There was just one problem: The damned things didn’t work.

Okay, that’s not entirely fair — I was able to send and receive text messages, at least. But repeated attempts to get the web browser to connect to something, anything, failed. Nor could I make either of our A835s do that other thing mobile phones are supposed to do. What was that again… oh right, make phone calls.

The handsets were butt-ugly, especially for Japan. Perhaps it was a good thing that the data didn’t work; I’d sure hate for the wrong person to see me use it, and be chased out of Akihabara by a jeering mob of keitai otaku (mobile phone geeks). I did manage to snap some blurry, pixelated VGA-quality photos here and there — certainly nothing worth printing out and getting framed.

What I  remember most about this phone was using it to text my girlfriend in a frantic attempt to find her among the many and confusing aisles of Shibuya’s Tokyu Hands “Creative Life” store. When I finally found her she told me that all the while her phone had been in her purse and turned off, and why was I asking anyway?

Nokia smartphones of the day were powered by the Symbian operating system. The combination of the two was, for me, a culmination of every device I had owned prior. Like other Eseries devices the E61i was made for enterprise, with email support and a qwerty keypad worthy of a BlackBerry. But it also had a camera, and a not bad one at that. Like my Ericssons and Sony Ericssons the E61i supported Bluetooth and SyncML. Around this time I discovered a hosted SyncML service, so instead of shuttling my personal data back and forth to a single computer I could sync over the Internet and access it on the web, as I did with my hiptop — better, in fact, because now I could export my data at any time to standard file formats. Finally, like my TyTN the E61i had both 3G and WiFi radios — though 3G only worked in Europe and Asia. Did I mention that this device was never meant to be sold in the Americas, and was only available to Canada through an online retailer?  The lack of Canada-tuned 3G turned out to be a blessing, as I was paying my carrier far too much money for not enough data. If $25/month for a paltry 3 MB seems ludicrous believe me, it was.

Because Symbian — also confusingly referred to as “S60” — was so popular in Europe, I was able to sample mobile apps for the first time. There wasn’t yet an on-device app store; you would instead visit the developer’s website and purchase the app directly from them — imagine that! The available third-party software was generally excellent. There were task managers, giving the user control over the running processes on their phone. There was the free Opera Mini web browser, critical to browsing web pages on my ridiculous data plan. There was even software that could emulate old game consoles, like Nintendo’s Gameboy Color and NES. To play my favourite childhood arcade games on my phone was, well… it was just awesome.

My E61i travelled with me far and wide. Its first test was a trip to New Zealand, where I was able to peruse the morning news over breakfast via the WiFi in my hotel. Next up was a journey to the Great Pyramids of Egypt, where I used GPS for the first time with a Bluetooth accessory. To save on roaming charges I was able to store map data directly on my phone before I left. Accessing GPS satellites was free, and as I later found out, quite illegal in Egypt when I was there. Nonetheless, I’ve a particularly fond memory of being on an overnight train to Luxor, my eyes glued to the E61i’s screen as the train pushed forth into parts unknown.

Perhaps the biggest testament to the E61i’s world-phone abilities was that it actually worked in Japan. It might not have been as svelte as the keitai there, nor could it access Japan’s i-mode services. But as a camera phone and Internet-connected device it could hold its own. You’ll remember that early on I wrote about wanting only two things from a smartphone. In 2000 my VisorPhone had granted me my first wish, an address book that could be synchronized from computer to mobile device. Now I had a handset that I could use anywhere on the planet. Checklist complete.

And then the iPhone came along and changed everything…

Still stinging from the thousand bucks I dropped on my HTC TyTN I turned to eBay for a deal, and managed to find a local seller with an 8700g. It had branding from a carrier in the UK but the radio had been unlocked for use in Canada. I was unsure if the second lock on the device — the BlackBerry PIN — had been cleared, but all fears were allayed when I got the device, powered it up and successfully registered it for BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS).

In many ways, BlackBerries are win-win for carrier and user alike. Just like Danger’s hiptop, BlackBerry data passes through a central server before arriving on your handset. For carriers, this means less congestion on their networks; for users it means faster data — at least it did back in the dark days before the widespread availability of 3G. The BlackBerry operating system had a particularly helpful feature wherein the user could send “service books” to their device. If your email wasn’t working or some other ailment had besieged your handset a binary blob would be sent down the pipe to save the day. I’ve never seen this feature on any other mobile OS.

Though made almost entirely of plastic my CrackBerry was tough as nails; it shrugged off a brutal drop from about chest-high to an unforgiving sidewalk. Chalk this up to its roots as a text-only pager, I guess… And for text-related activities the BlackBerry did very well. Despite the fairly hideous on-screen fonts, dealing with email from multiple accounts was a breeze. Another BlackBerry innovation was the global inbox, a central dumping ground for incoming email, text messages, even missed calls. RIM has since removed SMS from the global inbox by default, which has been a challenge for my older siblings who still don’t entirely get what a text message is, let alone how to send one.

