Don't usually play these tag games, but this will be the exception that proves the rule. My first Symbian device was the Nokia 7610 which I bought unlocked in August 2004 from a Vietnamese grey market vendor here (thanks Harry!) in Vancouver.

I bought the 7610 because of its 1 megapixel camera which was fab for its time and also because S60 was and is a platform where I knew I could get 3rd party apps and possibly develop my own. I bought the 7610 as a belated 40th birthday gift to myself (much better than a sports car :-) and much cheaper!). I was was smart enough to also buy an unlimited GPRS data plan for my phone which is no longer available in Canada and allows me to monthly use about 250 MB of data traffic photos and videos which is a lot over GPRS.

Took plenty of photos and uploaded many with HuginAndMugin (which my friend Simon wrote in Java; the Java mobile platform annoyed me back then because it couldn't take 1 megapixel photos and it annoys me now because there is a new JSR released seemingly every month and every phone has a different implementation of the Java mobile platform but I am still willing to be convinced that Java on mobile is actually a viable platform ) and via ShoZu.

Went to BloggerCon III where I spoke about HuginAndMugin at the mobile session and met Andy who later became the man behind Nokia Blogger Relations.

From there, the rest is history. N70 and then N91, N93 and N73 and many, many photos and videos taken with all of these phones. Hopefully N95 soon. Oh and I also had a Newton 2000 and one of the first Palm Pilots. I used the Newton alot and the Palm for about 3 or 4 months; never liked Palm; too simple, really ugly fonts compared to the Newton :-) and didn't meet my geeky needs!

Except for the memory problems and the user interface problems of S60v3 (both of which can be fixed or improved, more on that later in a future post), I am quite happy with Symbian and S60.

I truly believe that if the iPhone is 1/4 as usable as it appears and ships 1/2 of the units Apple expects to, then this will be great competition and cause S60's memory problems and usability to be fixed rapidly. Vive la competition!

FROM atmaspheric | endeavors » My Symbian History:

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Ok - that was probably far too long and rambling, but I suppose that’s the point of this exercise. For the next round, I will tag people from my Twitter and Jaiku contact lists and ping Matthew Miller, Roland Tanglao and Ken Camp.

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