My Symbian History

I try not to duplicate posts too many times, but since R2 tagged me here on VOX, I'm cross-posting my post of just a bit ago here.

Like a few others, Jonathan Greene from the atmaspheric endeavors blog tagged meabout my Symbian history. Since I harp about mobility and mobile solutions quite a bit, I thought maybe some context would help.

First, my mobile computing began many years ago with a TI Silent Writer 700, an acoustic-coupled modem, and rolls of thermal paper. For me, the move up to the 28 pount Compaq "luggable" OC with 5-inch orange screen and two floppy drives was truly a move up.

I started my handheld passions with the original Sharp Zaurus of old way back in the early 90s. I can't even find a picture online of that old unit, but I still have two. They still work. 2400bps modem that attached on the side. With built-in software for AT&T Mail (at a time I worked for AT&T) and Compuserve (I helped run the telecom forum and others).

I tried a Newton for a while. Hated it. Then came the Palm Pilot. I have the first version ever release. And my current Treo 700W is the eleventh Palm device I've owned. I pretty much used every Palm model ever made. I carried a Palm VIIx for a long time, with the wireless Palm network connectivity. This was my road warrior tool through around 1999-2002. I used the Palm TungstenC with built in WiFi for quite a while too. I had two of those.

A couple of years ago my TungstenC died and I tried out the Palm TX, but really settled on the LifeDrive. I still have a Palm LifeDrive today. It has WiFI built in, but I use it primarily for audio, video and photo stuff these days.

Along the way I played with the iPAQ and the HP Journada too. Both pretty solid devices.

I've been carrying a Treo 700W since the weekend they were released to the public. To be honest, I'm quite happy with it.

Over the years, I've had a number of cell phones, and some were Nokias. I know they ran some flavor of Symbian, but they were just phones, and treated as such.

My real exposure to the Symbian OS is quite recent, driven by my participation in the Nokia Blogger Relations program. As part of that testing, I've had the pleasure of using the Nokia N73, N93 and N80i. All are pretty solid products that impress me with their ease of use. But I've really only been using them for about 6 months now.

The N73 is, in my view, the premier camera phone on the market. I've yet to see a still camera that can compare in snappiness and photo quality myself. The N93, while containing a comparable lens, is really oriented to video. Again, it's the premier video camera phone. If it weren't for the N93, I wouldn't bother with video in the field much myself, but this is one fabulous tool. The N80i is solid and useful as a camera, but doesn't really compare with either the N73 or N93. Yet, it remains the one I reach for most, partly because of its size and form factor. It's the one I can easily carry in a shirt pocket. It's been years since I had a phone that felt comfortable in the shirt pocket, and I like that feel. I've written quite a bit about these three phones in other posts.

As I'm still figuring out some of the ins and outs of Symbian tools, I'm probably more critical that some. I'm not overly impressed with memory management in general. I'm a pretty tech-savvy user, and I find that far too often, the only way to free memory is to power down and remove that battery.

I'm not going to tag anyone else here because I think the people who write about Symbian and Nokia are pretty well covered already.