Personal Smartphone History

For some odd reason or another I recently got to thinking about how many smartphones I've gone through in the past three years and dawned on me to do a write up about this history.  It's been a long road that has been fraught with dashed hopes, tried patience, and a continuing desire to find the device that would be "just right" for someone like me.  All but one of the pictures in this post are of the actual devices I used with the exception being the old Q9c which I never got around to taking a picture of back then.

Without further ado I present you my personal history of smartphones.

Motorola Q9c

The Motorola Q9c on Sprint was my very first smartphone device (but not my first ever PDA type device, that was an old Palm Vx) and it was the first long term (2 year) contract I had signed with a cellular provider in ten years.  Once upon a time I was one of the first Bell South DCS customers.  I had my reservations about signing a contract with a provider but back in 2008 to get in the smartphone game you either had to go with a contract OR buy a phone full price and hope they would let you go month-to-month.  After doing the research on the matter it was more cost effective to go with a contract and Sprint got my attention with some nice numbers.

The Q9c ran Windows Mobile 6.0 (later updated to 6.1) and was a non-touch screen device in the mold of the then popular Blackberry line of handhelds.  Sprint bundled an extra capacity battery with their version of the device that added a bit of "junk in the trunk" but gave it outstanding battery life.  In fact up until my iPhone 4 I never had a device that could come close to lasting as long as the Q9c did on a single charge with heavy usage.  Out of the devices I've used with a QWERTY keyboard this one had the best, thumbs down.  The camera it sported, a 1.3MP with flash, was nothing to write home about but it got the job done.  As for apps this was before there was an App Store from Apple for their iPhone and the slue of copy cat stores that followed.  Instead one would venture out onto the web for their apps.  One sore point for me with this device was the lack of a standard 3.5mm headphone jack and its 2.5mm one that require either hard to find headphones or an adaptor.

One of the draws of this device, and Sprint in general, was the Sprint TV service for their customers.  I'm a news junkie and the inclusion of CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC with that service was like mothers milk to me.  Indeed on my breaks at work and during the daily commute on the bus I would often fire up the news (listening via a Bluetooth headset).  Of course over time their Sprint TV service changed by first making Fox News and CNN part of an "extra" subscription for an additional $10 per month then later dropping both channels and once more adding Fox News via that extra subscription.  Back then I chose to forgo cable TV for the internet so this was my main source for news coverage.

HTC Touch Diamond 

My next smartphone device was the HTC Touch Diamond on Sprint (on the right in the above picture).  This was a touch screen device running Windows Mobile Professional 6.1.  By this point the second generation of the iPhone had been released and various smartphone device makers were scrambling to either copy or "kill" the iPhone.  This was first attempt by HTC  at this game and like a Lemming I went off the cliff with them.  I'll freely admit there as more than a little iPhone envy at play here but I was tied to Sprint and I couldn't stand AT&T so the Touch Diamond it was for me.

I got the Diamond about nine months after the Q9c which meant I had invested quite a bit of money and effort into various pieces of software for the Windows Mobile platform so by going with another WM device I could at least take some of that with me.  The camera on the Touch Diamond was much better than the one on the Q9c and it included a better web browser (Opera) by default.  It handled playing music and videos much better than the Q9c ever did but once again a non-standard arrangement for audio followed me along here.  There was no audio jack at all on the device.  Instead HTC bundled a pair of mini-USB headphones along with a dongle that could plug into the mini-USB jack and provide a 3.5mm jack.  The dongle just didn't work for me on the daily commute so I sucked it up and used the included headset.  I hated that headset.  Really, honestly hated it.  The touch screen was of the resistive variety which meant a stylus was included (HTC thoughtfully included a spare) that was housed via a magnetic capture system.

While the Touch Diamond was a more advanced device with more and better features than the Q9c it replaced it still had it's quirks.  The battery life on this phone was horrid and if you used it too long it got hot.  Bordering on uncomfortable hot.  On the upside it did do wonderful double duty as a hand warmer in the winter months.  You think I'm joking don't you?  I often would switch the phone from one coat pocket to the other while listening to music to keep my hands warm.  And the battery life was so bad I ended up purchasing a portable battery charging pack to recharge the phone while on the go.

Blackberry Curve 8330

About one month before the end of my first year with Sprint they began a Premier Customer program that included annual equipment upgrades for signing an extension to your contract instead of the industry standard two years.  By default of my plan price and paying my bill on time I was automatically enrolled in this program.  By this point I was getting tired of the horrid battery life of the Touch Diamond and wanted to see what all this Blackberry craze was about so I ordered a Blackberry Curve 8330 (the phone on the left in that picture above).

Oh Blackberry, where do I start?

The Curve 8330 goes down in my personal history of technology devices by being kept the least amount of time before shucking it.  I hated that thing so much I sold it to a friend at a serious loss.  The camera sucked, the trackball navigation really sucked, and I was no fan of the keyboard.  In its favor it did include a 3.5mm headphone jack (finally!) and had very good battery life.  Apps ran slow as heck and the web browser was a joke.

Did I mention I hated this device?

Back To The HTC Touch Diamond

As I said above I got rid of the Blackberry Curve fairly pronto.  I gave it two very frustrating months but I just plain gave up and reactivated my HTC Touch Diamond.  When I switched over to the 8330 I came very close to selling the Diamond but something told me to hand on to it just a while longer and I'm glad I did!  I used the Diamond for another two months keeping the Blackberry in a drawer.

Palm Pre 

In January of 2009 Palm announced their new Palm Pre at CES saying it would go on sale sometime in the summer with Sprint.  Hello Palm!  A new, hot, smartphone coming to Sprint?  Where do I sign up?!?

