Andrew Currie

My Phone Book
Every mobile phone I've ever owned. And one I didn't. 1st Edition, 2012 MyPhoneBook.ca

Licenses
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Cover art by user "Maddrum" via the Open Clip Art Library, licensed under the CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication.

Technical Notes
This ebook contains html links, on the assumption that you are using a connected computer, smartphone or tablet to read it. I myself don't own any dedicated e-readers like the Kindle or Kobo; as such I have no idea what kind of Internet connectivity those devices offer, if any. Sorry. If you want to know what you're missing, each of the mobile phones chronicled here has its own dedicated page at MyPhoneBook.ca. There are also some other links to carriers, manufacturers and the odd blog post. I could have used footnotes instead but deliberately chose not to. Hey, why trust me when you can click right through to the source?

Table of Contents
My Phone Book.........................................................................................................................................1 Licenses......................................................................................................................................................2 Technical Notes..........................................................................................................................................3 Prologue: The End is The Beginning.........................................................................................................5 Part 1 The Dark Ages..............................................................................................................................6 Chapter 1 (not quite) Love At First Sight...............................................................................................7 Chapter 2 My First Flip...........................................................................................................................8 Chapter 3 My Weekend with a Smartphone............................................................................................9 Part 2: The Wonder Years.........................................................................................................................10 Chapter 5 A Thousand Below................................................................................................................11 Chapter 6 My First Ericsson.................................................................................................................12 Chapter 7 My First PDA Phone............................................................................................................13 Chapter 8 I Used Gel Skins Before They Were Cool............................................................................14 Chapter 10 The Dancing Nokia.............................................................................................................15 Chapter 11 My First Keitai....................................................................................................................16 Chapter 12 My First World Phone........................................................................................................17 Chapter 13 My First Bluetooth.............................................................................................................18 Chapter 14 CSD Is History...................................................................................................................19 Chapter 15 My Treo..............................................................................................................................20 Chapter 16 My First Camera Phone......................................................................................................21 Chapter 17 My First Sony (Ericsson)...................................................................................................22 Chapter 18 UIQ.....................................................................................................................................23 Chapter 19 Two Ts and a Z...................................................................................................................24 Chapter 20 Best Sidekick Ever.............................................................................................................25 Chapter 21 Hell No, Moto.....................................................................................................................27 Chapter 22 My First HTC.....................................................................................................................28 Chapter 23 My CrackBerry...................................................................................................................29 Chapter 24 Symbiotic............................................................................................................................30 Part 3: After The i.................................................................................................................................31 Chapter 25 Best Eseries Ever................................................................................................................32 Chapter 26 Rockstar..............................................................................................................................33 Chapter 27 Nseries Dyslexia.................................................................................................................34 Chapter 28 Best Nseries Ever...............................................................................................................35 Part 4: Assimilation..................................................................................................................................37 Chapter 29 My First Nexus...................................................................................................................38 Chapter 30 Android On The Cheap.......................................................................................................40 Chapter 31 hiptop Redux .....................................................................................................................41 Chapter 32 Last Dance with Nokia ......................................................................................................42 Chapter 33 Nothin But Nexus..............................................................................................................43 Epilogue The Beginning Is The End.....................................................................................................45

Prologue: The End is The Beginning

While out for lunch with friends last year something struck me. Every single person had a mobile phone in front of them on the table an Android phone at that, just like me. Most of the phones on the table would be classified as smartphones capable of much more than merely making calls. But that moniker is increasingly irrelevant today, as most mobile devices for sale here in Canada can browse web pages at the very least. Steve Litchfield, a blogger and podcaster in the UK, stopped calling his video podcast The Smartphones Show a long time ago; now its just The Phones Show, even though the gear featured therein is no less powerful. There was a time, however, when Internet connectivity, text messaging even syncing your phones address book to a computer was a big deal. I know because I was there. Ive been blogging about smartphones since the 1900s. I used the mobile Internet back when it was just a series of text-only WAP pages. I used SMS when only a single carrier in my country supported it. Ive also had the good fortune to have travelled a fair bit, and have seen firsthand how mobile phones continue to change the world. I guess you could say Im a bit of a mobile phone geek. Thats why this particular moment, sitting at a table with an Android phone at every place setting, was so profound. Each of my friends had their own handheld gateway to the Internet; they could share their world with anyone and bring the world to them with just a few taps of their screen. Many are in possession of this power now, whether they use Android, iPhone, BlackBerry Smartphones are now a commodity item. Theres still lots of room for innovation, but for my world, my friends, weve arrived. The mobile revolution has swept through Europe, Asia and (finally) the Americas. Now when I travel I see the same high-powered phones wherever I go, and most of them now work in every country, on every network. Its an amazing thing. I might not have the authority to tell you how we got here, but I can tell you how I got here. Im still in possession of many of my old phones. For a while I was even collecting dummies you know, the ones on display in stores that dont actually work? You can find a lot of them on eBay. I stopped only because newer handsets tend to look the same; didnt used to be that way, though. If youre wondering what using a mobile device was like in the dark days before the iPhone, this book is for you. Despite my mobile geekery Ill strive to keep things as un-technical as possible, focusing as best I can on the experience of using the technology, rather than the technology itself. But this is a book about mobile phones after all, so expect a sprinkling of model numbers here and a light dusting of acronyms there much of it hilariously antiquated. If nothing else my goal is to demonstrate how much cell phones used to suck; if by the end of this chronicle you appreciate the connected computer you hold in your hand just a little bit more then Ill have done my job.

Part 1 The Dark Ages

I was still in university when I used a mobile phone for the first time . A friend of a friend gave me a lift somewhere, and the first thing I noticed from the front passenger seat of the drivers arrest-me red 1988 Honda Prelude was the rather ostentatious car phone sitting between us. As we screeched away from the curb the driver, player that he was with his Ray-Ban sunglasses and the collar turned up on his pink Lacoste golf shirt, instructed me to call directory assistance to get an address. This set my mind racing, almost as fast as the sports car I was in: Directory assistance, from a car phone? Doesnt he know how much that costs? This guy must be rich yes, thats it hes a rich gangster in a Chinese Triad and Im going to die before this ride is over Of course I didnt, but it would be many years before I had a mobile phone to call my own. And even then I still wasnt sold on the idea.

Chapter 1 (not quite) Love At First Sight

My very first mobile phone was (I think) a Nokia 638. It couldnt surf the web or do SMS; it just made calls. Oh, and it was blue. I didnt even want it, but a buddy of mine bought it for me as a birthday present; all I had to do was sign a two-year contract and pay the monthly airtime bills. How thoughtful. Back in mid-1990s Toronto (where I live) pay phones were still cheap and plentiful, and most of my time was spent either at home or in the theatre where I worked. For me, a cell phone was an unnecessary luxury. It was a different story for my generous friend. He was an up-and-coming director of photography for music videos and TV commercials. He was always on location somewhere, and needed a mobile phone to secure his next gig, even while working the current one. He bought his Nokia first, the same model as mine but in a bright yellow housing. He loved it so much that he bought a matching yellow hard case for it not a form-fitting case as we know it today but a small hard case with a handle, filled with foam and a cavity cut out for the device. I needed no such protection for my Nokia; it went almost straight from the box to the bottom of my desk drawer, with the power shut off and battery removed. Starving comedian that I was I could barely afford to pay my bill, let alone risk going over my monthly allotment of minutes. I did take it out with me once to do a show at another theatre, where good fortune smiled upon me my phone was stolen from the dressing room. Freedom! But getting out of the contract with my carrier was another matter altogether. When I called Bell Mobility to cancel my service I was pushed to accept a replacement phone for only a little less than the two hundred or so Canadian dollars my buddy paid for the original. I politely declined. The price immediately dropped to a hundred. Nope. Then fifty. Really not interested Finally it was offered to me for free. And a week or so later, a second grey version of the phone I never wanted showed up at my door. Shortly afterwards the police called me up with the good news that my stolen blue Nokia had been recovered. Great, so now I had two phones, two batteries and two chargers entombed in the bowels of my desk. They stayed there for at least a year, until I gave them both away to someone I found through an online charity service. This would be the first time I had two working mobile devices in my home simultaneously, but certainly not the last.

Chapter 2 My First Flip

My second-ever mobile phone and the first that I actually enjoyed using was the Motorola StarTAC. This small and svelte device, dwarfed in every dimension by the ginormous Nokia before it, marked a lot of firsts. It was, for example, my first subsidized handset. Remember that I was still in the midst of my first contract with Bell Mobility, and when I happened upon a store to get out of it I was offered a StarTAC as a hardware upgrade instead. A clever ploy, and it worked. The StarTAC was also my first flip phone. According to Wikipedia it was technically the worlds first full flip the MicroTAC that preceded it only qualified as a semi because of its exposed earpiece. The point is, back then this was a design revelation. You didnt need a case for the StarTAC because the phone protected itself when closed that is, the screen and keypad folded up against each other, safe from harms way. An additional benefit of this design was that you could answer a call by flipping the handset open, though prying it apart like a clamshell would make the hinge last much longer. Note that this was in the days before cell phones had call display, so you couldnt screen calls even if you wanted to. And thanks to the whip antenna you could pull another slick move. Remember in the movie Pulp Fiction when John Travolta, with a comatose Uma Thurman in the back seat of his car, yanked out the antenna of his cell phone with his teeth before dialling a number? Yeah, that move. Badass. My hardware upgrade could have gone a different way Bell also carried the Nokia 282 at the time. But the StarTAC had yet another trick up its sleeve: it was my first handset with a vibrate function. No big deal today, but back then you were seen as a person of means if your phone politely buzzed rather than beeped. Speaking of snob appeal, the StarTAC was the first cell phone with available accessories that were actually worth paying for. At the high end was the prohibitively expensive lithium-ion battery; for those on a budget there was a more modestly priced clamp-on battery extender, making the diminutive Moto look a lot more like the bulky MicroTAC that preceded it. I stuck with the standard battery but got myself a car charger. Too bad I didnt have a car to plug it in to. As time passed ever more models of StarTAC and StarTAC accessories came to market. I can remember two or three other people I knew who also had one; wed chat about battery life, accessories and such. In other words, this marked the first time that I experienced a sense of community around a mobile device. Prescient stuff, this