Sadly, any hopes of a CrackBerry addiction for yours truly were vanquished in short order by an absolutely reprehensible app called PocketMac, which RIM licensed as the official syncing software for Apple desktop computers. It routinely ate appointments, contacts and/or to-do items on every sync, and it was a constant game of cat and mouse to suss out what had gone missing. Thankfully OS X now has a proper Desktop Manager, but I’m a proper Linux user now. And to be brutally honest, I don’t think BlackBerry’s proxied Internet is of much use in a world where 3G data is cheap and plentiful. Well, plentiful anyway.

I did use a borrowed BlackBerry Curve many years later on vacation in Bermuda. It was the only way I could get an unlimited data package from the local carrier there. The BlackBerry experience in 2011 wasn’t enough to win me back, but the on-screen fonts were better, at least.

HTC was a Taiwanese company that had previously made branded devices for others, most famously the Treo 650 and Compaq iPAQ. The TyTN was not their first Windows Mobile product, but the first to bear the company’s name. And it was fairly spectacular for the times. It was the first phone that I could use in Canada with 3G data service, offering download and upload speeds at least twice as fast as the then-current standards. Added to that was a WiFi radio, letting me hop on to a wireless Internet connection without using cellular data at all. All this plus an extra camera on the front of the phone meant that for the first time I could make voice and video calls using Skype, in flagrant disregard for whatever limitations I had on my calling plan. This was disruptive technology at its very best.

As you can imagine, this premium product had a premium price tag to match. My carrier hadn’t even heard of it, but I found a small local shop that specialized in importing super-high-powered phones from Europe. They could get me a TyTN, but it would set me back eleven hundred bucks. Flush with cash from my first professional contract as a theatre director, I placed my order.

My time with the TyTN was bittersweet. Perhaps its star turn was the nine days it spent with me in Seoul to ring in 2007. I received a “welcome to Korea” text from Fido the moment I powered it up upon arrival at Incheon Airport, and HTC’s flagship fit right in with the super-high-powered phones that the locals were using. My TyTn even got a compliment from the staff at my hotel.

But it was an altogether different story on a trip to Bermuda later that spring. I realized how dim the TyTN’s touch-screen display was when I couldn’t read texts or even see who was calling me in the bright island sunlight. Worse was battery life; with both 3G and WiFi radios turned on I can remember going from a full charge to empty in the space of a twenty-minute cab ride. This TyTN clearly needed much more power than its relatively small battery could provide.

Ultimately the TyTN’s downfall wasn’t the device itself but the desktop operating system it was tied to. I appreciated the push-email capabilities of Microsoft’s Exchange but I despised Outlook on my Windows laptop — so much so that I went back to my hiptop, dumped the Windows laptop for an Apple one and banished my TyTN to the dark recesses of my desk drawer. Then I gave it to a friend. Then he never used it and gave it back to me. Then I gave it to someone else. Then she dropped it in the toilet.

An inglorious end to a titan of smartphones.

The original hiptop didn’t even have a camera; for tiny, blurry photos you had to buy a separate accessory that plugged into (of all things) the headset jack. But its innovative design provided ample room for a near-perfect qwerty keypad. They might well have called this phone the fliptop, as the keys were hidden beneath the screen until needed. To access them you’d simply flip the screen panel out — a combination of magnets and a sturdy hinge would make it pivot a full one hundred and eighty degrees, snapping into the open position with a satisfying click. It never failed to impress, myself included.

The second generation hiptop2 added a built-in 320×240 pixel camera with flash, still fixed-focus and well behind the times but better than nothing. Amazingly, the flip-out screen now sat flush with the rest of the phone when closed; this meant that the keypad was set in a bit deeper than before, but no matter — it was still a joy to use. And navigating the Danger OS was a breeze thanks to four humongous buttons surrounding the screen. Plus a scrollwheel. Plus a four-way directional pad that doubled as the earpiece, of all things!

As great as the hardware was, it wasn’t the hiptop’s stand-out feature. Like BlackBerry’s Internet Service, data on all hiptops was routed through a central server to optimize bandwidth and ease congestion on carriers’ networks. But unlike BlackBerry, Danger’s solution offered two significant advantages for the user. The first was unlimited data — that’s right, all you could eat for a mere twenty Canadian dollars per month. Web browsing, emails with attachments, instant messages… didn’t matter what it was, it was all included. So long as you weren’t roaming internationally you’d never have to pay anything more than the standard monthly fee. Of course, when you were travelling the hiptop was a terrible choice. Data was an all-or-nothing proposition, a hard lesson I learned after racking up over two hundred dollars in roaming charges when I turned my hiptop2 data on over breakfast one morning in the UK.

