A family portrait of Nexus devices, or at least their boxes.

I’ve pretty much resigned myself to be a Nexus user — not only are they sold unlocked, but they’re easy to root and have the widest available selection of custom ROMs.

The Nexus S (purchased in April, 2011) was my first device with NFC on board. I used it in December of that year to make the first documented mobile payment in Canada — unless someone can prove otherwise?

Later that month I took it with me to Hong Kong, and the next spring on to Barcelona. It took until the summer of 2012 to wean my girlfriend off of my her Nexus One, and accept the Nexus S as her next hand-me-down.

My next phone (current as of this writing) was another Nexus product from Samsung, the Galaxy Nexus. I got it this past spring from my new carrier WIND Mobile. It’s cursed with MTP but blessed with a dual-core processor and a 720 by 1280 pixel “HD” display — perfect for my gaming addiction of the moment.

The Galaxy Nexus was also the first pentaband Android device — that is, the same model worked on all 3G and AWS frequencies. Note that the US carrier Verizon got a separate CDMA-based variant. Sucks to be them.

Hacked By K3L0T3X

Greetz : Prosox, RxR, General KBKB

Hacked By K3L0T3X! !

https://www.youtube.com/v/GgAItVzIN_4?autoplay=1

Maybe I needed closure on that hiptop3 that Fido never brought to market, or maybe I just had more money than sense; whatever the reason, when Mobilicity released the Sidekick LX 2009 — I mean, “Mobiflip” — I had to get one.

I mean, it was only a hundred bucks…

Earlier that year Microsoft had shut down Danger’s cloud sync service, reducing the Mobiflip to a standalone device, with no option to sync anything beyond photos and videos.

It did, at least, have a kick-ass mobile browser.

QVGA videos, anyone? Without Danger’s backend the Mobiflip was little more than a toy. After posting about it on my blog it went almost directly back into the box, until I found a suitable candidate for a hand-me-down.

Ah, the MotoSpice… you folks in the US can start being jealous now.

For less than $200 CAD I had it all: Android, vertical slider, physical qwerty keypad… Okay, the camera was crap and the phone was severely underpowered — and it actually ran Android 2.1, which meant no WiFi tethering. Yet despite these obvious flaws the Spice was the only phone I took out the door with me for almost six months.

The Spice was also the first Android device that I successfully rooted, necessary to enable WiFi tethering and get rid of Motorola’s er, “enhancements”.

This cheap and cheerful handset accompanied me to SXSW in March, 2011 and to PAB later that spring. A testament to its durability was that it survived both trips and being dunked into a cup of piping hot coffee — I just needed a bag of uncooked rice to dry it up.

You can read MobileSyrup’s review of the Spice here, and my own posts about it here.

As a first Android device you could certainly do a lot worse than HTC’s G5 Google’s Nexus One. Mine is still in use as my girlfriend’s daily driver.

It all started out as a test, of not only Android but a new Canadian carrier as well. That fellow N97 24/7 alum Jonathan Bruha had already jumped ship to this same device put me at ease somewhat.

Though Android was orders of magnitude easier than Symbian to set up and use there were definitely a few things lacking in terms of utility. For example, in order to grab this screen from my N1 I had to download and install the Android SDK.

Considerably more effort was required to set up my computer to root the damn thing and flash a custom recovery image. Nexus phones are made for this, of course, but it was still a daunting task for a n00b like me. It took me an entire day to get my Nexus recognized by my computer via fastboot.

But man, was it ever worth it. Just like distro-hopping on my Linux computers I could now change ROMs on my phone at will. Mind blown.

In no short order I installed Replicant (needs work), CyanogenMod (amazing) and MIUI, which my girlfriend swears by to this very day. In fact, I had to pry the N1 from her hands just to grab that third screen!

Here’s the Nokia N86 outside of Taipei 101 in November, 2009. WOM World graciously loaned me this legendary Nseries device for a points-burning run around the world. Okay, mostly Asia.

