Mobile phones & tablets thread

[Mark]

Was just thinking back to how many Nokia's I've owned over the years, and it's quite a few as Nokia was synonymous with mobile phones for well over a decade, so here's my list

3330
Was actually my Dad's phone and for many was their first foray into owning a mobile. Was very basic and weighed a tonne but did the job. Have memories of going to some of the first forum meetups at touring car races carrying one of these in my pocket.

6310i
Until I got my iPhone 4S this was the phone I used for the longest time, about 3 years I think. Did everything you needed at the time and had a battery life of about a week! Only really got rid of it when the screen smashed - just like my 4S!

3230
Got this as my first foray into the new big thing of colour screens! It may have been cheaply made and underpowered, but it was a very innovative phone for it's time, running Symbian it was one of the first you could get where you could load software onto it (the term 'apps' hadn't really been coined yet), I remember running TomTom satnav on it, even though it required a seperate GPS reciever!

N73
Kind of building on the 3230 I actually really liked this phone, never gave me any trouble and running the same symbian you could load the likes of TomTom, digital bedside clocks etc, and it's the phone where I first downloaded the viewranger UK maps, which I still use on my iPhone today. I actually had two of them as after one broke after a year I got another one! Main drawback as with my Nokia things as it had a lot of features but they never really worked properly, I was never able to get emails working for example, neither on this phone or the N96/N97 whereas on my first iPhone 'it just worked'.

N96
Bigger screen and a slider phone, better than the N73 as it had wifi and GPS onboard, but it did suffer from being cheaply made with cheap plastic, while I didn't dislike it it's the only phone I've had for less than a year - 8 months I think it was.

N97
This was the big Nokia flagship phone that promised so much and yet delivered so little. Touch screen with flip out keyboard it was meant to take on both the iPhone and the Blackberry at the same time, and spectacularly failed on both fronts. OS which was not designed for touch screen was hacked to make it work and was chock full of bugs, and lots of stuff - such as the GPS which just didn't work at all. Not to mention it being so slow due to vastly under specced hardware. It was this phone above all else that made myself and I know many others, finally give up their loyalty to Nokia for the majority of the year or so I had the phone I was waiting for the iPhone 4 to be released, which I got on the day of release and never looked back.

Since the Nokias I've had iPhone 4, iPhone 4S and iPhone 6.

It's a shame, but as ever it's a story of missed opportunity as Nokia had one of the first smartphone platforms, yet loading apps required you connecting a cable and downloading install files from random websites, who had to have their own payments system as there was no central app store. When Nokia finally did set one up Apple's app store was already dominant.

It was obvious that they would face challenges, but nobody could have possibly predicted that in the middle of the last decade that in the middle of the next, Nokia mobile phones would cease to exist. RIP Nokia.