It was spring 2005. My friend came to me and told me she got a new phone for around 500$. I looked at her as if she said a blasphemy. Then she showed it to me and I was even less convinced. It was the Nokia 6630, a huge handset in my opinion. She told me it was a “smartphone”. I couldn’t care any less. Then a few days later, she started showing me features on that 500$ handset: we started off by playing music, then recording video, then editing videos with Muvee. She also showed me a program that allowed her to play sounds when on a call, like car honks to pretend she’s stuck in traffic. And one day, she was extremely excited to tell me she had Word and Excel on her smartphone, and showed me her whole 60-page training report, on that small phone. I was dazzled, and it is that day that I knew my next handset would have to run the same platform as the 6630.
A little research later, I was introduced to the name: Series 60. I didn’t have the resources to buy a handset at the time, but I kept visiting Nokia’s website each week, waiting for that perfect handset that won’t cost a lot but will allow me to have everything with me. This is how I spotted the 3250, how I fell in love with its twist design, how I learned it was one of the first handsets to come with S60 3rd Edition, how I decided to buy it.
Spring 2006. After having blabbered for months to everyone around me about the uniqueness of the 3250, I plunged down and bought it. At first there were very few applications for it, let alone freeware, and I was questionning my choice. Then came Mobireader for S60 3rd, and my whole world was turned upside down.
What exactly did Mobireader do? It showed me that this small “smartphone” can be much more smarter than anyone else would suspect. I was a 3rd-year Pharmacy student, and after digging for some free ebooks and buying some commercial ones, I had a great medical library in my hands. I could research each drug’s full information in less than 5 seconds, I could tell each medical term’s meaning in less than 3seconds. I had massive ebooks with me, on that almost invisible 512Mb memory card, that I could run using my trusty 3250. Compared to dozens of 2-3Kgs weighing books, this was a miracle. For months, my friends had to run to the library each time they had a small thing to research, I only had to open my phone. Then the 3250 became a celebrity among my classmates and teachers: I had many professors ask me to “look it up in my phone”, almost as if it was some kind of reference.
2 years and a great (at least in my opinion) career in blogging later, I decided to upgrade to the N95, then I won the N82. S60 had become a part of my everyday life, a way to interact with a lot of things around me, and the N95/N82 reinforced that. But most importantly, through blogging, I discovered that everyone around the globe uses S60 in a different way. I had a discussion with Nokia’s managers in our area lately, and each one of them told me a few ways he’s using his handset. I replied by saying that this is the beauty of the platform, it’s open to possibilities, to suggestions, to improvements, to adaptation, to everything. There are a hundred ways to perform an action on S60, and you are left to choose which way suits you the best. There are thousands of ways to use your S60 handset, but you will find the few ones that fit in your life. Then, if there comes a time when you ask yourself “oh I would like to do that on my device, can I?”, you research a bit, and the answer is 99% of the time “Yes”. The possibilities are endless, you just have to look for what you need and what you enjoy and carry them with you.
This is my S60 story. What’s yours?