Chapter 3 My Weekend with a Smartphone

In 1999 I got a free ride to the famous Just For Laughs comedy festival in Montreal. I spent my evenings watching my girlfriend of the time perform, and most of my days at the Bell Mobility store on St. Catherines Street. Why? Because I had upgraded my phone yet again this time to a so-called smartphone and the damn thing didnt work at all. There was certainly nothing wrong with the hardware. It was my second Nokia, the 6185, in a business grey housing instead of whimsical blue. It also used a fancy new digital cellular network called PCS. In practical terms this meant that the screen (now LCD instead of LED) was now exponentially more useful because the phone supported call display. Yay, progress! Unfortunately a service bundle offered by my carrier ruined everything. I should have known that Bell couldnt possibly deliver what they promised, a quantum leap forward in mobile technology that would put the power of the Internet in my hands, wherever I happened to be. It was brace yourself email on my mobile phone. It was supposed to work like this: Id log in to my Bell account on a desktop computer, and enter details for the email address I wanted to connect to my phone. Im pretty sure the service only supported a single email address but remember, this was bleeding edge technology for the time. BlackBerry had launched their very first email device earlier in the year but I had never heard of it Anyway, once the connection was set up my email would be forwarded in real time to my mobile phone. Even better, I could email replies again, in real time. This was all made possible by some obscure mobile telephony standard from Europe called SMS, but I cared not for such trivial details Email on my phone! How cool is that?!! On the morning of my departure for Montreal I dutifully logged in to Bell Mobilitys website and entered the details of my Sympatico email address. Sympatico was the home Internet service offered by Bell Canada come to think of it, I think Bells mobile email service only worked with a Sympatico account. Go figure. Back to the story With everything set up I powered down my computer for the weekend and my girlfriend and I headed down to Union Station to catch our train, where I would surely use the next six hours in a productivity coup sending and receiving emails like a boss and generally being the envy of everyone else on-board. Instead, I spent the afternoon-long journey looking at a blank screen. At the Bell in Montreal there was much furrowing of brows and scratching of heads. The staff were obliged to offer support, but I got the distinct feeling that this bleeding-edge technology was as new for them as it was for me. To their credit they finally got it working intermittently, at least and then the promise of email on the go was met with the unfortunate reality of a small screen that could, at best, display six lines of text. Worse, because of the 160-character limit of this SMS technology even a short email had to be broken up into five or six separate messages. It took the first two or three just to spit out the sender and subject! Immediately upon my return to Toronto I proceeded immediately to the store where Id purchased my smartphone, slammed it down on the counter and demanded an immediate refund. The experience was so frustrating that it moved me to write my first-ever blog post on the Internet, wherein I vowed to never again be wooed by the empty promise of new technology. In a blog post. On the Internet. I was doomed.

Part 2: The Wonder Years

For my personal golden age of mobile telephony to begin I first had to sign up with a proper GSM network. In Canada there was but one such option at the time; it was called Fido, and its still around today albeit with new ownership. When I moved in to my current home in early 2000 I contacted Bell Canada to get a landline phone installed as was the style of the day. When the technician arrived I immediately noticed that he had a Fido-branded cell phone clipped to his belt. I couldnt help but ask: Shouldnt you be using a Bell product? Fidos got a better signal, was his terse reply. Hows that for a ringing endorsement? Fido in the early 2000s was very much like Mobilicity and WIND Mobile a decade later; an upstart to the wireless status quo that competed simultaneously on two fronts innovation and price. At one time, when the mobile Internet was available but not widely used in North America, I had an option on my account called Fido Pro. Eight extra dollars a month got me voicemail, call display/waiting/forwarding, unlimited text messaging and unlimited (circuit-switched) data until Mobilicity and WIND came along there was no better value in Canada for mobile users. A few years later Fido got me to ditch my landline altogether, thanks to the unlimited local airtime available on their City Fido initiative. And a month after that Rogers bought them up and everything slowly went to hell. But I soldiered on with Fido until 2010, mostly because I didnt really have anywhere else to go. But thanks to the magic of the subscriber identity module (SIM card), a removable chip found inside every GSM-based handset, I was able to burn through more mobiles than ever before

Chapter 5 A Thousand Below

The next logical step after Nokias 6185 and 6188 should have been the 6190, but alas that particular handset was too expensive for someone living on actors wages. Instead my first phone on the Fido network was the lowly 5190, in hindsight one of the best decisions I ever made it proved to be so spectacular that it fundamentally changed my expectations of what a mobile phone could do. First, there was the Xpress-on cover. The entire front panel of the device could easily be removed, along with the number keys which laid together on a flat piece of silicone. This essentially made a protective case unnecessary, as the user could, at their discretion, swap out the front of the phones housing at any time for something new. Of course I ended up buying a leather pouch anyway because I loved my 5190 that much. But I also started collecting Xpress-on covers. It didnt quite get to the point where I had one to match every outfit, but it was close. Its also worth pointing out that when you removed the Xpress-on cover on the 5190 or any 51xx series phone, I think you were greeted with a smiling face, literally. Someone, somewhere had made the design decision to mold the plastic covering the earpiece of the phone into a happy face. It confounds me to this very day, but speaks to an attention to detail that Ive not seen from any other electronics manufacturer before or since. Perhaps it had more to do with my nascent career as an actor than the handset itself, but I also remember my 5190 as the phone I really started travelling with. My previous two Nokias had support for Canadas old school analog networks built-in, while the made-for-GSM 5190 did not. Nokia and Fido came up with a pretty clever solution; for an extra seventy-five bucks you could get an external analog antenna that snapped onto the back of a 51 (or 61) 90 between the phone and battery. It made the phone about twice as thick but I used this very setup on a tour of Eastern Canada and it worked great. Most importantly, this was the first phone that I properly texted with. I remember very clearly when SMS first proved its worth: I was with my girlfriend at The Chicago Improv Festival in the spring of 2000. We were watching a troupe perform and they were fairly awful. Worse, I couldnt say anything disparaging to my girlfriend without disturbing the other patrons around us in the packed theatre. Then I remembered that an actor I had taught back in Toronto was also in the audience somewhere and was, like me, a Fido customer. So we started texting each other, sharing our misery and a blow-by-blow assessment of the unfolding comedy train wreck on stage. In this way I was transported from the tedium of a comedy show that wasnt funny to a parallel universe, where I was free to bitch and moan about it to a kindred spirit all without leaving my seat or disturbing anyone. Except for my girlfriend, of course; she was none too impressed by the distractions of my glowing screen and flying thumbs.

Chapter 6 My First Ericsson

To be honest, Im not a hundred percent clear on why I bought Fidos Ericsson T18z. It might have been to soften the blow of a breakup (dont worry, weve both moved on since). It might also have been that my Nokia 5190, with the removable faceplates and all, was getting to be too whimsical for someone who was now a home-owner and full-time actor. Or it might well have been a lingering jealousy over the first Fido phone I ever saw. In 1999 someone in a bar somewhere was pitching Fido to me via the Ericsson sitting atop his pack of cigarettes I cant say exactly which model it was, but I did find it appealing in an austere European kind of way. The T18z, no less austere, easily passed my informal cool enough for a gangster test like my StarTAC it also had a telescoping antenna that you could pull out with your teeth, John Travolta in Pulp Fiction-style. Another thing I liked was that it didnt need a protective case. Being a semi-flip meant that the keypad was protected when not in use, and the monochrome screen was so tiny that the odds of it ever being scratched were slim to none. Also, a belt clip was built in to the back of the housing not that Id ever wear it on my belt; instead I displayed it proudly on my chest via the strap on my messenger bag, like a bike courier would. Never mind that I didnt actually own a bike at the time. The phones biggest drawback was its incredibly stiff keys which, when combined with the tiny screen, made texting a real chore. To combat this I found an interesting accessory, a snap-on qwerty keypad that Ericsson called the Chatboard. In theory it was a great idea, in practice not so much. The problem was one of weight distribution to effectively text you had to hold the Chatboard with both thumbs, and the much heavier handset attached at the top had you constantly fighting the inevitable forces of gravity when using it. A more usable accessory was the Mobile Office DI-27 that is, an infrared modem. Snapping this on to the bottom of my T18z enabled me to compose texts on my Palm Pilot, then send them through the air to my phone and onwards to the recipients. Remember, this was still the year 2000; I can remember drawing an actual crowd when a buddy and I broke out our Palms and played a game of Battleship via an IrDA connection We were gods that day. The unfortunate thing about infrared was that you needed a line-of-sight connection, just like the remote for your TV. So sending and receiving texts using my Palm and Ericsson meant that both Ir ports had to be facing each other for the transfer to work. And the transfer speed was so slow that I most often had to lay both of them down on a flat surface and wait hardly an optimal solution for handheld devices meant to be used on the move. Fortunately, there was something better just around the corner

Chapter 7 My First PDA Phone

Despite my high-level geekery Ive only ever wanted two things from a connected mobile device. Youll read about the second one shortly but the first is quite simple, a feature that we take entirely for granted these days. However, back in the winter of 2000 I was the only person I knew with a synchronized phone book, and it was all thanks to my VisorPhone. I had already been using personal digital assistants (PDAs) for about two years. I got started with an Apple Newton; some hospital or pharmaceutical company had returned a bunch of them to a local electronics shop, who in turn passed the savings on to me. It wasnt nearly as bad as people were making it out to be remember that eat up Martha gag on The Simpsons? but the Palm Pilot that succeeded it was orders of magnitude better. Walking around with my entire calendar and address book in my pocket was incredibly convenient, and the idea was catching on. As I was starting to make a name for myself as an actor a local radio station invited me to debate PDAs vs. paper-based organizers on-air. My opponent clearly didnt stand a chance; nonetheless, I went easy on her right up until the very end, when the moderator challenged us to produce contact details for our respective dentists. The poor woman had barely cracked open her not-so-little black book as I was already blurting out the name, address and phone number of my dental office much to the delight of the folks who worked there. Heres the thing, though: beyond the quick access my electronic address book wasnt actually that useful. Sure, it synchronized with my desktop computer, but the desktop version was a lot more useful. To compose an email to someone all I had to do was click on their name. I could even dial their phone number thanks to the modem attached to my computer. Why couldnt my PDA do this? Thankfully, some clever people were considering this problem even before I was. One of them was Jeff Hawkins, co-CEO of Handspring, Inc. He was the inventor of the original Palm Pilot for U.S. Robotics, and when USR was bought up by 3Com he moved on to start his own company. Where 3Com targeted the business market Handspring went straight for geeks like me. The distinguishing feature of Handspring devices was an expansion slot at the back called a SpringBoard, giving you the ability to add and remove specific modules games, dictionaries, memory expansion, the spool of dental floss I got at the Handspring booth at Comdex 2001 But the VisorPhone trumped them all, turning my Handspring PDA into a PDA phone. It wasnt the only PDA phone on the market, nor was it the only Palm OS-based PDA phone at the time; Bell Mobility sold a Qualcomm device called the pdQ but it cost a thousand bucks and was ugly as sin. The $99 VisorPhone wasnt technically available to Canada, but as it wasnt locked to any carrier and my brother lived in the United States at the time he was able to bring one home for me at Christmas in 1999. And what a Christmas present it was! No more fiddling around with infrared connections; now I could text directly from my Visor. I could dial numbers from it, too. And the conversation I remember most? Are you on your VisorPhone? It sounds like crap

Chapter 8 I Used Gel Skins Before They Were Cool

At the dawn of the new millennium that is, February of 2001 I took a four-month sabbatical from acting to study new media at The Canadian Film Centre. New media was what they called Web 2.0 before there was a Web 2.0, and Web 2.0 was what they called it before whatever its called now. Why is any of this important? Only because I spent four intensive months in the company of other geeks, and for the first time didnt have to keep my mobile phone lust in check. Add to this Fidos blanket 14-day no-questions-asked return policy on handsets. The result? I could justify burning through any number of Fido-branded phones in the name of scholarly research. And thats exactly what I did. First up was Motorolas V2282. Two things drew me to it: (1) changeable plastic skins for customization not unlike my Nokia 5190, and (2) a built-in FM radio. Unfortunately, no amount of colourful plastic could hide the fact that this was one butt-ugly Moto. Truth be told, the cheap skins actually made the phone look more tawdry than without. And the FM radio, groundbreaking as it was for the time, didnt end up being such a killer feature after all. Making a wired headset do double duty as an antenna was clever enough, but the bulk of the commuting I did in those days was underground on the Toronto Subway system where there was no reception of any kind to be had. There still isnt. Were kind of backwards that way. I dont think this Moto lasted a week before I sent it back. Apparently it had a web browser, but I never used it. The mobile Internet would have to wait for my next handset.