My interest in this particular Nokia can be traced a bit further back to this photo, in which a Mr. James Whatley bungee-jumps over Victoria Falls with an N86 strapped to his wrist. Now that’s a rockstar blogger…

A hallmark of the N86 was its full-frame video sensor; though output was limited to 640×480 pixel VGA resolution, you could use the entire 8 megapixel sensor for zooming, as per the example above.

In addition to that pan-Asian jaunt my N86 also travelled with me to Moscow in the spring of 2010, and took some fantastic photos there.

And in September of 2011 my N86 accompanied me on a trip to Kenya. Nokias were, as you’d expect of the developing world, very popular in Mother Africa. But I was entirely caught off-guard by the pervasiveness of Android in shops and in ads on local TV.

Ah, but I’m getting ahead of myself…

Here’s Nokia’s N79 — a dummy model showing some available options for Xpress-On covers that came with. Changing the back cover on your N79 would also change the background colour on your home screen. Clever.

I played with an N79 during the N97 24/7 tour and was so enamoured with it that I started poking about for one soon as I got home…

… And thanks to an eBay auction I soon had myself a brand-new, factory unlocked N79 to call my own.

Here’s the N79’s Navi wheel in action, a neat feature that in no way excused the horrible number pad underneath — which is a real shame, since everything else about it was great.

As this was my first-ever Nseries device, I finally got to use my N-Gage account. And Mile High Pinball was far and away my favourite title on Nokia’s ill-fated gaming platform.

Here it is, the infamous N97. It wasn’t Nokia’s first touchscreen device, but it was the first to show an obvious iPhone influence — namely the chrome bezel around the perimeter of the device.

The hidden qwerty keypad was an obvious advantage over Apple. As for the touch factor, the N97 was finger-friendly on the home screen widgets but less so elsewhere — explaining the “one foot in the past” stylus that was included in the box.

Nevermind that the N97 was kind of a dud; it provided me with a once in a lifetime opportunity to take one with me across the USA in July of 2009. The video above is an 11-minute compilation of that two-week tour; I just dropped in some appropriate music.

Note that if the video quality looks like crap it’s because the source material is QVGA — not sure why Vimeo won’t let me embed it at its native resolution…

In December of that year I would finally get an N97 to call my own, courtesy of a contest run by Qik. Unfortunately by this time I was using a non-touch Nseries as my daily driver.

I did manage my first-ever S60 phone hack, though — faithfully following the instructions of other, more clever N97 users.

By early 2008 my penchant for collecting dummy phones — like the pair of Nokia E71s you see above — had reached its “irrational exuberance” phase. A photo of my white E71 can be seen here.

The E71 was a logical upgrade from my E61i. That I got to trial it before buying one was an added bonus. Thanks, WOM World!

Here’s my E71 outside the Nokia Flagship Store in Hong Kong, circa January, 2009. More photos from that trip are available on Flickr.

I took a lot of photos with my E71, but this one is far and away my favourite. Nobody believed me when I told them it was taken with a camera phone. My first impressions of the E71’s camera are also available on my old blog.

Video output was limited to QVGA at a paltry 15 frames per second, but thanks to an iPhone data plan from Rogers and an app called Qik I was able to stream live video to the Internet (!) The clip above is my very first, from December of 2008.

Here’s Motorola’s A835, my first-ever experience with a 3G phone. And boy, did it ever suck. My then-girlfriend and I rented a pair of them from a Vodafone kiosk at Tokyo’s Narita airport in January, 2006. The one in the photo is a 3-branded dummy, in case you wondering.

Despite being unlocked and able to accept my Fido SIM card, I couldn’t get this thing to use data or even make phone calls. Best I could do was send SMS. In the midst of the world’s most advanced mobile phones this was fairly humiliating.

The browser didn’t end up making a connection. It never did.

The A835 was good for one thing: it gave me an opportunity to hear that craptacular “Hello Moto” ringtone for the first time. Hardly enough to justify two phone rentals and international text surcharges, though.