Apple introduced the iPhone in July 2007. A few months before, however, Nokia gave us the N95. And I managed to get one of the first ones on Orange, having been a loyal customer for 10 years.
It had everything I wanted from a mobile device. It had a sliding mechanism, so it was fairly compact (if a little bulky). It could double up as my diary and my contacts book, meaning I wouldn’t need my Palm Tungsten T3 any more (which also had a slider – hey, I like sliders, my first phone was a Nokia 8110). It could handle more than one email account, and used the new-fangled 3G. It played music. You could connect it to a TV. It had front and rear cameras. State of the art stuff.
It stopped working properly about a year later, Orange sent me a replacement and I’ve used it ever since. Until now. I’ve replaced it with… an Apple iPhone 5s.
As much as I loved my N95, some bits were definitely showing their age. Looking at email attachments was difficult, as it couldn’t cope with Word, Excel or PowerPoint. Web browsing was stuck in the mid-noughties. The phone’s address book wasn’t in sync with my main contacts book, which has for some time been on my iPod (and now in iCloud). Same with all my diaries; not just my personal one but I couldn’t sync with my work one, plus by now I had separate diaries for sports events, committee work, travelling, and all colour-coded.
But I found myself in the not entirely unusual position of having the N95 as my phone, my iPod as diary & contacts book, a 4G mifi to connect the laptop and iPod to the Internet when on the road and not enough pockets to put devices in when I went out. So I ‘converged’ – which is what I did when I bought the N95, if we’re being honest.
The trouble with the iPhone – and all so-called smart phones – is that they are all the same, ‘candybar’ design. Innovation over the last 10 years has dried up. Where are the successors to the Nokia 8110 or the Motorola StarTac? And why, after years of shrinking sizes, are they beefing up again? The reason for going for the 5s is that it’s a 4” screen – not many of those around these days.