Chapter 10 The Dancing Nokia

As my new media studies at The Canadian Film Centre were coming to an end, the phone I finally settled on as the successor to my much-loved 5190 was another, newer Nokia, the 3390. Nokias nomenclature made absolutely no sense to me at the time; suffice to say the 3390 was better in a number of ways. For starters it was less than half the size, and had no external antenna poking out so I could easily fit it into my pocket. Like the 5190 the 3390 had Xpress-On covers; unlike the 5190 you could change both the front panel and back battery cover. And like my old StarTAC the 3390 was blessed with a vibrate function. On its own the feature was convenient enough, but another Nokia engineering feat made for the stuff of legend. I discovered quite by accident that if I put the phone in vibrate mode, placed it upright on a flat surface and called it the 3390 would magically rotate about a centimetre or so on its base, without falling over. In other words, it could dance. For this to be even possible the handset would have to be weighted just so; ditto for whatever produced the vibration inside. Long story short, the dancing was clearly a planned feature either pointless or awesome depending on your point of view but proving nonetheless that Nokias engineers were light years ahead of anyone else. Unfortunately, as an entry level phone the 3390s days as my personal sidearm were numbered. But I kept it as a spare, and years later it would perform another feat matched by no other handset before or since: it was the first (and so far only) cell phone to ever be thrown at me by an angry girlfriend. It missed its target and smashed into a wall behind me, and thanks to its Xpress-On cover we both lived to see another day.

Chapter 11 My First Keitai

While North America and Europe were still stumbling with WAP, Japan was enjoying the worlds first successful mobile Internet. It was called i-mode and was a product of the Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo. Ive read two excellent books on the subject John C. Becks DoCoMo: Japans Wireless Tsunami and Mari Matsunagas Birth of i-mode and as I understand it there were two deciding factors that made DoCoMos creation an instant hit: First, Internet for home computers was prohibitively expensive in Japan and second, Japanese users were quite all right with a pay-per-page walled garden that was more like AOL than the wild west of the open web. I saw my first i-mode phone (keitai, to use the proper Japanese term) during my 2001 studies at The Canadian Film Centre. It was the property of a visiting lecturer I dont even remember what the talk was about, all I remember is the phone. It was shocking red and impossibly thin. It was like holding the future in my hand. Later that summer I paid my first-ever visit to Tokyo, ostensibly to figure out my career crisis that is, how to transfer my creative skills from old media to new. But truth be told I really just wanted to check out the keitai culture and use an i-mode phone. Some money Id made from a TV show made the trip possible; for the keitai I found a company operating out of Hawaii called Japan Cell Phone Rentals. Theyre still in business today. My handset would be waiting for me at my Tokyo hotel on the day of my arrival; upon departure I would simply put everything into a return mailer and leave it at the front desk. Sure enough, upon check-in at the Shibuya Excel Hotel Tokyu I was handed a small package; inside was an i-mode enabled Panasonic P503i HYPER. Im fairly certain that this particular unit was meant for a female user the case was dusty rose (pink) but I didnt care one bit. Nor did I care that I couldnt actually do much with it, what with the minor hurdle of not being able to read Japanese and all. I did manage to pull up an English-language i-mode menu, and browsed The Daily Yomiuri every morning over breakfast at my hotel. Like a boss. Words cannot do justice to the geeky joy I felt walking the streets of Tokyo, wandering past the racks of display phones in Akihabara, seeing people on trains silently hammering out messages to friends they were on their way to meet I was thrilled to be in the company of a populace who understood that mobiles could do so much more than make calls. And my god, the handsets were beautiful colour screens, clear as day with brightly-coloured housings to match. I had read somewhere that Japanese keitai users preferred clamshell phones by and large, but you could procure pretty much any form factor you wanted in this, the worlds most advanced market for mobile phones. On the last day of my trip I dutifully sealed my keitai into its return mailer and dropped it off at my hotels front desk. On the express train to the airport I watched out the window as Tokyo slipped away from me. Was it brave or stupid to transport myself to the other side of the planet on a whim? I still dont know I learned a scant few Japanese phrases while I was there, mostly ways to apologize just paying for something at a convenience store was a struggle. But folly or not, this was a once-in-a-lifetime experience that Id never forget. And I never thought Id be back in that part of the world so soon.

Chapter 12 My First World Phone

By September of 2001 I had already used a Fido phone on another network, my Nokia 5190 and attached analog adapter in Eastern Canada. I had also roamed on another countrys network (T-Mobile in the United States) with that same handset. But I had yet to roam on another continent. This would require a dual-band handset, called a world phone back in the day. Such a device wouldnt work on Japans mobile networks; carriers in Hong Kong, however, used the same GSM service that I enjoyed with Fido, just on another frequency. And why are we talking about Hong Kong all of a sudden? Unbelievable as it sounds, barely a week after my return from Japan I got booked on a comedy tour of Hong Kong, China and Singapore. The call came from the Toronto branch of The Second City the same theatre I was working at five years prior when I received my first cell phone as an unwanted gift. And now, as a crowning achievement of my stint as an actor there, I was to represent them on three different stages half a world away. Of course I couldnt go without a working mobile phone at my side, so I headed to the nearest Fido store for help. At the time they offered two dual-band handsets: One was the beautiful Nokia 8890, a slider with a brushed aluminum shell that when closed was even smaller than my 3390. The only problem was that it cost almost a thousand bucks. The other, cheaper option was the Ericsson T28w. At two hundred and fifty it was still pricey, but with Fidos generous thirty-day return policy I really had nothing to lose. So I brought one home and charged up the battery for my trip. Then 9/11 happened. Amazingly, the trip was still on. We travelled on one of the very first flights out of Toronto on Saturday, September 15th when planes were allowed to fly again. Our five-hour flight to San Francisco wasnt just quiet, it was solemn punctuated only by an emotional thank-you from the United Airlines crew. At SFO we transferred to a 747 and were upgraded to Business Class. The luxury proved to be a much-needed distraction from the events of the previous week. And now, back to the phone What I remember most about this particular handset was what happened immediately upon my arrival in Hong Kong. A signal was acquired without issue; in fact, I got a voicemail notification as our overseas flight from San Francisco was still taxiing up to the gate. The problem was that I couldnt actually dial in to hear it, and thus couldnt impress my colleagues with my globe-hopping connectivity on the go. This was still 2001, remember, and I was in the company of actors, not high-flying executives. I had to settle for a call to Fido customer service instead, and spent the next half hour complaining while on a bus into town. Fortunately, that call was free. Though my T28w stayed with me for the duration of my two weeks in Asia I didnt end up using it all that much. There was nothing particularly wrong with it, but thanks to Hong Kongs advanced mobile culture I was about to discover the wonder of unlocked phones and bring home a rather expensive souvenir.

Chapter 13 My First Bluetooth

A Bluetooth headset is a great way of letting the world know how much sex youre not getting. someone on the Internet My comedy shows in Hong Kong were a big success, even though the first one was cancelled (it was a corporate show, not part of our regular run). That cancellation gave us a full week in Hong Kong before our first gig, with nothing to do but take in the sights and shop. We soon found ourselves on the famous Nathan Road in Kowloon, where one of my fellow actors got himself fitted for not one but two custom-tailored suits. And I paid about as much for an Ericsson T39m, my second-ever unlocked phone. I also walked out with a wireless Bluetooth headset as part of the deal, but since such things have never really found favour with those who know better douchebag earrings, I believe theyre called you wont read any more about that here. But we will return to Bluetooth in just a bit. There was nothing particularly wrong with the Fido-branded Ericsson T28w that Id brought with me from Canada; it was pretty much a one-trick pony, though, offering dual band world service and not much else. But the T39m was a different story. Its killer feature was a GPRS data radio, allowing it to connect to the Internet at will, rather than locking down the phone entirely by making a data call via circuit switched data. The difference was akin to a dial-up versus broadband Internet connection on a home computer. Sadly, like other Ericssons before it the T39m was cursed with a tiny screen, so browsing WAP pages on it was quite pointless. Thus, upon my return to Canada the Ericsson T28w went back to Fido and my T39m went into storage that is, until the following April (2002), when I became aware of a Bluetooth module for my Handspring Visor. Like infrared, Bluetooth allowed for a connection without wires; unlike infrared Bluetooth was a lot faster and didnt require line-of-sight for transmission. Two hundred bucks later I was dismayed to find that the only task this Bluetooth module could accomplish was dial my phone from my PDA. Shortly thereafter the Bluetooth, then cellular radio died entirely. The only explanation I could surmise was that my T39m was made for developing markets, and was not up to the same build standard expected for the west, or even Hong Kong. To put it another way, I was scammed. But if it sounds like my imported Ericsson was a waste of time it honestly wasnt. This wouldnt be the last Ericsson Id ever own; the Saturday night Hong Kong movies on a local Chinese television station taught me that Ericsson was the brand of choice for discerning mobsters. And the experience of buying mine overseas showed me the freedom that could be gained in using unlocked devices, along with the perils of buying them from sketchy vendors.