The persistent Internet connection provided another benefit for hiptop users: with every device came a free web portal where personal data and emails were stored. You didn’t have to worry about syncing data to any one desktop computer; so long as that computer had a web browser you could access everything on your hiptop from there. The  portal also featured a webmail client, and since hiptops supported multiple push email accounts you’d need never worry about BlackBerry envy.

The price for all this convenience was learned later, when it was time to get my data off of the hiptop servers. Danger sold a plug-in for Microsoft’s Outlook called Intellisync, which gave me a local copy of my address book on a Windows computer. Photos could be downloaded individually from the hiptop web portal, but calendar entries, notes and to-do items had to be transcribed by hand if I wanted to keep them. And I did.

Danger’s proxied data service was similar in another way to BlackBerry’s BIS: It went down a lot. It happened often enough to be a familiar pain, rendering the device all but useless except for phone calls and SMS.  I would always know when the data service came back up; my hiptop would vibrate with a loud grunt as everything on it was restored.

Still, my hiptops were fantastic devices, right up there with the best smartphones I’ve ever had. My hiptop2 was dependable enough to survive two weeks in Uganda in 2005. Though I had no data there I found a way to post short dispatches to my blog via SMS. Part of that trip was a three-day journey to and from the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park to see gorillas in their natural habitat. I can still remember spotting the first cell tower on the long drive back, and firing up my hiptop to let the world know that I was still alive.

That same hiptop was memorable for another, more dubious achievement. It holds the first and so far only breakup text I’ve ever received. Ouch.

And yet I used this “dumbphone” (along with two other nearly identical models) for over a year, thanks largely to a technological standard called SyncML.

If you didn’t know, SyncML stands for Synchronization Markup Language. It allows one’s personal data — calendars, contacts, to-do items and more — to be synchronized between phone and desktop computer. Now here’s the important part: Unlike Palm’s proprietary HotSync, SyncML is an open standard, so anyone can make software for it. By this time Apple’s OS X desktop had SyncML support through an app called iSync; while my T616 wasn’t fully supported from the get-go, a third-party program called PhoneAgent did everything that iSync didn’t.

I didn’t even need a data cable; Bluetooth finally proved its worth as a means to wirelessly synchronize my data and install files to my handset. And thanks to Sony Ericsson’s sizable fanbase in Asia and Europe I was able to trick out my T616 with all manner of custom ringtones and themes.

All of the above actually applies to three separate handsets — the T616, T610 and Z600. The two “Ts” were virtually indistinguishable from the outside; on the inside, the T610 had a radio with an extra European band (900MHz) while the T616 swapped that out for an extra North American band (850MHz). This was more or less irrelevant, as both handsets worked on both continents, and Fido didn’t support the 850MHz band at the time.

The Z600 shared the same camera and internals, but was a bigger flip phone with customizable front and back panels.

It’s hard to say which one I liked more; the Z600 felt like a Japanese keitai but clearly needed a protective case, while the T610 and T616 were small enough to fit into the lighter pocket of my jeans. Of course I ended up dropping two out of the three, each in a different exotic locale. I managed to dent the metal case of my T616 by sending it crashing to the hard wooden floor of a swanky Bermuda hotel, and did about as much damage to the plastic housing of my Z600 as I fumbled with it in a public washroom atop Table Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa.

I also remember these handsets for their goofy accessories. I bought a Bluetooth-controlled toy car for my T610 that my cat chased for all of thirty seconds, then never again. For the Z600 I got a snap-on game controller, which was far too ridiculous-looking to ever use in public. I still have both of them tucked away in a drawer somewhere.

Any takers?

One of the biggest reasons why I didn’t keep it was the price tag: nine hundred and fifty Canadian dollars was a bit too dear. I think it was my Treo that instilled in me the optimal price point for one of these high-functioning handsets; even today, I’m loathe to pay more than five hundred bucks for one. And Fido offered no subsidies for the P800, as it was very much a niche device.

I might have given the P800 more consideration had it a proper qwerty keypad. Using the number pad for anything other than entering phone numbers was decidedly unpleasant. The touchscreen underneath had built-in handwriting recognition that didn’t work at all for me — I would have much preferred something more familiar, like Palm’s Graffiti alphabet. Instead, I had to make do poking at an on-screen keyboard with the included snap-on stylus. Not fun.

But the biggest problem with Sony Ericsson’s smartphone was that it had no available options for syncing data to my Macintosh computer. Remember that I’ve only ever wanted two things from my mobile phone, and above all else the ability to share a single address book. Apple to this day is still dwarfed by Microsoft Windows in terms of market share, and I wasn’t about to buy a new computer just for a phone (at least not yet). To manually write phone numbers to my SIM card would be an instant regression back to the stone age, and an immediate deal-breaker.

