You’ll recall that the word “Nexus” means three things when it comes to phones:

1. “Pure Android” — an operating system free of carrier bloat;
2. Factory unlocked — usable on any network (frequencies notwithstanding);
3. Unlockable bootloader — and the widest available selection of custom kernels, ROMs, etc.

It’s this recipe for success that has kept me faithful to the Nexus line for three devices and counting — four if you include the Nexus 7 tablet charging in the other room as I write this. To be honest I’m not so much a fan of plasticky Samsung phones; that I’ve bought two of them says something about my unfaltering loyalty to Nexus.

The first time I saw the Nexus S was in the hands of a Mr. Dave Dobbin. At that time he was the CEO of Mobilicity, and in January of 2011 he had the T-Mobile version with him at a promotional event I attended. Yours truly go to hold it for a precious few seconds. Though otherwise an unremarkable slab, the screen on this Samsung was a wonder to behold. The colours were incredibly vivid and rich; the blacks so deep as to be an abyss. And the glass was impossibly curved, fitting perfectly against your cheek when on the phone.

I came very close to purchasing one at a Best Buy during South by Southwest later that spring, and when Mobilicity started selling it in April I could no longer resist.

The first beneficiary of this purchase was actually my Nexus One. Relieved of its day-to-day duties I was able to figure out this whole rooting and ROM-ing business with drastically reduced consequences. It wouldn’t be until December, 2011 that I’d load the legendary CyanogenMod ROM onto my Nexus S; when I did I was pleasantly surprised by the inclusion of a fully-functioning Google Wallet app. I used it with the S’s on-board NFC chip to make my first contactless mobile phone payment, a fancy tea at a posh supermarket café. I’d like to believe it was the first such event in Canada; it probably wasn’t but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

At the end of that month my girlfriend and I visited Hong Kong (my 6th trip there!) to ring in 2013. While Samsung’s wide-bodied Galaxy Note was all the rage there, I was on the hunt for the “it” phone of the moment back in the Americas, the Galaxy Nexus. I felt confident buying it overseas because this third Nexus had a pentaband radio, meaning that I could enjoy 3G data speeds on any carrier anywhere in the world. It was also free of any carrier locks. Unfortunately it cost more in Hong Kong than on the Bell network back in Canada.

The Galaxy Nexus eventually got a wider release here, and I got mine on a subsidy from WIND Mobile in the spring. WIND is another upstart Canadian carrier, offering unlimited calls, texts and data at prices much lower than the incumbents. I had switched to them from Mobilicity before Christmas, when they ran a holiday promotion. WIND has proven to be much better in terms of coverage for me — for the first time since I was with Fido I could actually make phone calls from inside my home… What an age we live in!

This third Nexus was both new and familiar at the same time. There was the curved glass, plus a new version of Android — another hallmark of the Nexus line. I wasn’t really sold on the HD screen and dual-core processor at first; both seemed unnecessary, frivolous even. But over the ensuing months I came to appreciate my Galaxy Nexus as a mobile gaming powerhouse — maybe not the most noble use of bleeding edge technology, but a lot of fun nonetheless.

My trio of Nexus phones accompanied my girlfriend and I to Barcelona in the spring of 2012 — the Nexus One in her back pocket, the Nexus S in mine and the Galaxy Nexus tucked away in the hotel safe. We received lots of advance warnings about pickpockets and such but I needn’t have worried — the Nexus S was (and is) a perfectly usable phone, anyway. I finally convinced my girlfriend to accept it as her next hand-me-down this past September. I took back my Nexus One, which I’m currently using to explore free/libre software from the F-Droid repository. The Galaxy Nexus is to this day my side arm of choice, and will likely remain so until the next Nexus is announced.

If I was second-guessing my switch to Android I had no such regrets about my new carrier, Mobilicity. Yes, there was the small issue of having no signal at home, but the cheap and unlimited service that worked great everywhere else more than made up for that. And their selection of handsets couldn’t be beat — they were the only carrier in English-speaking Canada to sell the Nexus One, and the only one in North America to offer the MotoSpice. Then they trumped both, releasing a device that was both new and familiar at the same time, right when I needed it most. At a hundred and fifty bucks the Nokia E73 was a no-brainer for me.