Chapter 14 CSD Is History

Up until June, 2002 I had enjoyed mobile data service from Fido for a mere five dollars a month. Yup, five bucks. And Im pretty sure that was just an administrative fee; this was circuit-switched data after all, so in addition to that charge I was also on the hook for the minutes I used while dialled in to the mobile Internet. Having been on the Internet since 1995 I was well-versed in the dial-up routine get in, get what you want, get out but like broadband Internet for desktop computers, an always-on Internet for mobile phones was inevitable. When Fido introduced their packet-based GPRS data service they yanked the CSD option at the same time. While the minutes from my calling plan would no longer take a hit from data there was now a data transmission charge, 5 per kilobit sent or received. Even on small WAP pages that could add up, and exponentially so if you were roaming abroad and needed valuable information at your fingertips. It should be noted that by this point in my life I didnt just have a travel bug; a parasitic host had set up a permanent residence, relentlessly steering my career and cash flow towards the next overseas flight and hotel booking. My actor friends couldnt afford to go or werent interested, but the mobile Internet proved to be a dependable and compliant travel companion. Thus this new pay-per-use mobile Internet simply would not do. I called Fido and threatened to cancel my account an obvious bluff, since there was no other GSM carrier in Canada at the time. I got to speak to someone in their retentions department, who offered me a $400 handset for $50 if I would stay on with them through the summer. Being the device whore that I am I could hardly say no, and the $400 phone I got was the Nokia 8390. Like the 3390 before it, the 8390 had Xpress-On covers and could dance. But this newer, smaller Nokia also had a GPRS radio and onboard WAP browser. And yet I was entirely underwhelmed by it, never even gave it a chance, really. Maybe it was the small monochrome screen, maybe it was the constant, painful reminder that the mobile Internet would never again be as cheap as it once was. Whatever the reason meh. I seem to remember taking it to a bar that was open all night to broadcast a World Cup game from South Korea, but thats about it. The phone would go up for auction on eBay the very next month. What replaced it, however, would prove to be quite epic

Chapter 15 My Treo
I sold my Treo 270 to a friend in January, 2004 and almost immediately regretted it. For a year and a half prior I was in smartphone heaven, blessed with a device that ticked all the boxes: It had a colour touch screen, qwerty keypad, ran the Palm OS, had a dual-band radio for overseas use It didnt ship with a GPRS-compatible radio but wonder of wonders, I was able to apply a firmware upgrade myself a few months after I bought it. About the only thing it didnt have was an onboard camera, but in the summer of 2002 when I bought it camera phones were just starting to become popular in Europe and Japan. Okay, my GSM-based Treo wasnt compatible with Japans mobile networks, but I could use it pretty much everywhere else. And in 2002-2003 it seemed like I did just that. By this time I had racked up enough Air Canada points for a free trip to Australia, via Hawaii. I remember being on a bus in Honolulu and firing up the mobile version of MapQuest to verify the location of the Ala Moana Center, where I would enjoy my first-ever serving of Hawaiian poi. Choosing a food court vendor over a touristy hotel restaurant saved me about fifty bucks. Later that trip I would surprise a friend back in Canada with my reply to her innocuous text: What am I up to? Oh, not much just having breakfast in Sydney, Australia is all Later that year I was back in Singapore with the The Second City theatre, and amazed our stage manager by pulling up almost-live hockey scores from back home on Yahoos mobile sports site. On that same trip I somehow managed to find a cute Singaporean pen pal to flirt with via SMS when I got back home once we both figured out the country codes, of course. It didnt last long but while it did it was an amazing thing, sharing random moments from lives on the run from opposite sides of the world. This was all in the days before Twitter, of course. My Treo was also there for me during tougher times. It allowed me to take diligent notes from doctors as my father lay dying in hospital. During the SARS epidemic, no less. And when a sudden, North America-wide power outage silenced my desktop computer and cordless phones, my Treo persevered. That I could still make calls on it made me quite popular with my neighbours, at least for the duration of the blackout. The last time my Treo would travel with me was, fittingly, on my last jaunt as an overseas comedian, performing for Canadian troops stationed in Bosnia-Herzegovina. We were already halfway through our two-week USO-style tour sorry, deployment when I learned that mobile phones were not allowed on base. Apparently local crime rings had the technology to intercept mobile transmissions, including SMS. But about the only sensitive information I remember sending was that the food was fantastic. Seriously, an army really does travel on its stomach. My Treo and I had some great times together and it rarely, if ever, let me down. I miss it to this very day.

Chapter 16 My First Camera Phone

The first camera phone that I ever saw was the Nokia 7650 in the summer of 2002, at an electronics shop in a mall down the road from my Sydney hotel. It was a hulking brute of a vertical slider that cost upwards of a thousand Australian dollars, and wouldnt even work in North America. The first camera phone that I actually used wasnt made for North American markets either; it was another Japanese keitai that I rented for my second trip to Tokyo in January, 2003. I had a buddy from high school who worked the IT racket in the United States. His frequent paid-for flights back and forth between Toronto and Dallas gave him enough points to enjoy a first class return trip to the faraway land where his favourite anim and manga were made. Needless to say, I jumped at the opportunity to tag along. Since my inaugural visit to Japan in 2001 NTT DoCoMo (of i-mode fame) had introduced a new service called i-shot, enabling its users to share photos via the built-in cameras on their handsets. Nothing special today, I know but back then it was enough for me to justify my entire trip. I secured an i-shot compatible phone once again via Japan Cell Phone Rentals, and upon my return to the Excel Hotel Tokyu in Shibuya a package was waiting for us at the front desk, just like the first time. Inside was a Mitsubishi mova D251i, in dusty rose that is, the one meant for girls. I snapped about fifty 120120-pixel photos that trip of cars, food, signs, toys, myself I had always been a fan of digital cameras, and accustomed as I was to the restrictions of low resolution photography I felt that I could adequately exploit this oddly small and square palette. Plus, there was something incredibly liberating about having a camera with you at all times, one you could keep at the ready in a pocket rather than a bag or knapsack. But having a connected camera was the best part of all. Snapping a photo from the streets of Tokyo and sending it to a friend halfway around the world by email immediately after was at that time, at least the stuff of science fiction. Never mind that said friend halfway around the world was at that moment more than likely sound asleep. And that I racked up and extra fifty US dollars in data charges over and above my one hundred dollar handset rental. And that I discovered that the phone had a removable memory card only after I had emailed every single photo to myself from the handset. The future, it seemed, didnt come cheap.

Chapter 17 My First Sony (Ericsson)

Handsprings second-generation Treo 600 promised to be a big improvement over my first-gen 270, with a sturdy candy bar design replacing the admittedly flimsy flip. But by the spring of 2003 it still hadnt come to market, and the wait was killing me. The Palm/Handspring operating system had proved its mettle for smartphones, so I ponied up for the rather expensive Palm Tungsten T and found a suitable Bluetooth-enabled handset to pair it with. That phone was the Sony Ericsson T68i. Sony had already been making their own handsets at least in the UK for quite some time. Their join venture with Ericsson was inked in 2001 but the T68i, the combined companies first product, took almost two years to arrive in Canada. Its standout feature was an available camera accessory that plugged in to the bottom of the phone. It was an expensive add-on that I never even bothered with; in fact, this particular phone/PDA combo lasted maybe a week before I sent both back to their respective stores. In theory, using a phone as a Bluetooth modem was a godsend. One could enjoy the mobile Internet on an expansive touch-enabled screen while the signal source was safely tucked away in a pocket. In practice, though, this setup was a pain. A constant Bluetooth connection easily halved the battery life of both devices; your only other choice was to pair and un-pair them manually throughout the day. I vowed that I would never again separate PDA from phone, and my next device kept me to that promise

Chapter 18 UIQ
Years later I would come to appreciate the power and flexibility of the Symbian mobile operating system. But UIQ, Sony Ericssons fork of Symbian, was pretty much a non-starter for me. My one and only UIQ smartphone was the P800; I trialled it for about a week in the summer of 2003. One of the biggest reasons why I didnt keep it was the price tag: nine hundred and fifty Canadian dollars was a bit too dear. I think it was my Treo that instilled in me the optimal price point for one of these high-functioning handsets; even today, Im loathe to pay more than five hundred bucks for one. And Fido offered no subsidies for the P800, as it was very much a niche device. I might have given the P800 more consideration had it a proper qwerty keypad. Using the number pad for anything other than entering phone numbers was decidedly unpleasant. The touchscreen underneath had built-in handwriting recognition that didnt work at all for me I would have much preferred something more familiar, like Palms Graffiti alphabet. Instead, I had to make do poking at an on-screen keyboard with the included snap-on stylus. Not fun. But the biggest problem with Sony Ericssons smartphone was that it had no available options for syncing data to my Macintosh computer. Remember that Ive only ever wanted two things from my mobile phone, and above all else the ability to share a single address book. Apple to this day is still dwarfed by Microsoft Windows in terms of market share, and I wasnt about to buy a new computer just for a phone (at least not yet). To manually write phone numbers to my SIM card would be an instant regression back to the stone age, and an immediate deal-breaker. One thing the P800 had going for it was an integrated VGA camera. I decided that my next mobile would also be a camera phone. And sure enough, it was.

Chapter 19 Two Ts and a Z

By November of 2003 I was still waiting for the first camera-equipped Treo thats how much I wanted one. I finally gave up when Fido released a smart little camera phone called the Sony Ericsson T616, and offered it to me for a price that I couldnt refuse. At first blush there was nothing that special about it, apart from its compact size and metallic body. It had a camera, sure, but it was nothing to write home about; a fixed-focus lens was expected for the day, but CIF resolution a paltry 288 by 352 pixels was bad even for those times. And yet I used this dumbphone (along with two other nearly identical models) for over a year, thanks largely to a technological standard called SyncML. If you didnt know, SyncML stands for Synchronization Markup Language. It allows ones personal data calendars, contacts, to-do items and more to be synchronized between phone and desktop computer. Now heres the important part: Unlike Palms proprietary HotSync, SyncML is an open standard, so anyone can make software for it. By this time Apples OS X desktop had SyncML support through an app called iSync; while my T616 wasnt fully supported from the get-go, a third-party program called PhoneAgent did everything that iSync didnt. I didnt even need a data cable; Bluetooth finally proved its worth as a means to wirelessly synchronize my data and install files to my handset. And thanks to Sony Ericssons sizable fanbase in Asia and Europe I was able to trick out my T616 with all manner of custom ringtones and themes. All of the above actually applies to three separate handsets the T616, T610 and Z600. The two Ts were virtually indistinguishable from the outside; on the inside, the T610 had a radio with an extra European band (900MHz) while the T616 swapped that out for an extra North American band (850MHz). This was more or less irrelevant, as both handsets worked on both continents, and Fido didnt support the 850MHz band at the time. The Z600 shared the same camera and internals, but was a bigger flip phone with customizable front and back panels. Its hard to say which one I liked more; the Z600 felt like a Japanese keitai but clearly needed a protective case, while the T610 and T616 were small enough to fit into the lighter pocket of my jeans. Of course I ended up dropping two out of the three, each in a different exotic locale. I managed to dent the metal case of my T616 by sending it crashing to the hard wooden floor of a swanky Bermuda hotel, and did about as much damage to the plastic housing of my Z600 as I fumbled with it in a public washroom atop Table Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa. I also remember these handsets for their goofy accessories. I bought a Bluetooth-controlled toy car for my T610 that my cat chased for all of thirty seconds, then never again. For the Z600 I got a snap-on game controller, which was far too ridiculous-looking to ever use in public. I still have both of them tucked away in a drawer somewhere. Any takers?

