The Nokia N95 was my 4th mobile phone. It served me from May 2007 – September 2010… over three years. It has of course been replaced by my new iphone 4….
Before i move on to the n95, let’s go back in time and have a look at my phones from the past…
Siemens C25
First came out in 1999, i probably inherited it around 2000… it was my first mobile phone and i had just gone in to secondary school. I remember out of a class of about 30, 7 had mobile phones at that time, me being one. Back then text messages were as good as it got. The phone itself was actually very small & slim for it’s time.
nokia 3330
The infamous 3310 came out in 2000 and the 3330 was an upgraded version with WAP and animated screensavers. That was a big deal. WAP meant you could connect to external services and download screensavers and even get text based news headlines. It cost a bomb so i never used it… this phone was a ‘classic’ though. Notice the internal antenna too…
nokia 6600
photo credit: if you love me
I bought this phone after getting my first bit of cash from a part time job in Dunnes Stores around about 2004. From a meteor shop in navan. It was about €600 as far as i remember. Meteor were the only ones who had it in stock in pay as you go. This was the ultimate gizmo. Video, pictures, memory slot, bluetooth, multitasking, games, colour screen… this was a massive step up from the 3330 and the 6600 was the iphone 4 of it’s day. It was also pretty fat and chunky and had a little joystick in the middle.
nokia n95
photo credit: Andrea Vascellari
Bought in 2007 for €550+ sim free. 5mp camera, wifi, gps, music player, decent quality videos, apps… again this was the best phone money could buy at the time (the original iphone was launching that summer and i knew about it but at that stage the n95 kicked it’s ass).
iphone 4
In all honesty there are no new major hardware features on this phone -v- older phones i’ve owned however the iphone 4 does a great job of integrating them all in to one very smooth, polished package that just works. It looks classy and it feels classy to use. That’s what apple do. The iphone 4 is now one of the best phones money can buy not because of it’s hardware, but because of the overall package.
It’s amazing what they can do these days
6 / 7 years ago (when the n6600 came out) the likes of twitter & facebook didn’t exist. Apps didn’t really exist either. Apple made ipods and very expensive PCs. Mobile phones are a great example of how quickly IT ages. We could only have dreamt of the stuff we have today 6 years ago. And most of us would have thought that technology would be 10-15 years + down the line. Some may even have questioned the need for it or the demand for it.
What’s great about IT is that nothing is certain. You don’t know there’s a demand for something until there’s a demand for it. By the time you’ve carried out your research, it’s old news… things move so quickly…
You’ll often hear older people say “It’s amazing what they can do these days” and it’s true. As we get older, technology becomes more incredible by the day because we’re always comparing it to the past, like i am doing now. Take a typical 13 year old now and they’ll be starting secondary school with an iphone 4. In 10 years time they’ll be saying how stone age that was…