was a fashion phone it was this piece of crap. Build quality and ‘pocket survivability’ were dismal, and looking back at it now the features are pretty bad considering how much they cost at the time. Interestingly I found this phone after arriving back in Sydney, powered it up and was shocked to find it still works. After over 3 years left idle – no charging – it was as good (or bad) as new.

Before that I had a trusty Nokia 5110, which my boss at the time made me buy since he thought my current phone was “from the dark ages”. I guess it was. It was great to upgrade to a modern phone that actually worked for more than a few minutes before running the battery flat!

The phone that got the ‘dark ages’ label? A Voxson something-or-other, which I got second-hand from my brother. I remember thinking (and everybody else said) “I didn’t know they made phones”. They probably shouldn’t have. I had to carry around both batteries all the time. Not suprisingly I couldn’t find any info or pictures of this phone on the web.

So back to where it all began, my first phone, an Omni. Bought it from Harvey Norman on an interest free lay-by plan. It was pretty useless as a phone but as a novelty item it excelled! It had both long and short antennae, as well as long and short batteries. I think it had an 10 character display…cool!

Well there you go…

P

See what people are blogging about: phone, mobile, nokia, seimens, voxson, omni

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 7th, 2006 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Ramblings. If you enjoyed this post, you might also like to leave a comment or follow @patrickkennedy on Twitter.

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About the author

Patrick Kennedy is a user experience strategist and design researcher based in Sydney Australia. He leads research activities that improve the user experience of cross-channel products and services; helping both designers and business decision makers in bringing those products and services to fruition. Read more.