Chapter 20 Best Sidekick Ever

One of the advantages of being a promiscuous phone buyer is that you sometimes find legendary phones in unlikely candidates. Case in point: quite on a whim I picked up a Danger hiptop also known as Sidekick in the USA and ended up using it for more than two years. The original hiptop didnt even have a camera; for tiny, blurry photos you had to buy a separate accessory that plugged into (of all things) the headset jack. But its innovative design provided ample room for a near-perfect qwerty keypad. They might well have called this phone the fliptop, as the keys were hidden beneath the screen until needed. To access them youd simply flip the screen panel out a combination of magnets and a sturdy hinge would make it pivot a full one hundred and eighty degrees, snapping into the open position with a satisfying click. It never failed to impress, myself included. The second generation hiptop2 added a built-in 320240 pixel camera with flash, still fixed-focus and well behind the times but better than nothing. Amazingly, the flip-out screen now sat flush with the rest of the phone when closed; this meant that the keypad was set in a bit deeper than before, but no matter it was still a joy to use. And navigating the Danger OS was a breeze thanks to four humongous buttons surrounding the screen. Plus a scrollwheel. Plus a four-way directional pad that doubled as the earpiece, of all things! As great as the hardware was, it wasnt the hiptops stand-out feature. Like BlackBerrys Internet Service, data on all hiptops was routed through a central server to optimize bandwidth and ease congestion on carriers networks. But unlike BlackBerry, Dangers solution offered two significant advantages for the user. The first was unlimited data thats right, all you could eat for a mere twenty Canadian dollars per month. Web browsing, emails with attachments, instant messages didnt matter what it was, it was all included. So long as you werent roaming internationally youd never have to pay anything more than the standard monthly fee. Of course, when you were travelling the hiptop was a terrible choice. Data was an all-or-nothing proposition, a hard lesson I learned after racking up over two hundred dollars in roaming charges when I turned my hiptop2 data on over breakfast one morning in the UK. The persistent Internet connection provided another benefit for hiptop users: with every device came a free web portal where personal data and emails were stored. You didnt have to worry about syncing data to any one desktop computer; so long as that computer had a web browser you could access everything on your hiptop from there. The portal also featured a webmail client, and since hiptops supported multiple push email accounts youd need never worry about BlackBerry envy. The price for all this convenience was learned later, when it was time to get my data off of the hiptop servers. Danger sold a plug-in for Microsofts Outlook called Intellisync, which gave me a local copy of my address book on a Windows computer. Photos could be downloaded individually from the hiptop web portal, but calendar entries, notes and to-do items had to be transcribed by hand if I wanted to keep them. And I did. Dangers proxied data service was similar in another way to BlackBerrys BIS: It went down a lot. It happened often enough to be a familiar pain, rendering the device all but useless except for phone calls and SMS. I would always know when the data service came back up; my hiptop would vibrate with a loud grunt as everything on it was restored. Still, my hiptops were fantastic devices, right up there with the best smartphones Ive ever had. My hiptop2 was dependable enough to survive two weeks in Uganda in 2005. Though I had no data there I

found a way to post short dispatches to my blog via SMS. Part of that trip was a three-day journey to and from the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park to see gorillas in their natural habitat. I can still remember spotting the first cell tower on the long drive back, and firing up my hiptop to let the world know that I was still alive. That same hiptop was memorable for another, more dubious achievement. It holds the first and so far only breakup text Ive ever received. Ouch.

Chapter 21 Hell No, Moto

In January of 2006 I took my then-girlfriend on her very first trip to Tokyo, Japan. That was pretty neat. Way cooler was that we could use our Fido SIM cards for the very first time in the hitherto inaccessible land of the rising sun. It was all thanks to Vodafone Japan, who rented us a pair of unlocked Motorola A835s upon our arrival at Narita Airport. There was just one problem: The damned things didnt work. Okay, thats not entirely fair I was able to send and receive text messages, at least. But repeated attempts to get the web browser to connect to something, anything, failed. Nor could I make either of our A835s do that other thing mobile phones are supposed to do. What was that again oh right, make phone calls. The handsets were butt-ugly, especially for Japan. Perhaps it was a good thing that the data didnt work; Id sure hate for the wrong person to see me use it, and be chased out of Akihabara by a jeering mob of keitai otaku (mobile phone geeks). I did manage to snap some blurry, pixelated VGA-quality photos here and there certainly nothing worth printing out and getting framed. What I remember most about this phone was using it to text my girlfriend in a frantic attempt to find her among the many and confusing aisles of Shibuyas Tokyu Hands Creative Life store. When I finally found her she told me that all the while her phone had been in her purse and turned off, and why was I asking anyway?

Chapter 22 My First HTC

In the summer of 2006 this Mac user of many years bought his first Windows laptop, for the express purpose of trying a proper Linux distribution on it. Somewhere along the way I decided that Linux was actually too hard, or that Windows wasnt actually so bad. Why is any of this important? Because with a Windows-powered desktop machine the stage was set for my first (and as of this writing, only) Windows-powered smartphone, the HTC TyTN. HTC was a Taiwanese company that had previously made branded devices for others, most famously the Treo 650 and Compaq iPAQ. The TyTN was not their first Windows Mobile product, but the first to bear the companys name. And it was fairly spectacular for the times. It was the first phone that I could use in Canada with 3G data service, offering download and upload speeds at least twice as fast as the then-current standards. Added to that was a WiFi radio, letting me hop on to a wireless Internet connection without using cellular data at all. All this plus an extra camera on the front of the phone meant that for the first time I could make voice and video calls using Skype, in flagrant disregard for whatever limitations I had on my calling plan. This was disruptive technology at its very best. As you can imagine, this premium product had a premium price tag to match. My carrier hadnt even heard of it, but I found a small local shop that specialized in importing super-high-powered phones from Europe. They could get me a TyTN, but it would set me back eleven hundred bucks. Flush with cash from my first professional contract as a theatre director, I placed my order. My time with the TyTN was bittersweet. Perhaps its star turn was the nine days it spent with me in Seoul to ring in 2007. I received a welcome to Korea text from Fido the moment I powered it up upon arrival at Incheon Airport, and HTCs flagship fit right in with the super-high-powered phones that the locals were using. My TyTn even got a compliment from the staff at my hotel. But it was an altogether different story on a trip to Bermuda later that spring. I realized how dim the TyTNs touch-screen display was when I couldnt read texts or even see who was calling me in the bright island sunlight. Worse was battery life; with both 3G and WiFi radios turned on I can remember going from a full charge to empty in the space of a twenty-minute cab ride. This TyTN clearly needed much more power than its relatively small battery could provide. Ultimately the TyTNs downfall wasnt the device itself but the desktop operating system it was tied to. I appreciated the push-email capabilities of Microsofts Exchange but I despised Outlook on my Windows laptop so much so that I went back to my hiptop, dumped the Windows laptop for an Apple one and banished my TyTN to the dark recesses of my desk drawer. Then I gave it to a friend. Then he never used it and gave it back to me. Then I gave it to someone else. Then she dropped it in the toilet. An inglorious end to a titan of smartphones.

Chapter 23 My CrackBerry
Here in Canada the BlackBerry has, until recently, been something of a national treasure with a fanatical following that would impress any Apple cultist. As of this writing the stock price for parent company Research In Motion has certainly seen better days, but its worth noting that both of my brothers, their wives and at least one of their children have one. So maybe it was peer pressure that got me to try out a CrackBerry in the spring of 2007 though I seem to remember that I was also growing increasingly frustrated with service outages on my hiptop. Still stinging from the thousand bucks I dropped on my HTC TyTN I turned to eBay for a deal, and managed to find a local seller with an 8700g. It had branding from a carrier in the UK but the radio had been unlocked for use in Canada. I was unsure if the second lock on the device the BlackBerry PIN had been cleared, but all fears were allayed when I got the device, powered it up and successfully registered it for BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS). In many ways, BlackBerries are win-win for carrier and user alike. Just like Dangers hiptop, BlackBerry data passes through a central server before arriving on your handset. For carriers, this means less congestion on their networks; for users it means faster data at least it did back in the dark days before the widespread availability of 3G. The BlackBerry operating system had a particularly helpful feature wherein the user could send service books to their device. If your email wasnt working or some other ailment had besieged your handset a binary blob would be sent down the pipe to save the day. Ive never seen this feature on any other mobile OS. Though made almost entirely of plastic my CrackBerry was tough as nails; it shrugged off a brutal drop from about chest-high to an unforgiving sidewalk. Chalk this up to its roots as a text-only pager, I guess And for text-related activities the BlackBerry did very well. Despite the fairly hideous on-screen fonts, dealing with email from multiple accounts was a breeze. Another BlackBerry innovation was the global inbox, a central dumping ground for incoming email, text messages, even missed calls. RIM has since removed SMS from the global inbox by default, which has been a challenge for my older siblings who still dont entirely get what a text message is, let alone how to send one. Sadly, any hopes of a CrackBerry addiction for yours truly were vanquished in short order by an absolutely reprehensible app called PocketMac, which RIM licensed as the official syncing software for Apple desktop computers. It routinely ate appointments, contacts and/or to-do items on every sync, and it was a constant game of cat and mouse to suss out what had gone missing. Thankfully OS X now has a proper Desktop Manager, but Im a proper Linux user now. And to be brutally honest, I dont think BlackBerrys proxied Internet is of much use in a world where 3G data is cheap and plentiful. Well, plentiful anyway. I did use a borrowed BlackBerry Curve many years later on vacation in Bermuda. It was the only way I could get an unlimited data package from the local carrier there. The BlackBerry experience in 2011 wasnt enough to win me back, but the on-screen fonts were better, at least.

Chapter 24 Symbiotic
Im going to mention my HTC TyTN one last time: One of the other phones I was considering for that purchase was a Nokia, the E61. The lack of an on-board camera ultimately put it out of the running but its replacement, the E61i, ticked all available boxes. I bought one in July of 2007, blissfully unaware of where my renewed interest in Nokia products would ultimately take me. More on that later. Nokia smartphones of the day were powered by the Symbian operating system. The combination of the two was, for me, a culmination of every device I had owned prior. Like other Eseries devices the E61i was made for enterprise, with email support and a qwerty keypad worthy of a BlackBerry. But it also had a camera, and a not bad one at that. Like my Ericssons and Sony Ericssons the E61i supported Bluetooth and SyncML. Around this time I discovered a hosted SyncML service, so instead of shuttling my personal data back and forth to a single computer I could sync over the Internet and access it on the web, as I did with my hiptop better, in fact, because now I could export my data at any time to standard file formats. Finally, like my TyTN the E61i had both 3G and WiFi radios though 3G only worked in Europe and Asia. Did I mention that this device was never meant to be sold in the Americas, and was only available to Canada through an online retailer? The lack of Canada-tuned 3G turned out to be a blessing, as I was paying my carrier far too much money for not enough data. If $25/month for a paltry 3 MB seems ludicrous believe me, it was. Because Symbian also confusingly referred to as S60 was so popular in Europe, I was able to sample mobile apps for the first time. There wasnt yet an on-device app store; you would instead visit the developers website and purchase the app directly from them imagine that! The available third-party software was generally excellent. There were task managers, giving the user control over the running processes on their phone. There was the free Opera Mini web browser, critical to browsing web pages on my ridiculous data plan. There was even software that could emulate old game consoles, like Nintendos Gameboy Color and NES. To play my favourite childhood arcade games on my phone was, well it was just awesome. My E61i travelled with me far and wide. Its first test was a trip to New Zealand, where I was able to peruse the morning news over breakfast via the WiFi in my hotel. Next up was a journey to the Great Pyramids of Egypt, where I used GPS for the first time with a Bluetooth accessory. To save on roaming charges I was able to store map data directly on my phone before I left. Accessing GPS satellites was free, and as I later found out, quite illegal in Egypt when I was there. Nonetheless, Ive a particularly fond memory of being on an overnight train to Luxor, my eyes glued to the E61is screen as the train pushed forth into parts unknown. Perhaps the biggest testament to the E61is world-phone abilities was that it actually worked in Japan. It might not have been as svelte as the keitai there, nor could it access Japans i-mode services. But as a camera phone and Internet-connected device it could hold its own. Youll remember that early on I wrote about wanting only two things from a smartphone. In 2000 my VisorPhone had granted me my first wish, an address book that could be synchronized from computer to mobile device. Now I had a handset that I could use anywhere on the planet. Checklist complete. And then the iPhone came along and changed everything

