Looking back, I realize that there has been quite a few cellphones I’ve tried, hacked, cracked and played with, and then left for a new and more shiny one.

So this post is dedicated to all those old phones that I spent hours playing with and carrying around.

Motorola M3288

This one was the first cell phone I ever had. It was at the top of its game in 1999, and had a single unique ring-tone, four lines of text and had the ability to store 10 dialed, 5 received and 5 missed calls!  It was also my first phone number, which I had with me for many years. More about this later.

Conclusion: 2/10

As for being my first phone, I think I could have done way better, but it was my mother that bought it, and I couldn’t really complain. The SMS writing was horrible, ringtone was like nails on a blackboard and voice quality was like listening through tinfoil being wrapped.

Nokia 3210

Now here’s a phone that really introduced me to tinkering with phones. It had the ability to change cover (or better known as Xpress-On ™ by Nokia), downloadable ringtones and the ability to compse them yourself, and T9 dictionary. It also had some good games like snake and memory.

Conclusion: 6/10

This phone was with me everywhere, and was as solid as a rock. I bought an awesome cover for it, I used the early days free SMS servers to send free sms to my friends, and I hacked away on every little Setting I could find.

All in all, one of the better phones I’ve had, until I lost it from my pocket while riding a moped, and losing it in the middle of the road, having it smashed into a million pieces :(

Nokia 3330

After the previous phone being smashed to pieces, I figured it was time to move on to the next big thing. This being the Nokia 3330. I had read allot about this phone, and prepared myself a bit, as I had heard this phone was the revolution in cell phone technology. It had Internets! As in, it supported WAP and had the ability to run the J2ME Java applications, which meant more hacking, more fun.

Conclusion: 6/10

I’m not giving this any higher rating then the previous phone. This being because when I first got it, I got disappointed in how slow and crap it was. The Java applications took forever to load, and the WAP surfing was a big downer (all tough the WAP being slow wasn’t really the phones fault, more the phone lines carrying the data). It still gets a good rating for being fun to use when I was bored and wanted to check IT-News, and chat on online.no with other wap’ers.

Nokia 3650

Being the geek that I am, I of course needed an upgrade pretty soon. And that upgrade was the Nokia 3650. This phone was out of this world at the time when it finally arrived (I had been waiting for over a year for it to be released). It had colour screen, wallpaper support, vibration and polyphonic ringtone support, whopping 4MB of internal memory AND support for MMC cards. It also sported a pretty ok camera.

Conclusion: 7/10

Here I’m up for the big leagues when it comes to cell phone. We’re talking smartphone, business phone. All the fancy names you know for phones today. I had been waiting for this cell phone to be released for so long, and had saved up the money for it (about 5000,- NOK), just so I could be the first to get it.

And boy did I hack around allot with this one. I download apps from all places and installed on it, set up new wallpapers and even used it to surf the web quite a bit. In the end I found it way to slow, all tough that might just have been because I loaded it up with every app I could find..

Nokia 6270

After tiring out the old one I figured it was time for a more advanced phone. At first glance, this phone seemed like something I really wanted. It had a cool look, nice finish (brushed metal), and an overall nice solid quality type feel to it. It had stereo speakers and seemed like a pretty decent phone all in all.

Conclusion: 3/10

Yes, it was total rubbish! I was hoping for a phone I could hack away at and enjoy myself with. Turns out this brick of boredom only ran Symbian series 40, which is about as hackable as a dishwasher. Actually, a dishwasher is more hackable then this piece of junk.

I ended up selling it less then a month after I got it, due to the fact that the phone was really no fun at all. It was a phone, and that’s it. I’m more demanding then that.

Nokia N71

Here’s another one that was a phone I really wanted, and waited for a long time to get. It was the first N-Series clamshell phone made my Nokia.

It had of course the now essential parts like colour display, T9, camera etc. etc, but at the time it had everything you could have in a phone, making it a kind of everyday user/business user phone.

Conclusion: 7/10

There is a very good reason this phone doesn’t get a higher score, and this being that it was very poorly built. The hinge betwen the screen and keyboard got horribly loose after just a couple of months use, and the display got huge scratches because of the keyboard. It was really not built for the kind of use it received by any average user.

The features on the phone itself was of course amazing. It had a very quick Interface, with the ability to install apps for a newer and more robust SymbianOS. I even started a hosting server just for apps for this phone, that’s how much fun I had playing around with it. In the end it started failing me, and it was when it started locking up, crashing, not ringing when it was supposed to and not setting the alarm off that made me abandon it.

Samsung X660

Don’t ask…  The reason I suddenly ended up with this phone was basically because I was very short on money at the time, and I really needed a cellphone, so I got my moms old one. This phone was very simple and had the basics you needed for sending SMS, calling, receiving calls and having the alarm go off.

Conclusion: 3/10

This phone actually gets a bit better rating then my first phone. The reason being that the phone wasn’t half bad, really. It was quick as hell, did what it was supposed to and sturdy to the point of it being able to survive a throw across the room and into a wall. I of course hacked and tweaked this phone as well, but it was quite limited, and so was my tweaking.

I still use this phone today as a backup phone, in case my current one would fail on me. And I really wouldn’t have any problem going back to it if I had to, all tough only for a few days of course.

HTC Touch Diamond

Aaand we’re back in the big leagues. I got myself a job, and seeing as several of the other people at work had their own HTC’s, which I was really envious about, I wanted one for myself as well. This one was the big hype when it came out, and seemed (yet again) to contain every feature you would ever need in a phone.

There was possibilities you could never have dreamed about. Like being able to use a fully functional xHTML browser, being able to connect to wifi, having mail received directly to the phone, and an amazingly slick look.

Conclusion: 7/10

Why only a 7 for a gadget of this magnitude you say? Well to be honest, I had really high hopes at first. It seemed like a cool phone, packed with features, and the interface was really good, but to be honest, the Windows Mobile system has been, and always will be a piece of junk. It’s slow, bloated, horribly built in terms of being finger friendly, and fails constantly.

I have lost count on how many times I had to restart the phone, and wait for 15 minutes for it to boot, because there was either an application that crashed, or the phone just stopped functioning. In the end, this phone was hacked to the point where I could not tweak it anymore, and it still crashed on me.

Apple iPhone 3G 8GB

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And now, for my current phone. Yes, I joined the herd and became an Apple fan boy. I was very reluctant at first, and waited for a long time to get one. Mostly because I was very against the monthly fees the operator charged, but I felt safe enough economically , so I had a go. Features for this phone includes allot of the same stuff that other phones, but with the added extra to user (and finger) friendliness.

Conclusion: 10/10

Yes, that’s right. I finally found the phone for me! Okay, I might be over my head on this, but it’s true right now anyway. Right now this phone has every single feature I would ever need, and then some. I can install applications on it, it’s fast, it looks slick as hell and is a combination of the average user and a geeks dream.

I must admit, I held back jail-breaking it for quite some time, but finally my sweaty geek hands could not stay away any longer, so I hacked it. There’s just something special about being a geek, and being able to sit in a GNU/Linux like console on your phone, connecting to other servers with SSH and even downloading torrents while walking through town.

This about sums up my collection of phones over the years. Some have been fun, some not so fun. In the end, I found a phone that I’m happy with, but that will probably change when the next big thing arrives

It’s expensive being a gadget geek :)

Updated 15.07.2009: After looking over the list, I remembered the Nokia 6270 that I had for a few weeks. Turns out I had completely forgotten about it. Now it’s in the list where it belongs :)