Running a company like Locatrix, it’s no surprise that we usually have a few handsets laying around the office. Quite a few, in fact. But earlier today I decided to dig up the select dozen or so that have been my “personal devices” over the past decade. They look like this:

Ten years of mobile handsets

 In order, we have (top row L-toR):

• Motorola V3688: in it’s day this was a tiny, absolutely lusted after little handset. I bought it after enduring a couple of years working in Asia and having my colleagues at Compaq laugh at my Nokia 2110 (the original brick). It was a dual-band device (900-1800MHz) with a dinky little screen, but it rocked.  This handset later survived immersion in a backpack filled with water (a leaky bottle while hiking). We just dried it out and turned it back on.
• Motorola LSeries+: this was (I believe) the first tri-band (adding 1900MHz) device sold in Australia, acquired solely so I could roam in the US. I got this around 2000, and soon after changed domestic (Australian) networks simply to get cellular roaming in North Carolina, where I was spending time each quarter. This phone and the V3688 shared a charger format, which meant I could charge up both at home overnight or at the office. These devices collectively served me well until 2003, when I upgraded to…..
• Nokia 3650: my first Series 60 device, colour screen, and the dodgiest ever release of Nokia’s PC Suite software. I once tried to sync my address book to it, filled the memory, and then couldn’t delete address entries due to insufficient memory. This device survived being used as a crash test dummy for original Locatrix Series60 demos – we developed CellID location technology similar to that used by Google Maps today, just four years too early! It also bounced at least once out of a cycling jersey at around 40km/h, and still works today – proving its resilience. 
• Motorola V600: this briefly served as a personal handset, largely because it ran a J2ME variant of our software and had a nice screen. I remember sitting in Changi airport using the 3650 to take a photo of an error message on the V600 so I could e-mail it to our developers for debugging. Good times….
• O2 XDA II Mini: my first, and thus far only foray into Windows mobile for personal use. ActiveSync worked way better than the Nokia PC Suite, so for the first time I had contacts, calendar items, tasks, to-do lists and even Outlook mail on my handset (or I did, everytime I could get it to the USB port on my ThinkPad). This device had an SD slot so I EBay’d a WiFi card which was of occasional use; I tried an early version of Skype for Windows mobile on this device but the CPU was too slow to decode audio in a helpful way.
• Benefon TWIG: Benefon were clients of ours for a while, and I still have a boxful of these things. TWIGs were kind of neat – with integrated GPS and full PND functionality – but with not one but three Xscale processors onboard it was pretty easy to drain the battery. In theory PC syncing worked, in reality it didn’t. But I carried this for a year or so, often in conjunction with…..
• BlackBerry 7100x: I wanted to try out a BlackBerry, and this has to be the best mobile bargain I ever got – I picked this up for around $200 via online auction. It was a grey-market device, originally packaged for the O2 retail channel in the UK, so I had to search around for the appropriate software upgrades. But having live e-mail on a portable device for the first time (this was around 2005, I think) was a revelation, and something I could probably never live with out. (Well I could, but there’s a reason they call these things Crackberries).  This device survived as a secondary handset for me until early 2009.
• Samsung SGH-A501: In October 2006 Telstra launched their 850MHz HSDPA service (”NextG”) and so I joined the third generation.  Selecting 850MHz instead of 2100MHz meant that their handset vendors spent the next nine months or so playing catchup, and the first four devices launched were limited to ZTE, Motorola, and Samsung.  PC software that worked (sort of) for syncing and you could use it as a modem (maybe 1 or 2Mbps via USB). This is the handset I had when we first launched Uandme™ (later re-branded Whereis® Everyone), so it got used for hundreds of demos.

In the bottom row (L-to-R) we have the more recent workhorses:

• Samsung SGH-A701: I acquired this as an upgrade to the A501, primarily due to super screen size and resolution (which was really nice for mobile demos, and still looks good today).  Just before the 2007 Mobile World Congress (then still called 3GSM) in Barcelona I hurried out to buy a 2100MHz W-CDMA Samsung when it was pointed out to me that the early “NextG” devices were unlikely to roam onto non-850MHz networks, which would make demos overseas painfully slow. Things have changed now, and most of the Telstra-branded handsets seem to happily roam between 2100 and 850MHz.
• Nokia N95: Let me be clear, I absolutely loved this handset, and in many ways still do. Easily the best camera-phone ever made (or that I used), this was the original N95 – 2100MHz W-CDMA (no 850MHz) and for the first time the Nokia PC Suite seemed to work really well. Yes, you had to upgrade all the time (both PC software and handset firmware) but having Google Maps and the integrated GPS helped me in Europe dozens of times.  One downer – and a real blight on Nokia – is that between the 8GB and 16GB (or whatever it was) they changed the form factor of the battery cover.  Why would you do that? When one of our employees broke the battery cover we had a heck of a time finding a replacement (because Nokia Care sent us the wrong one). But I really miss having a decent camera on my phone (Research in Motion, are you listening?).
• Apple iPhone: These weren’t yet released in Australia when I bought this handset in Hong Kong in December 2007. I had barely brought it back to Australia when it was forced to survive (literally, without a scratch) a cycling incident which left me with a fractured pelvis and three broken ribs. For some reason I reverted to the N95 and passed the iPhone to the Locatrix developer pool.
• Nokia E51: We had an E61 lying about the office, and it was suggested to me that RIM made a Blackberry client for Symbian that promised I could consolidate my dual-handset life, and still maintain e-mail access. I never succumbed to the temptation of the Blackberry Pearl, because Telstra kept promising an 850MHz-compatible Blackberry. I never managed to get the E51 Blackberry client working either, I suspect because mine wasn’t acquired through the “official” Telstra channel. I did at times have Telstra (and RIM) personnel attempting to assist me with this, in the end I gave up (thank heavens for my 7100x).
• Blackberry Bold 9000: I’ve written elsewhere about my infatuation with the Bold, so I won’t go on – suffice to say that I’ll probably spend a year or more happily working away on this handset. I really, really like Google Sync, and the only two letdowns have been the Blackberry Desktop Suite (which I now don’t have to use, thanks to Google) and the piddly, awful camera. I can even live with the battery life being not so great, but please, by the time I buy my next Blackberry PLEASE HAVE A DECENT CAMERA!

I’ve tried other handsets – again, an occupational hazard of this business is that we get to see a lot of handsets – but none that I’ve otherwise been inclined to say “Oh, I’ll use that” and make it my own. Other than the above I also have a Telstra USB modem that disappointingly doesn’t support non-Telstra SIM cards while overseas, so I’ll probably try to a obtain a Huawei 3G dongle sometime. There’s also the 2100MHz Candy-bar Samsung that I’ve occasionally used, but haven’t for quite a while.

And that, folks, is my personal handset museum!