Part 3: After The i

On June 29th, 2007 Apple began selling the first iteration of their iPhone in the United States. Canada got the iPhone the following summer with the global launch of the iPhone 3G. In its wake, I can only imagine design teams at Nokia falling over themselves to rush their own touch-screen devices to market. And it wasnt just Nokia playing catch-up; every phone-makers product portfolio seemed to reflect an almost immediate iPhone unfluence, with either a touch-screen, on-device app market or at the very least a familiar-looking metal bezel over black trim. No doubt about it, the iPhone was a revolutionary, game-changing device. Yet to this day Ive never really been interested in owning one. There were obvious, practical reasons. I could have imported a first-generation iPhone from the US (at a hefty surcharge), but as I remember it most of the apps in those early days werent much more than skins for iPhone-optimized web sites. By the time my carrier got the second-gen iPhone 3G I had already begun the move to Linux on my desktop computers. No iTunes meant no iPhone, simple as that. There were political reasons as well. My short-lived affair with the HTC TyTN and a Windows laptop was no accident; after years of telling users how PowerPC was the superior chip for Macintosh computers, Apple suddenly and inexplicably switched to Intel. I was not impressed. I was similarly disappointed that Apple chose to sell the iPhone through carriers, with locks and subsidies, rather than unlocked in their own retail stores. Blogger Stefan Constantinescu wrote an excellent post in 2008 detailing how Apple had a chance to revolutionize the economics of mobile, and failed. Long story short: I felt burned by Apple and liberated by my unlocked Nokia, a device that I could use on any carrier, anywhere in the world. Nokia trumped Apple in another, deviously clever way. In the spring of 2008 I received the first in a long series of trial devices from a blogger outreach program called WOM World. I think it started off as Nokia Blogger Relations, and its since been given the new moniker Nokia Connects. Whatever the name, the idea was genius. Anyone with some sort of online presence could request any Nokia product for a two-week trial. A review (good or bad) would send traffic to the writers blog and provide free marketing for Nokia. With a steady stream of shiny new toys arriving at my door the idea of being locked to an iPhone for a three-year contract seemed downright comical. Oh yes, I forgot to mention The standard carrier contract term in Canada is three years. Were backwards that way. Back to the iPhone, Ive futzed around with almost every version of it, and after only a few minutes its always been the same story I put it down and walk away. It just doesnt do anything for me. I absolutely get that its made smartphones easier to use, especially for people who have never had one, but for someone like me who struggled through the early years of data synchronization, Internet connectivity and just about every other technological hurdle Apples JesusPhone has always seemed like a bit of a cheat. Nokia fanboy? Mobile phone snob? Guilty as charged. Id finally join the world of modern smartphones a few years later but for the moment, enduring Symbians old school charm was about to pay off. Big time.

Chapter 25 Best Eseries Ever

In my first blog post about the Nokia E71 I proclaimed its killer feature to be a lanyard loop, enabling the display of my growing collection of cell phone charms. It was a joke at the time (kinda); what I really meant to say was that right from the get-go this phone seemed like it was made for me. By October of 2008 I had trialled a variety of smartphones from Nokias WOM World. The N82, N95 (8 GB version) and E90 had all come and gone. All of them were fine devices, but not a one threatened an early retirement for my E61i. The E71 was a different story, being the official update from Nokia and all. It was smaller, yet had the same screen resolution and a better qwerty keypad. The camera had autofocus and a flash, and best of all there was a version with 3G data service tuned for the Americas. The lanyard loop sealed the deal. 3G data became a lot more useful when Fido, my carrier, started selling Apples iPhone 3G and offered a 6 GB/month data package for $30 CAD. It was still a rip-off, to be sure, but at least it was better than the 3 megabytes I was getting for $25 just two years prior. It was around this time that I started using an app called Qik to stream video from my E71. The results werent stellar, but it bears repeating: in 2008 I was streaming live video to the Internet from my mobile phone. Another S60 innovation was an app called JoikuSpot, which enabled my E71 to broadcast access to my cellular data via WiFi . Such things are taken for granted today, but in 2008 the idea of tethering your phone to a laptop instead of using an expensive hotel Internet connection was the stuff of magic. Only problem was that JoikuSpot, even the paid premium version, was a bit finicky about providing a stable connection. But the idea was bang-on, even if the execution was sometimes lacking. My E71s star turn was a week in Hong Kong to ring in 2009. I booked that trip in August of 2008; students of economic history will recall how the global economy kind of went to shit the following month. Despite the doom and gloom I resolved to enjoy myself, and my biggest indulgence by far for that trip was the data roaming fees. I made a pilgrimage to the local Nokia Flagship Store, where I tried the new flagship N96 for the very first time. I would end up trialling that device from WOM World the following month, but it wouldnt woo me away from my E71. Truth be told, my most vivid memory of this vacation had nothing to do with the phone. Someone at my hotel had pegged me as some kind of patsy, and sent no less than five, shall we say, working girls to my room over the course of an afternoon. Serves me right for blogging instead of taking in the sights, I guess. My E71 came along on another, more fateful trip in the summer of 2009, one that would put it out of the spotlight and pretty much change my life forever

Chapter 26 Rockstar
Hi Andrew, Would you like to join Nokia for a two week trip across the US next month demonstrating some of the capabilities of the Nokia N97? And thus, in the summer of 2009 this humble blogger of some eight years got his fifteen minutes of fame. I dont think I was WOM Worlds first choice for this gig, but that didnt matter; I wasnt the first choice to tour Asia with The Second City either way back when, but I still got to go. How could I pass up an opportunity to visit four cities on someone elses dime, with a worldwide audience watching our every move? Two amazing weeks that July were spent in the lovely company of three fellow bloggers Matthew Bennett, Jon Bruha and George Kelly. Dan Silvers was our chaperone in Los Angeles and San Francisco, then rejoined us in New York City after we had a few days in Chicago on our own. Fond memories of N97 24/7 are many; a few of my favourites: The unabashed geeky joy of some high-level phone talk on the hundred dollar-plus cab ride from LAX to our boutique Hollywood hotel. Our meet-up in San Francisco, where I met Dennis Bournique of WAP Review, Myriam Joire from Engadget and Ewan Macleod, a mobile entrepreneur from the UK. A failed challenge in Chicago, which turned into a rather awesome bender in a bar at the base of the Willis Tower. A decidedly over the top wrap-up party in Manhattan, full of beautiful people who mostly had no idea who we were, or even what the event was about. Oh yes, the phone I viewed the N97 as an iPhone with a secret weapon the pop-out qwerty keypad underneath. An over-simplification perhaps, but that seemed to me to be the best way to pitch the device to non-Nokians. Unfortunately, it was a pretty hard sell. Where the iPhone was elegant the N97 was clunky, if ultimately more powerful. I had never before tested a mobile device to its limits like I did during those two weeks, and all too often the N97 came up short. Battery power was a constant issue, despite each of us having two devices. The built-in GPS radio took forever to lock on to a signal. Worst of all, we simply spent too much time hunting through menus to get to what we were looking for. I think its a testament to the character of our blogging quartet that we took the perceived failure of this tour so personally. We had three scheduled meet-ups, one in every city but New York. The turnout was pretty good for the first, fantastic for the second and something on the order of two people for the third. Ill never forget looking at an entire wall of catered food and then across an almost-empty room at the University of Chicago. In retrospect we probably could have had a lot more fun with the challenges that WOM World handed down to us. But at the time we took our role as Nokia ambassadors very seriously, perhaps too much so. I didnt get to keep a souvenir N97 from the tour, but I did end up winning one in a contest the following Christmas. I used it as a test subject for some theme hacks, but never as my full-time phone.

Chapter 27 Nseries Dyslexia

Almost immediately after my turn as a rockstar blogger across the United States I bought my first-ever Nseries device, not the N97 but an N79. Somebody on the tour had one, and I quickly became enamoured with this unassuming phone that consistently exceeded low expectations, much more than the flagship device that disappointed more often than not. The N79 was a lot like Sony Ericssons T610 in that it had no groundbreaking features of its own, but instead wrapped up the innovations of the day in an attractive and affordable package. Though small enough to fit into a pants pocket the N79 had a 5 megapixel camera with lens protection, plus a front-facing camera for videoconferencing. 3G and WiFi radios were at the ready to serve your data needs. Navigating through the old school S60 UI was made easier (or at least different) by the innovative Navi wheel. What I liked best was the return of Nokias Xpress-On covers updated for the 21st century with some clever technology that made the background colour of the screen match the back cover of the phone. Had I kept my N79 longer I would have a fairly large collection of Xpress-On covers by now. But I didnt. You see, regressing from a qwerty keypad to a T9 number pad was made considerably more difficult by the N79s awful buttons. They were flat, offered almost no feedback and felt extremely cheap. Hammering out text messages, a breeze on my Eseries phones, was now a painful chore. Still, I was definitely won over by what Nseries had to offer in particular Nokias gaming platform of the day, called N-Gage. A favourite title was Mile High Pinball, my first modern-day gaming addiction since Bejeweled on my Treo almost a decade prior. Imagine a pinball table that extended infinitely and you get the general idea. Though the days of N-Gage were numbered, Nseries devices were getting better and better. My N79 got to tag along with me on a points-burning mission around the world in November of 2009; sadly, it spent most of that trip in my suitcase, sidelined by the Nseries that would take its place as soon as I got home

