When I first started my decade-long career in mobile phones, I was lured into the business by the prospect of working on an amazing piece of technology known as the Seiko-Epson Locatio, a Japan-only gadget now lost to the mists of time.
The Locatio was an amazing piece of kit for 1999; it was comprised of a pen-based PDA computer with a tiny i-mode phone module attached to the bottom with thumbscrews, a QVGA-resolution camera module on the top of the PDA and a GPS unit screwed to the back of the unit with the same sort of thumbscrews as the phone module. Assuming you lived in Tokyo and could read Japanese, you could use the GPS and PDA to do a location-based search for nearby restaurants, browse their web-pages for menus, use the phone module to phone up and book a table and then the GPS again to navigate your way to the restaurant. The camera module could be used to take photos of you drunkenly vomiting in the gutter outside and then you could email said photos to all your colleagues.
For comparison, in 1999 Western phones had text messaging. Except in America.
In 2006, I was working on camera UI software for a large Finnish phone manufacturer (rhymes with blockier). I was the lead engineer on the camera application for the N95, a highly spiffy smartphone with a 5-megapixel camera and gps built in. With this phone you could use the mapping application to navigate you to a local restaurant, phone up to book with the phone functionality and use the frankly excellent camera software and hardware to take unsettlingly high-resolution photographs of all your drunken antics, suitable for MMS messaging to all your mates. Truly my career had come full circle, with me finally implementing the same features on a Western market phone as I had on the very first mobile device I'd ever worked on. Only smaller, smarter, higher resolution and without the touchscreen because I hate those. The N95 was the best phone I ever worked on and I was a proud owner of one from the launch.
Now in 2010 it's one step worse. I had to cancel my mobile phone contract and switch to a pay-as-you-go SIM. Orange rather kindly sent me a new phone as well as the SIM, a Nokia 6700 classic.
The Nokia 6700 is a Series 40 type phone, which doesn't use Symbian as the base OS. When I worked with Nokia, Series 40 was the platform for the lower-to-midrange phones with the Symbian-based Series 60 phones being reserved for the high end Smartphones with all the shiny features. I worked almost exclusively on S60 devices except for Nokia's brief dalliance with Series 80 as used in the super-high-end 9210, 9300 and 9500 smartphones, all of which I worked on.
Anyway, series 40, non-Symbian mass market phones, right? Well my new 6700 is feature-for-feature a match for my old N95. GPS? Check. Navigation software? Check. 5-megapixel digital camera with DVD-resolution video recording? Check.
It's also smaller and slightly more elegant.
The only two downsides seem to be battery life (which is unsettlingly poor compared to the already-poor battery performance of the N95) and the camera software which just isn't anything like as nice as that on the N95, even if it shares most of the features.
So, what's the problem? Nothing really, it's just that it feels like having all that functionality on a Non-Smartphone non-Symbian phone (the Locatio was non-Symbian, but my employers had written the OS it used) is like the phone industry is saying "Bye, Zinc; we don't need yous no more!"
They don't really, but I would like to pretend that they do. :(
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