Nokia to iPhone: Taking the plunge

When the first iPhone came out, it had a few nifty tricks but was ultimately useless (no 3rd party apps, aweful camera, no 3g!!!). Then the 3G arrived; things are getting better, but a 2MP camera with no video recording won't really cut the mustard. The app-store idea had promise, but I couldn't live without stuff like TomTom, SlingPlayer and Sky+ which I have had on my Nokias for the last few years.

Oh yes, the Nokias! My handset history reads something like:

• A Philips handset, my first phone, back in 2000 - can't even remember what it was but it had absolutely no frills!
• Nokia 3330 (2001). The classic 3310 + WAP!! Oh the excitement of being able to check the cricket scores whilst out and about! (At a cost of 10p/minute)
• Nokia 7250 (2003) = first cameraphone! CIF camera at that. First colour screen as well! also the magic of GPRS (at a princely cost)
• Nokia 6600 (2004). First smartphone, the magic of S60 and 3rd party apps! Facewarp, Agile Messenger (I recall sitting atop the grand canyon and sending a picif the view over MSN to a buddy, must have cost a bomb in data!). VGA camera, better than nothing! Friends were amazed what this thing could do though - the concept of apps began here for us!
  
• Nokia 6680 (2005). My first entry into the world of 3G. Pretty neat actually! 1.3MP camera which felt like something of a watershed - you could actually take photos with this that didn't look truly aweful when viewed on a PC screen.
  
• Nokia N73 (2006). S60v3 arrives, and so does a brilliant camera. Actually, looking back at all of the phone snaps the ones taken with the N73 still look the best (yes, better than N95/85). Fantastic screen compared to what went before, and the form factor was sooo much slimmer and sexier than the 6680! This also introduced TomTom and SlingPlayer
  
• Nokia N95 (2007). This was the big one; Nokia shook the world when they released this, and I had to wait agonising months to run out my contract before getting it! 5PM camera, GPS, dual-slide, massive microSD expansion, real headphone socket, WIFI! This was all fresh, amazing stuff.
  
• Nokia N85 (2008). Hmmm.... evolution rather than revolution eh? It's an N95 in a neater package, with the party trick of an OLED screen (and the always-lit standby screen clock/etc is incredibly cool). But it had nothing really new about it, same old 5MP camera (the biggest improvement was actually the new version of the OS - fp2). I really got bored of this after not very long. Oh, and the screen is useless in any kind of sunlight.
  

So, 2009 and time for a new phone (well, before time to tell the truth - contract still has a few months to run!)? iPhone 3GS, of course!

During the last 6 months the iPhone 3G had me getting quite jealous: The lovely interface, superb web browsing, and the rapidly growing catalogue of excellent applications (and the intregation of the applications into location/web) are so superior to anything i'm experiencing with Nokia. But the iPhone 3G is still limited; no copy/paste & MMS are much trumpeted but not really a problem. No video is a problem. 2MP camera with no auto-focus is a problem.

Then the 3G S is announced. Still a little underwhelmed by the 3MP camera to be perfectly honest, but it's reached the point where it's "good enough", and it was the same VGA 30fps video as Nokia. Plus SlingPlayer and TomTom have been announced, result! But it's so expensive! I live in the UK, and the O2 prices on contract are obscene (when you factor in that it's an 18 month contract, and there's no way i'll last 18 months with 1 phone!). I have actually ended up buying on O2 Pay as you go, which is a big hit upfront but the free 3G data for a year is great.

So what do I think now that i've finally taken the plunge, moved over to the dark side, etc..?

The good: -

• The screen is simply beautiful. Big, bright, vivid.
• Mult-touch is amazing. Navigating google maps is bliss.
• The web browser is simply light-years ahead of what I have experience on the N95/N85.
• Thw whole UI is a dream to use. There are obviously some things that will take getting used to, but nothing is killing me yet (i'm surprised).
• Google voice search - this is amazing! I just speak something and it does a google search for it!!!
• Location-aware apps. Flixster, Weather, AroundMe, Maps. These are doing in an instant what I would spend minutes trying to achieve before.
• App store. Yup, there is a lot of crap out there. I've got 5 pages of apps on my home screen already, a lot of which I probably won't use much; but there really is a lot of good stuff out there, and it is so easy to find/download/pay/install.
• Voice commands. I can say "play artist Radiohead" and it will do just that. You know what annoys me? Nokia had one phone that could do this, but it was on a crappy midrange music handset, and the feature wasn't allowed out to play on any other devices.
• Jailbreak. I did this 1 day after I bought it. Partly so that I could unlock and make use of the remainder of my vodafone contract, and partly so that I could install such brilliance as sbSettings, yourtube, 3G-unrestrictor, statusNotifier, lockScreenCalender. All of these are tweaks that could/should have been there already, but are already proving incredibly useful.
• The games. Ragdoll blast, monkey ball, real racing, sheep launcher(!) all better than anything i've played on a mobile before (apart from S-Tris 2 of course!)
  

The bad (of course there is, did you think this was some Jesus-phone or something?): -

• The lockdown: I can't create my own ringtones without resorting to little hacks (i'm not even trying to make a ringtone out of copyrighted material here folks, this is my own stuff, that I created with my own fair hands, but the assumption is that we are all pirates).
• The lockdown: I can't use a custom SMS/message alaert tone without jailbreaking and accessing the iPhone filesystem.
• The lockdown: There is no direct access to the file system from my PC. At all. I can't even copy a photo to the iPhone to use as a wallpaper, without setting up iTunes to sync a folder on my PC and putting the image in that folder. And that image sync only works one-way PC->iPhone. Seriously?
• The lockdown: I have to use iTunes to put music on the device. To put anything on the device in fact. To be honest, this I can probably live with. My music library has needed organising for a while and iTunes maybe just what I needed.
• No multitasking... hang on? Yep, everyone quotes this as the big disadvantage of the iPhone. And every apply fan(boy?) retorts with push notifications. Firstly, I have not found myself missing multitasking. iPod runs in the background, and the web browser (and most other apps) remember exactly what you were doing before so that you might as well be multitasking. Plus if I really need it I have jailbroken and can install backgrounder. But I haven't needed to yet :)
• The lockdown: .. until I installed 3G unrestrictor!
• Battery life. This was a big problem. It was draining in no time at all. Until I disabled location services; i'm guessing that it was continually trying to get a GPS fix, regardless of whether I wanted one or not. I just click this on using sbSettings when I need it now.
• The lockdown: one can't change the background wallpaper on the battery charging screen. Annoying; every other screen uses my wallpaper but this is black (it spends a fair amount of time on charge..)
  

It looks like a lot of negatives, doesn't it? But it's really not; they are niggles whereas the positives are big, sweeping improvements in my mobile life.

If there had been a Nokia just released with an 8MP camera, HD video recording (this will be the next big thing in mobile, by the way!), a DAB radio (dreaming, I know), a bigger/better screen, etc then I may not have gone for the iPhone, but i'm glad that there wasn't! ;) Nokia haven't brought out anything that has excited me since the N95 (that includes the N97: I have no interest in a querty keyboard, and the touchscreen UI is immature and with few apps available, regardless of how good it is).

In short? I'm finding it a joy to do most things now, things which I was amazed that I could do at all before, but weren't very easy or enjoyable. There's no single thing that I wish this phone could do that it can't.