Chapter 28 Best Nseries Ever

By September of 2009 I was sitting on a rather large collection of points from Air Canada, and getting a bit anxious about their expiry date. It was around this time that someone in a travel forum posted a scheme wherein you could technically travel around the world that is, make your return trip via a different ocean for the same number of points as a standard business class return ticket. It wasnt like the round the world fares offered by some airlines; you couldnt, for example, hop off at any stop and take in the sights for as long as you wanted to. But one faraway destination plus a combined four stopovers there and back was fairly enticing nonetheless. That November I boarded an overnight flight to London, the first leg of yet another once-in-a-lifetime trip that would take me onwards to Bangkok, Singapore, Taipei and Tokyo. I was met the next morning in Piccadilly Circus by Tom Hall of WOM World, who graciously gave up his Sunday to give me a personal tour of London and loan me a Nokia for the destinations that lay ahead. Over brunch an N900 and N97 mini appeared on the table, plus a handset that was earmarked for me: the N86. Truth be told I was initially more drawn to the N900, being a desktop Linux user and all. But the N86 quickly proved to be the better choice in fact, its camera was so good that my standalone point-and-shoot didnt leave my suitcase for the next two weeks. In Bangkok I took spectacular photos of the gold and purple Grand Palace and documented my first-ever tuk-tuk ride on video. I was also lucky enough to catch Al Pavangkanan, whom Id met that summer on the N97 24/7 tour. Thanks to him I got to see Bangkoks two famous IT malls, Pantip Plaza and MBK Center. In Singapore I documented my first-ever durian fruit and a sunset view of the city skyline aboard the Singapore Flyer. I also got stood up by someone I was supposed to meet there. But Im over it, really. More importantly, I snagged a local SIM card with unlimited data a good thing, because by my fourth day abroad I had already burned through a two-week data roaming package from my carrier back home. In Taipei I scored another local SIM, and kind of went insane with Qik, the live streaming video app that I first used on my E71. I kept it running over an entire breakfast in my hotels restaurant (much to the horror of the other guests there, Im sure) and streamed an end-to-end walk-through of a night market. Im pretty sure this is what would eventually win me that white N97 from the company. In Tokyo there was sadly no option for local unlimited data. I spent about half an hour in a DoCoMo service centre before giving up and walking out, having come to the conclusion that the staff there were too afraid to talk to me. I also had a moment with one of the N86s few shortcomings, Nokia Messaging. Nokia used to have a regular email client that worked great. Nokia Messaging was their improved next-generation email experience, designed to mimic the push email you could get on a BlackBerry. But this was no BlackBerry quite possibly due to the low amount of RAM, Nokia Messaging on the N86 was crap. Deep within the bowels of Shibuya station I spent what seemed like an eternity struggling to find an email with directions to a dinner engagement; then I remembered that I could find that same message using a free email-over-WAP service. Despite that little hiccup I ordered an N86 to call my own almost as soon as I got back to Toronto. The next spring it would accompany me on a visit to Moscow and a high school friend-turned-diplomat. That summer I got invited on another WOM World tour, this one promoting the N97mini to Canada. In a tricked-out recreational vehicle from Montreal to Toronto I got to hang with a Mr. James Whatley, whose 2009 bungee-jump over Victoria Falls with an N86 strapped to his wrist had first piqued my

interest in this device. The swan song for my N86 was a Kenyan safari in September of 2011. I had been to Mother Africa twice before and knew how popular Nokia phones were there. But I was caught completely off-guard by the presence of Android devices, at least in Nairobi. Every local carrier had not just one but an entire selection, from the cheap and cheerful to the high-powered and high-end. Kind of ironic considering I had left my Android phone at home and brought the N86 just for this trip. Thats right, this unabashed Nokia fanboy was now a full-time Android user.

Part 4: Assimilation
Much like clearNET and Fido decades before, a new crop of upstart Canadian carriers launched in 2010 to shake up the wireless status quo. First out of the gate was WIND Mobile, with a high-profile launch in December, 2009. Public Mobile, a smaller regional player operating in Ontario and Quebec only, lit up their first towers in May, 2010. The third new operator was Mobilicity, whose Toronto network went live that same month. I signed up for Mobilicity to trial their network that October, and chose an Android handset to do the job. At launch, Mobilicitys offerings from Nokia were too pedestrian. And BlackBerry? Been there, done that. I had seen T-Mobiles G1 (the first-ever Android device) two summers before on the N97 24/7 tour, and followed the rising popularity of the Android platform through the first half of 2010. By the time I bought my first Android device I pretty much knew what Id be getting into. Were it not for Android I probably wouldnt have stuck with Mobilicity through the next year and a bit. For the entirety of that period their signal was so weak in my home that I couldnt take phone calls. This would have been an instant deal-breaker just a few years prior, but in the age of Skype, Google Chat and mobile VoIP clients I could make do. And once outside the concrete walls of my abode the service was generally great. Putting up with a weak signal in my condo cut almost two-thirds off my cell phone bill or to put it another way, Canadas incumbent telcos had been overcharging me for years. Heres a breakdown of what I was paying Fido just prior to switching: $45 City Fido voice plan, 3-year contract $30 6GB data, on a separate 3-year data contract $15 call display, voicemail, 300 Canada-wide SMS For a grand total of $90 CAD per month. The Mobilicity plan that I signed up for included the following: Unlimited North America-wide voice calling; unlimited global SMS; unlimited data; call display, conference calling & voicemail.

All for an insanely low $35 per month, with no contract. It was almost too good to be true. And now that you understand how I came to be in the possession of my first Android device, this final section of my mobile memoirs will detail how I came to be a full-time Android user.

Chapter 29 My First Nexus

So there I was, having breakfast at my hotel in Kuala Lumpur, reading an editorial by an ex-Symbian engineer about how Nokia had failed to transition from making PDA smartphones to Internet superphones. And I just happened to be reading this on my new superphone, the Android-powered Nexus One by HTC. The complaints I read about Symbian were not lost on me. For the first time I was experiencing a mobile web browser that was actually usable. Not only did full web pages load in a matter of seconds, but double-tapping the screen would zoom in to fit the width of a single column of text. And the manual synchronization of personal info calendars, contacts, tasks was no longer necessary; an Android phone would do it in the background for you. In fact, setting up an Android phone (or several, as Id later find out) required no more than a network connection and a Gmail account. As I held this slim block of mostly screen in my hands, I could only marvel at what Id been missing. For this particular smartphone veteran Android did have a shortcoming or two, along with a possible area of concern. Coming from my N86 photos and video on the Nexus were clearly not as good, although that was almost entirely offset by something no Nokia camera app would ever remember that I hated flash photography and wanted my phones camera to fire up with the flash powered off. On the subject of power, battery life was fairly abysmal for someone used to going up to three days on a single charge. Id thank my lucky stars if my Nexus lasted until sundown, especially if I was travelling. And then there was Google or more specifically the requirement that I hand over pretty much all of my personal information to them. Im still not a hundred percent comfortable with that. You could argue, of course, that what you got in return for the data mining was a bargain and for a lot of Android users I suspect thats true. But what finally sold me on this new OS was learning how I could take Google out of the equation entirely yet still use Android, through the magic of custom ROMs. The hard part was getting started. The Nexus One was sold with an unlockable bootloader, like the BIOS on a Windows-based PC. By unlocking it you could flash a custom recovery image, and in turn use that to flash a custom ROM. But unlocking the bootloader required no less than a desktop computer, the Android software development kit, the Android Debug Bridge (adb), and something called fastboot. If all this sounds confusing believe me, it was. But patience and the seemingly endless cross-referencing of forum threads finally paid off, and a universe of custom ROMs was now just a wipe and install away. My Android handset, powered by the Linux kernel, was as customizable as my Linux desktop computers. From this point onwards, nothing less would do. King of the Android ROMs was CyanogenMod, which was famously ordered to unbundle the Google Experience that is, the proprietary Google apps. FDroid, an alternative app market featuring only open source software, proved to be a worthy substitute for the official Android Market. Much of what is available there is excellent, but my freedom-hating reliance on the proprietary stuff Flickr, Foursquare, games had me using Googles Market again before too long. Remember too that my new carrier, affordable as it was, provided almost no signal in my home. As such, Googles chat service was a lifeline between me and a new lady in my life. When I moved on to my second Nexus device my girlfriend got my Nexus One as a hand-me-down, which she uses to this very day. Her custom ROM of choice is MIUI, made available to the public by Chinese handset-maker Xiaomi. A big draw for MIUI is its themes you can easily customize not only the wallpaper on your device but also the app icons, on-screen fonts, even the boot-up screen. But theres more to it than that MIUI has its own built-in backup and restore system, plus an excellent

security feature giving you control over the sometimes suspicious permissions that apps can request. If nothing thus far has sold you on the Nexus line of superphones, consider this final point: Google quietly revolutionized the mobile phone industry where Apple deliberately chose not to. The first three Nexus devices were sold through carriers just like the iPhone; but very much unlike the iPhone they were sold unlocked. My Nexus One has been to Malaysia, Hong Kong and Spain, and in each of those places expensive roaming charges were replaced with affordable service via a local SIM card. As you can imagine this is not a feature that carriers go to great lengths to explain, nor is it something that many customers appreciate or even understand. But its there, and like my Nokias of old it made my $500 CAD Nexus One a bargain.

Chapter 30 Android On The Cheap

If the previous chapter gave you the impression that my embrace of Android was immediate and unquestioning, it wasnt. In time (and with root access) I came to realize the power of this new mobile platform, but for the first six months or so it was a love-hate kind of thing. My biggest beef was text entry email and SMS, it seemed, still had their place in this brave new world of mobile computing. The best input solution I could find for my Nexus was an app called Swype, developed by the same brilliant mind behind T9 for number pad phones. And Swype was every bit as clever; the user entered words by flicking their thumb across an on-screen virtual qwerty keypad. The longer the word the more accurate Swype was. More common words were a different story, though; is and if were often confused, along with on and of, and just about everything else with less than five letters in it. It was a frustrating compromise for someone used to physical qwerty at this point I was even missing the number pad on my N86! So when my new carrier, Mobilicity, released the cheap and cheerful Motorola Spice I got one almost immediately. In fact, at one point I had two. Here, for less than $200 CAD, was a handset that seemed to have it all: Android, a physical qwerty keypad, even the same vertical sliding design as my N86. An unexpected bonus was the trackpad on the back of the phone very handy for scrolling through web pages without your thumb getting in the way. The only problem, aside from the dreary lo-res fixed-focus camera, was that the MotoSpice was slow. It was to be expected, I guess, that a smartphone selling for less than half the price of the Nexus One would have a processor just over half as fast. In practice it wasnt so bad. I discovered that Android scaled quite well to low-powered devices. One key thing was to be patient while processes (apps) were launched. With less available speed and memory the Spice had to figure out how to allocate its meagre resources when something new was added to the mix. That was the slow part, at least for me; once an app was up and running I found the speed to be quite acceptable. Also key was liberating the Spice from Motorolas bloatware, and this could only be accomplished through rooting. The Spice was actually the first Android device I ever rooted sorry to have misled you but yes, I rooted my MotoSpice long before going near the bootloader on my Nexus One. But where the Nexus got a proper unlock, root and custom recovery the hard way my Spice was rooted using a simple tool that did the hard work for me. Once root was obtained it was a simple matter of removing the Android package Spicy.apk and I was good to go. I also installed an app that enabled WiFi tethering; that was another feature that the MotoSpice was missing out of the box. In retrospect I think the Spice was ultimately a transition device between my tactile N86 and my (almost) all-touch Nexus One, even though I got the Nexus first. I used the MotoSpice as my primary phone for a good six months from December, 2010 to May, 2011. It came with me on a WOM World-sponsored visit to the famous South By Southwest conference and did quite well there; the Spice was never sold in the USA so the other bloggers on that trip had never seen one. It didnt fare so well on its second conference run, though. At Podcasters Across Borders in May it became quite apparent that my Spice couldnt keep pace with the iPhones that surrounded it plus I dropped it in the elevator of my hotel, leaving a noticeable ding that was pretty much a kiss of death. But the memory of my MotoSpice lives on. I gave mine away to a friend in need, but was fortunate enough to score a dummy model from my local unlocker. Had the Spice as much processing power as higher-end phones Id probably still be using it today.