In retrospect I really should have just not used my upgrade on the Blackberry and stuck it out until June that year.  Instead what I did was sell the Blackberry and line up a buyer for the Touch Diamond so that I could offset a large chunk of the full-price Palm Pre.  This was also the first time I was able to score a new hot piece of tech on the day it launched.

The Palm Pre had a lot of promise when it launched with Sprint but sadly Palm really dropped the ball.  I liked the Pre probably the most of any smartphone other than the iPhone 4.  The innovative WebOS that Palm developed really was a ground breaker in many respects.  To this day I have yet to use a smartphone device that handled multi-tasking and notifications as well as the Pre.  The web browser was excellent and the battery life while not being spectacular was at least something I could work with.  The keyboard left something to be desired for someone with larger thumbs but again, it was something I could work with.  The inductive charging option via the Palm Touchstone was icing on the cake for me.

Palm dropped the ball in two serious regards.

The first was how media was synced to the device.  Initially it would fool iTunes into thinking it was an iPod for music and using a USB drive mode to side load any video content.  Eventually Apple put the stop to that little trick and Palm flat out said that there were plenty of third party options for music and playlist sync duties.  That is an epic fail in my book.  I eventually rolled back to a previous version of iTunes on my PC which is something I should not have had to do.

The second, more crucial, failure on the part of Palm was the app situation.  For the first four months there were a total of 36 apps for the Palm Pre.  Actually, the first three months there were only 18!  How on Earth did Palm expect this platform to take off in the world of iPhones and mobile apps?  When it was announced Palm stressed the Pre had the exact same CPU and graphics hardware as the iPhone 3GS yet initially they would not make the programming APIs necessary to utilize that hardware available to developers!  It wasn't until after six months they realized their flub and released a new development SDK that allowed access to that hardware and by that point I was beyond pissed off.  There were things I had gotten used to being able to do when on the go that I had to find cantankerous workarounds to do.  If I could at all.

Maybe now that Palm has been purchased by HP WebOS might get the support it needs to succeed.  I really, really hope so because that OS is very nice and I would seriously think about getting a tablet based on WebOS.

HTC Hero 

Five months after the Palm Pre came out Sprint became the second carrier to offer Android powered devices to their customers.  Three months after that I came due another upgrade.  Around this time the HTC Evo 4G was announced for a summer 2010 release running Android and that phone was a beast (on paper at least).  However, I didn't know if Android was going to be for me or not so I opted to get the HTC Hero and sell off the Pre to help recoups some costs.  If I liked Android then I would be all set to save up for the Evo that summer.  If not then I knew I could always go with another platform.

The HTC Hero had almost the exact same internal hardware as the old Touch Diamond.  It had the same CPU and screen size with the key differences being the 5MP camera over the 3.2MP one in the Diamond and a capacitive glass touch screen instead of a plastic resistive screen.  Sadly it also came with another trackball (I hate the damn things on phones!).

The thing I liked about Android was just customizable it was from a user standpoint.  I could arrange program shortcuts and information widgets to my hearts content and had a hard time getting bored with the UI.  If I got bored I would either create my own "theme" or download some new widgets from the Android Marketplace.  What I didn't like about the Hero was the older hardware trying to run a modern OS and not so great battery life.  However, it gave me a taste of Android and I learned it was something I could like.

HTC Evo 4G

As I mentioned above I knew the Evo was coming when I got the Hero and after a few months of using Android I was really hyped about this device.  It was the first "4G" handset in America, had a very large 4.3 inch touch screen, a 1Ghz CPU, and was slated to get the latest version of Android (2.2).  Yes, I was at my local Sprint store before they opened on the day this puppy launched and had it in my grubby paws less than 20 minutes after the store opened.  The Evo showed just what Android could do given the right set of hardware specs.

There are several entries on my site about the Evo so I'll leave it to you to read those for something detailed.  I will say this about the Evo that should carry some weight for those who know me well.  Even though I've transitioned to both a new smartphone and cellular provider I've not sold it.  I don't really plan to either.  I still use it around the house via Wi-Fi and I plan at some point to try some custom ROMS out to play with.  Seeing as how my general practice is to sell off the old device to help defray the cost of the new this should say something about the Evo.  

iPhone 4

In January of this year Verizon and Apple announced that the iPhone 4 would be coming to Verizon one month later.  It had long been my hope that Apple would bring the iPhone to Sprint at some point but it just didn't look to be in the cards.  I hate AT&T and refused to go to them, even for the iPhone.  Trust me, this was harder than it sounds.  I was never a huge fan of Verizon due to how they would lock down their devices but that had changed over the last couple of years and by virtue of my employer I could also get a discount with them.  However, that was not enough to prompt me to switch carriers.  At least in mid-January it wasn't enough.  However, Sprint did a couple of things that really ticked me off, the least of which was some drastic changes to the Premier Program that would have done away with my annual upgrade.  I do not argue with their right to make that change but I did feel that that upgrade every year was one of the main points keeping me with them and if that was gone, well then, that changes every thing.

I thought long and hard about it and eventually decided to bite the bullet and switch carriers to Verizon and get the iPhone 4.  I'm saving around $80 a month and I got a friggin' iPhone 4!

There is much more to it than just saving money and being ticked at a cellular carrier and maybe I'll write a post about that at a later date.  Just let me say it was personal.  Besides, I've very happy with my iPhone!  If I have any regrets about getting one it's that the white iPhone 4 didn't come out when I switched.

So there you have it, my highly abridged smartphone history!