My new phone – not a Nokia anymore!

I finally had to get rid of my latest Nokia phone. It’s enough, really. The most consistent feature was the phone’s unreliability. It was buggy, slow – simply an awful experience. And it was Nokia’s ‘flagship’, the N97. I cannot imagine how a standard user must feel after having paid hundreds of pounds (or an equivalent contract with phone included) and getting a device that does not deserve the name ‘flagship’. Although it is telling for Nokia’s situation that its flagship device is just so bad. Already outdated in hardware spec when being announced back in 2009, it is now light years behind the main competitors, ranging from Apple over Samsung to others. And the state of its software is even worse. Ugly and outdated is the shortest description of the Symbian interface. I cannot believe how little progress things like email client, calendar, music player and other ‘core’ applications have seen over these many years since Symbian and Series 60 have existed. And announcements of future Symbian versions (such as Symbian^3) sound like reading the spec of competitor smartphones from last year! In the end, it just did not work for me anymore. I need a modern communication platform and Symbian is too close to being dead, as far as I am concerned.

So I got a new phone – it’s in fact the first phone I ever paid for (in the form of a contract)! After ten years of Nokia, it’s now a Samsung Galaxy S – an Android-based phone. The hardware is amazing (it makes the announced new flagship of Nokia, the N8, look like being two years too late): 1GHz processor (fast!!!), Super AMOLED screen (brilliant colors, while readable in sunlight!!), 512MB RAM (and there are no ‘memory full’ errors under Android, it seems), and multi-touch screen (something that might come in Symbian^3). The only feature that is not outstanding is the camera with 5MP and no flash (although I never took a picture in low light with my phone!). But video recording is in HD with 30fps.

But the biggest thing is the software. I can only imagine that Nokia engineers must be crying over the state of their software if they were ever to use ‘modern’ platforms. Android (similar to Apple) is like from another world, compared to Symbian. It’s slick, fast, and it works. The email client is not killing me with features but it does its job at least to an extent I was only hoping for on my Nokia. The apps in the store are amazingly many (in particular many free ones – apparently Android has the largest ratio of free apps). The coolest thing is the text input. Samsung licenses a software called Swype which allows for inputting text by ‘swiping’ across a keyboard. The recognition rate is amazing, making input REALLY fast. And there are so many other features I so much enjoy (e.g., turning my phone into a mobile access point through a built-in feature, no extra required). So it is really cool.

Why Android though? Well, I do like my iPod Touch and came to enjoy the simplicity of Apple’s UI. But I still wanted a phone that is not crippled and under full control of a single company (I can’t understand, for instance, why Apple is restricting BT functionality so badly!!). Android is licensed by phone companies who try to differentiate – that can only be good for the consumer. Some things don’t work as well on my Android as on my iPod (email being one example) but it’s pretty close.

So it is a big change after so many years of being faithful towards a company I worked for many years. But in the end, I’m a consumer who wants the best features. And Nokia is not among the companies anymore which can satisfy that demand for me (and numbers on smartphone market shares do agree with that sentiment). Anyways, off to enjoy my phone now.