As an "early adopter" of new technologies and having a scientific/engineering background the evolution of mobile phones has literally never ceased to amaze me.
My mobile life started in my early teens with a Phillips PH301, I could store a whopping 10 SMS messages and if I remember correctly could keep circa 150 contacts in my phone book. With a tiny LCD and a battery life of something in the region of 1.5 hours of actual call time and at best 8 hours+ of interaction, I thought things had reached their peak.
Give it a few years I was on the Nokia hype train - no one was cooler than the person that had Snake on their phone. I had a 3210 and then best of all an 8850 to be honest even now nothing has compared to how that phone made me feel at that time. It was elite.
Then when I was in college I bought a Samsung M100 - the first MP3 enabled phone, still same basic phone and SMS messaging. As I recall it had some cool games (no Snake though, BUT it did have Black Jack), but the ability of having half an album or there abouts on a phone and having a headset that enabled you to listed to music and answer calls was amazing. This was the first mobile phone device to really add something new to the mix.
Following on from this I had the first Samsung (at least in the UK AFAIK) flip phone device, the A300 - two LCD screens, one Blue and one Green yes please... such a sucker for a gimmick. I then had a T100, which was far superior had a very decent internal screen, allowed custom backgrounds, whilst not doing the whole MP3 thing it did allow for high MIDI ringtones and also allowed for you to choose the colour of your connection / ringing light - I liked to switch it up but purple was my favourite.
It was actually during this time that I was at University and my thesis was a "Mobile E-Zine" viewing device that could access websites and could download virtual magazines with images, videos and music using home or in store internet, silly me for not taking the next logical leap and adding a SIM card, little did I know that WAP was soon to evolve.
Next for me came Nokia's 7600 (TearDrop), one of the best and worst purchases I have ever made. I loved it and hated it, it was for all intents and purposes a very early "smart phone", the design was different and intriguing. In use however it was a hard learning curve going from knowing that 1=abc, 2=def etc to dealing with the number pad running vertically down the left and right hand side.
The next leap I thought would be the final big step for phones, what more could happen (and in a way I was right) - I got the Nokia N97 Communicator, huge storage space for MP3s, web browsing, e-mail, full QWERTY fold out keyboard and a generally great user interface, it was a crying shame that no other vendors utilised Nokia's Symbian operating system. I feel that if they had today's mobile phone market could be something very different.
Following on from this I was working in Data Centres for an investment bank and was compelled to get the next new shiny thing, at this time it was the iPhone 4. It was a neat device all in all, but to be honest aside from the additional apps really did feel like a downgrade from my prior phone. I felt very restricted in their ecosphere and it wasn't long till I "jail broke" / rooted my device. The main kicker for this was how iTunes ruined my meticulously indexed music library upon installation - something I'm saddened to admit still annoys me to this day - it took me MONTHS to get my 300GB+ library back into a recognisable format.
From then on I went Android consistently, starting with the Google Nexus 5 (which was a great phone for the price point at the time). I must admit what turned me on to this was seeing my friend at works Samsung Galaxy Nexus, which just blew me away. From then I went with a Note 2, 4, 8 and now on the Note 10+.
I'd never have thought 15 years ago whilst at University that we would be getting these form factors, battery life, general connectivity through GSM, SMS, WAP, 3G, 4G, 5G, BlueTooth, Wifi, NFC etc. Getting resolutions that are to be honest too good for the size of the screen. Touch screen was an inevitability but multi-point touch screen and a pen/stylus with additional gestures and features is mind blowing and we now take it for granted.
Moore's law has been proven time and time again and I can only gestate on the things to come. I am looking forward to the first "clear"/see-through phone but to be honest aside from the connectivity type / waveform that we need to connect and from standard upgrades in components I don't see where else we can go.
As I was in my twenties I am more than happy to be proved wrong, just please no "eye-phones" like in Futurama, if ever the day comes when my eye starts vibrating when I'm getting a call, to quote the Professor - "I don't want to live on this planet anymore!".