Chapter 31 hiptop Redux

In retrospect the Mobiflip was perhaps an unnecessary splurge. But I had waited so long for my previous carrier to bring the hiptop3 to Canada can you really blame me? A lot had changed in the four years since I had last used my Fido hiptop2 full-time. The biggest news was that Danger, the company behind the hiptop/Sidekick line and responsible for its back-end servers, had been bought up by Microsoft. As the hiptops cloud sync solution was a competitor to Microsofts Outlook Web Access, the hiptop servers were quickly shut down. This might explain how Mobilicity was able to procure an untold number of second-generation Sidekick LX devices and sell them with its own custom firmware. Unlike my hiptop2 there was no web login for the Mobiflip, nor was the prescient app store anywhere to be found on the device. There was the excellent Opera Mini web browser and a third installment of the bouncing ball game Bob, but that was about it. I knew all of this going in, of course, and could really only justify my hundred-dollar Mobiflip purchase as a curiosity for what could have been. I brought it along with me to a Mobilicity event, hosted by Howard Chui of HowardForums fame. When I plopped it on a table it was greeted with a round of derisive laughter from the other bloggers in attendance. Clearly the hiptops day had come and gone. Its legacy lives on, however. On-device app stores are now, as we know, de rigueur for any device that calls itself a smartphone. And if you didnt know, Andy Rubin co-founder and CEO of Danger, Inc. was also a driving force behind Android in its early days. He remains in charge of the platform at Google, which can only be a good thing.

Chapter 32 Last Dance with Nokia

By June of 2011 I had rooted my Nexus One but was as yet unsuccessful in booting a custom ROM. My frustration with Android was at its peak never mind hacking, basic usability was a big problem on each of my three devices running this strange new operating system. My MotoSpice was too slow and entering text on my Nexus One or S with any kind of accuracy or speed was too frustrating. Output was a revelation; web pages and videos were a joy to read and see. But input specifically text was becoming a deal-breaker. If I was second-guessing my switch to Android I had no such regrets about my new carrier, Mobilicity. Yes, there was the small issue of having no signal at home, but the cheap and unlimited service that worked great everywhere else more than made up for that. And their selection of handsets couldnt be beat they were the only carrier in English-speaking Canada to sell the Nexus One, and the only one in North America to offer the MotoSpice. Then they trumped both, releasing a device that was both new and familiar at the same time, right when I needed it most. At a hundred and fifty bucks the Nokia E73 was a no-brainer for me. It was all very comforting, at first. I still had the installer files for my favourite Symbian apps, plus licenses for the paid ones. I spent an evening getting everything on the phone organized into folders and shortcuts, as I had done with Nokias of days gone by. I even gained a modicum of respect for the infamous Nokia Messaging. It seemed to work a bit better on my E73 than on my N86 the secret was to respect the low memory on the handset by loading only the last few emails from each of my two accounts of the day. Not optimal by any means, but functional at least. I took my E73 with me to a WOM World event held on a ranch in Western Canada that summer. The journey there and back reminded me of just how dated Nokias PDA phone OS was. With Symbian the handset was offline by default; specific steps were required by the user to take it online. Android devices were very different; they assumed a persistent connection to not just the network, but to the Internet as well. With unlimited data available in major Canadian cities, guess which one was more useful? It had become all too clear that there would be no future for Nokia and I. Their new CEO Stephen Elop, a Canadian of all things (!) had announced earlier in the year that future high-end devices would run Windows. I had stopped using Windows long ago; for me it was Linux or nothing. Nokia did have Maemo, a Linux-based tablet OS that eventually made its way onto phones. I had trialled the Maemo-powered N900 the previous spring and quite liked it. But its successor, the MeeGo-powered N9, was never widely available and pretty much doomed from the get-go. I brought both my E73 and N86 along with me on a Kenyan safari that autumn, where granular control over network charges and a local SIM card served me well. When I got home I retired both and moved on to Android full time.

Chapter 33 Nothin But Nexus

Instead of giving each their own chapter Im going to lump the Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus both manufactured by Samsung together, in order to better highlight the evolutionary differences between the two. Youll recall that the word Nexus means three things when it comes to phones: 1. Pure Android an operating system free of carrier bloat; 2. Factory unlocked usable on any network (frequencies notwithstanding); 3. Unlockable bootloader and the widest available selection of custom kernels, ROMs, etc. Its this recipe for success that has kept me faithful to the Nexus line for three devices and counting four if you include the Nexus 7 tablet charging in the other room as I write this. To be honest Im not so much a fan of plasticky Samsung phones; that Ive bought two of them says something about my unfaltering loyalty to Nexus. The first time I saw the Nexus S was in the hands of a Mr. Dave Dobbin. At that time he was the CEO of Mobilicity, and in January of 2011 he had the T-Mobile version with him at a promotional event I attended. Yours truly go to hold it for a precious few seconds. Though otherwise an unremarkable slab, the screen on this Samsung was a wonder to behold. The colours were incredibly vivid and rich; the blacks so deep as to be an abyss. And the glass was impossibly curved, fitting perfectly against your cheek when on the phone. I came very close to purchasing one at a Best Buy during South by Southwest later that spring, and when Mobilicity started selling it in April I could no longer resist. The first beneficiary of this purchase was actually my Nexus One. Relieved of its day-to-day duties I was able to figure out this whole rooting and ROM-ing business with drastically reduced consequences. It wouldnt be until December, 2011 that Id load the legendary CyanogenMod ROM onto my Nexus S; when I did I was pleasantly surprised by the inclusion of a fully-functioning Google Wallet app. I used it with the Ss on-board NFC chip to make my first contactless mobile phone payment, a fancy tea at a posh supermarket caf. Id like to believe it was the first such event in Canada; it probably wasnt but thats my story and Im sticking to it. At the end of that month my girlfriend and I visited Hong Kong (my 6th trip there!) to ring in 2013. While Samsungs wide-bodied Galaxy Note was all the rage there, I was on the hunt for the it phone of the moment back in the Americas, the Galaxy Nexus. I felt confident buying it overseas because this third Nexus had a pentaband radio, meaning that I could enjoy 3G data speeds on any carrier anywhere in the world. It was also free of any carrier locks. Unfortunately it cost more in Hong Kong than on the Bell network back in Canada. The Galaxy Nexus eventually got a wider release here, and I got mine on a subsidy from WIND Mobile in the spring. WIND is another upstart Canadian carrier, offering unlimited calls, texts and data at prices much lower than the incumbents. I had switched to them from Mobilicity before Christmas, when they ran a holiday promotion. WIND has proven to be much better in terms of coverage for me for the first time since I was with Fido I could actually make phone calls from inside my home What an age we live in! This third Nexus was both new and familiar at the same time. There was the curved glass, plus a new version of Android another hallmark of the Nexus line. I wasnt really sold on the HD screen and dual-core processor at first; both seemed unnecessary, frivolous even. But over the ensuing months I

came to appreciate my Galaxy Nexus as a mobile gaming powerhouse maybe not the most noble use of bleeding edge technology, but a lot of fun nonetheless. My trio of Nexus phones accompanied my girlfriend and I to Barcelona in the spring of 2012 the Nexus One in her back pocket, the Nexus S in mine and the Galaxy Nexus tucked away in the hotel safe. We received lots of advance warnings about pickpockets and such but I neednt have worried the Nexus S was (and is) a perfectly usable phone, anyway. I finally convinced my girlfriend to accept it as her next hand-me-down this past September. I took back my Nexus One, which Im currently using to explore free/libre software from the F-Droid repository. The Galaxy Nexus is to this day my side arm of choice, and will likely remain so until the next Nexus is announced.

Epilogue The Beginning Is The End

Wherein yours truly finds himself right back at that lunch with friends me with my Nexus S, my girlfriend with my her Nexus One and the rest of the table, amazingly, with Android devices of their own. This moment marks both the beginning and the end of my mobile phone memoirs. I hated my first mobile with a passion because I saw no value in having one. Once I got hooked on the non-voice features, however text messaging first, data later it was a different story. At the dawn of the new millennium I had no idea of how powerful the lowly cell phone would one day become; my personal device wish-list had but two items: 1. An address book that could be synchronized between phone and computer; 2. A phone that could travel with me anywhere in the world. My first wish was granted in the year 2000 courtesy of a plug-in module for a PDA . The next year I trialled my first world phone in Hong Kong, and bought another while I was there. But it wasnt until 2007 and my first 3G handset that I was able to access Japans advanced mobile networks with my own device. Then there was the third thing, a feature I didnt even know I wanted until I saw it coming. By the summer of 2009 I could foresee a smartphone future that paralleled the present state of desktop computers and Linux that the hardware would one day become a commodity, freeing its owner to use the operating system of his or her choice. Not two years later I had CyanogenMod on my first Android phone, and an entire universe of other custom ROMs just a download and install away. The story of mobile phones doesnt end here, of course. The hardware continues to evolve, not so much by leaps and bounds anymore as the touch-screen fondleslab has become the de facto standard. Internal components are faithfully following Moores law, getting ever smaller, better and cheaper. There has been a much more disruptive change in the manufacturers who bring the devices to market; the once-mighty Nokia and RIM have had their market share almost entirely usurped first by Apple and now, it seems, by Samsung. On the software side Android is widely acknowledged as the worlds dominant mobile phone OS; that the code is freely available to all ensures a healthy and diverse ecosystem of the aforementioned custom ROMs. But there are new players on the horizon: Firefox is set to release its own mobile OS in the very near future, and some ex-engineers from Nokia have vowed to continue the legacy of the Linux-based Maemo and MeeGo with a new startup called Jolla. At some point down the road history might allow for a second edition of this book. For now, I can only marvel at the progress Ive seen. Perhaps the most cherished sign of how far weve come is that people in public spaces are generally spending less time shouting into their mobiles and more time quietly interacting with them. Ill leave you with a final memory: At South by Southwest in 2011 I attended a movie premire at Austins historic twelve hundred-seat Paramount Theatre, so packed that I could only get a seat in the last row of the balcony. The film was entirely forgettable, but Ill always remember what I saw as the end credits began to roll. The huge auditorium in front of me was suddenly lit with the sparkle of a thousand tiny screens, silently reaching out to each other and the world beyond. For this unabashed mobile phone geek it was a little bit like heaven.