One thing the P800 had going for it was an integrated VGA camera. I decided that my next mobile would  also be a camera phone. And sure enough, it was.

Sony had already been making their own handsets — at least in the UK — for quite some time. Their join venture with Ericsson was inked in 2001 but the T68i, the combined companies’ first product, took almost two years to arrive in Canada. Its standout feature was an available camera accessory that plugged in to the bottom of the phone.

It was an expensive add-on that I never even bothered with; in fact, this particular phone/PDA combo lasted maybe a week before I sent both back to their respective stores. In theory, using a phone as a Bluetooth modem was a godsend. One could enjoy the mobile Internet on an expansive touch-enabled screen while the signal source was safely tucked away in a pocket. In practice, though, this setup was a pain. A constant Bluetooth connection easily halved the battery life of both devices; your only other choice was to pair and un-pair them manually throughout the day.

I vowed that I would never again separate PDA from phone, and my next device kept me to that promise…

I had a buddy from high school who worked the IT racket in the United States. His frequent paid-for flights back and forth between Toronto and Dallas gave him enough points to enjoy a first class return trip to the faraway land where his favourite animé and manga were made. Needless to say, I jumped at the opportunity to tag along.

Since my inaugural visit to Japan in 2001 NTT DoCoMo (of i-mode fame) had introduced a new service called i-shot, enabling its users to share photos via the built-in cameras on their handsets. Nothing special today, I know — but back then it was enough for me to justify my entire trip.

I secured an i-shot compatible phone once again via Japan Cell Phone Rentals, and upon my return to the Excel Hotel Tokyu in Shibuya a package was waiting for us at the front desk, just like the first time. Inside was a Mitsubishi mova D251i, in “dusty rose” — that is, the one meant for girls.

I snapped about fifty 120×120-pixel photos that trip — of cars, food, signs, toys, myself… I had always been a fan of digital cameras, and accustomed as I was to the restrictions of low resolution photography I felt that I could adequately exploit this oddly small and square palette. Plus, there was something incredibly liberating about having a camera with you at all times, one you could keep at the ready in a pocket rather than a bag or knapsack.

But having a connected camera was the best part of all. Snapping a photo from the streets of Tokyo and sending it to a friend halfway around the world by email immediately after was — at that time, at least — the stuff of science fiction. Never mind that said friend halfway around the world was at that moment more than likely sound asleep. And that I racked up and extra fifty US dollars in data charges over and above my one hundred dollar handset rental. And that I discovered that the phone had a removable memory card only after I had emailed every single photo to myself from the handset.

The future, it seemed, didn’t come cheap.

Okay, my GSM-based Treo wasn’t compatible with Japan’s mobile networks, but I could use it pretty much everywhere else. And in 2002-2003 it seemed like I did just that.

By this time I had racked up enough Air Canada points for a free trip to Australia, via Hawaii. I remember being on a bus in Honolulu and firing up the mobile version of MapQuest to verify the location of the Ala Moana Center, where I would enjoy my first-ever serving of Hawaiian poi. Choosing a food court vendor over a touristy hotel restaurant saved me about fifty bucks. Later that trip I would surprise a friend back in Canada with my reply to her innocuous text: “What am I up to? Oh, not much… just having breakfast in Sydney, Australia is all…”

Later that year I was back in Singapore with the The Second City theatre, and amazed our stage manager by pulling up almost-live hockey scores from back home on Yahoo’s mobile sports site. On that same trip I somehow managed to find a cute Singaporean pen pal to flirt with via SMS when I got back home — once we both figured out the country codes, of course. It didn’t last long but while it did it was an amazing thing, sharing random moments from lives on the run from opposite sides of the world. This was all in the days before Twitter, of course.

My Treo was also there for me during tougher times. It allowed me to take diligent notes from doctors as my father lay dying in hospital. During the SARS epidemic, no less. And when a sudden, North America-wide power outage silenced my desktop computer and cordless phones, my Treo persevered. That I could still make calls on it made me quite popular with my neighbours, at least for the duration of the blackout.

The last time my Treo would travel with me was, fittingly, on my last jaunt as an overseas comedian, performing for Canadian troops stationed in Bosnia-Herzegovina. We were already halfway through our two-week USO-style tour — sorry, deployment — when I learned that mobile phones were not allowed on base. Apparently local crime rings had the technology to intercept mobile transmissions, including SMS. But about the only sensitive information I remember sending was that the food was fantastic. Seriously, an army really does travel on its stomach.

My Treo and I had some great times together and it rarely, if ever, let me down. I miss it to this very day.