After about 10 years of cellphone use, I finally gave up on the Nokia phones. For several reasons I’ll get into later. Yet first I’ll allow myself some memory lane 😉

• Nokia 3210 – My first cellphone, a present from the parents & a fun phone 🙂 Got stolen. And somehow replaced, I dont remember how though.. :s
• Nokia 3510i – The second phone – a first color phone. I still have it 🙂 Got it when I was 21 and well.. memories 🙂 It was one of the first color phones in a long line and lets say it had some quirks.. Food phone though 😉
  As you might by now have realized, I do 3 years with most phones.. well, I did back then.
• Nokia 6103 – A third. And a great phone at that 🙂 Works a week on a fully charged battery, but was slow as hell. Well maybe not hell, but .. slow! Point was, it was a great phone & Ive still got it ready to pick up & use when necessary 🙂
• Nokia 3500 Classic – The phone I got from my current employer (Big box at Kontich). Same soft as the previous one; much faster, same batt; so barely ANY autonomy on this phone. 3 days max.. Quite sad coming from the week a charge regime..

And all through this endless cycle of Nokia phones, there was one constant. Well, two..

The first was obviously the wonderful phone interface. It was unparalleled in its time & I rightly swore by it back in the day..

The second was sadly the fact that you could not in Any acceptable way get ANYTHING off those phones. This gradually got better anyway, but at any rate.. changing SIM or GSM always equaled pain. AAAALWAYS! PAIN!! The only way to get from one phone to another was a sim card reader. Copy all contacts from one card to another & be happy everything fit on there.. More contacts? More messages? The new phones let you put that on memory; but there was no way to get the data off again. Maybe you wanted to benefit all the modern options of your phone, added birthdates, maybe some contact pictures, but even if you were able to get some of that data off the phone (renamed to contact name 1, contact name 2, dirk 1, dirk 2, vi 1, vi 2, ..) you probably wont be able to get it all (only contacts A to Reinaldo) and there is No WAY you ll get those images off. And about those images.. you wont ever be able to fit an image on there for all those contacts, because that minimal amount of storage is already Full. Now lets be honest here for a sec.. there are options. These days I can get my personal pics off the phone, there s a memory card, there s the messages & the phone numbers, ..but in the end; its a Nightmare. And Nokia does provide some scary interface, windows only. There s Gammu; the AMAZING linux version of the phone interface. And Im not kidding here, gammu rocks our world 🙂 But its a great solution to a problem that never should have existed!

This awful situation where we need to grasp straws to get the data we aggregated on our devices over some period of time. We took the pictures, we sent & received the messages, we got the phone numbers from all those people.. but apparently Nokia does not believe they should make that data readily available. A simple open standard and access to the ENTIRE phone contents!

Android

And this is where the Nokia era ends 🙂 Google took it upon them to create an open phone os; completely customizable and with the possibility of a drop in replacement for each and every component!

Need your contacts? they re on the google servers. If you want them to. Contact images? idem. Want your phone to do something extra? just install an app. Need some data your phone is using? No problem, just copy it or use an app to help you.

And to be honest; Nokia is trying to make an effort with the Meamo thing. Open source n all that. Too little too late though and even more so – I cant trust them to open that up at a decent level. It ll obviously be focused on their top level devices and we probably wont even get half of the data. The right thing to do would be to get their open source stuff on ALL their phones and preferably some standard instead of trying to save the platform they neglected up till now. Get some android on all your phones & make it a standard brand.

And the nice thing about this whole android movement 🙂 When I want a new update, can put a new piece of android on it. Lovely hardware with any software I choose on it. And there are off course caveats with the android thing too; (though I wont count the recent modding controversy here – Read up on that & you ll understand why) but we’re almost there 🙂

So exit Nokia; Welcome to the Android 🙂