It was all very comforting, at first. I still had the installer files for my favourite Symbian apps, plus licenses for the paid ones. I spent an evening getting everything on the phone organized into folders and shortcuts, as I had done with Nokias of days gone by. I even gained a modicum of respect for the infamous Nokia Messaging. It seemed to work a bit better on my E73 than on my N86 — the secret was to respect the low memory on the handset by loading only the last few emails from each of my two accounts of the day. Not optimal by any means, but functional at least.

I took my E73 with me to a WOM World event held on a ranch in Western Canada that summer. The journey there and back reminded me of just how dated Nokia’s PDA phone OS was. With Symbian the handset was offline by default; specific steps were required by the user to take it online. Android devices were very different; they assumed a persistent connection to not just the network, but to the Internet as well. With unlimited data available in major Canadian cities, guess which one was more useful?

It had become all too clear that there would be no future for Nokia and I. Their new CEO — Stephen Elop, a Canadian of all things (!) — had announced earlier in the year that future high-end devices would run Windows. I had stopped using Windows long ago; for me it was Linux or nothing. Nokia did have Maemo, a Linux-based tablet OS that eventually made its way onto phones. I had trialled the Maemo-powered N900 the previous spring and quite liked it. But its successor, the MeeGo-powered N9, was never widely available and pretty much doomed from the get-go.

I brought both my E73 and N86 along with me on a Kenyan safari that autumn, where granular control over network charges and a local SIM card served me well. When I got home I retired both and moved on to Android full time.

A lot had changed in the four years since I had last used my Fido hiptop2 full-time. The biggest news was that Danger, the company behind the hiptop/Sidekick line and responsible for its back-end servers, had been bought up by Microsoft. As the hiptop’s cloud sync solution was a competitor to Microsoft’s Outlook Web Access, the hiptop servers were quickly shut down.

This might explain how Mobilicity was able to procure an untold number of second-generation Sidekick LX devices and sell them with its own custom firmware. Unlike my hiptop2 there was no web login for the Mobiflip, nor was the prescient app store anywhere to be found on the device. There was the excellent Opera Mini web browser and a third installment of the bouncing ball game “Bob”, but that was about it.

I knew all of this going in, of course, and could really only justify my hundred-dollar Mobiflip purchase as a curiosity for what could have been. I brought it along with me to a Mobilicity event, hosted by Howard Chui of HowardForums fame. When I plopped it on a table it was greeted with a round of derisive laughter from the other bloggers in attendance. Clearly the hiptop’s day had come and gone.

Its legacy lives on, however. On-device app stores are now, as we know, de rigueur for any device that calls itself a smartphone. And if you didn’t know, Andy Rubin — co-founder and CEO of Danger, Inc. — was also a driving force behind Android in its early days. He remains in charge of the platform at Google, which can only be a good thing.

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.

The complaints I read about Symbian were not lost on me. For the first time I was experiencing a mobile web browser that was actually usable. Not only did full web pages load in a matter of seconds, but double-tapping the screen would “zoom in” to fit the width of a single column of text. And the manual synchronization of personal info — calendars, contacts, tasks — was no longer necessary; an Android phone would do it in the background for you. In fact, setting up an Android phone (or several, as I’d later find out) required no more than a network connection and a Gmail account. As I held this slim block of mostly screen in my hands, I could only marvel at what I’d been missing.

For this particular smartphone veteran Android did have a shortcoming or two, along with a possible area of concern. Coming from my N86 photos and video on the Nexus were clearly not as good, although that was almost entirely offset by something no Nokia camera app would ever remember — that I hated flash photography and wanted my phone’s camera to fire up with the flash powered off. On the subject of power, battery life was fairly abysmal for someone used to going up to three days on a single charge. I’d thank my lucky stars if my Nexus lasted until sundown, especially if I was travelling. And then there was Google — or more specifically the requirement that I hand over pretty much all of my personal information to them. I’m still not a hundred percent comfortable with that.

You could argue, of course, that what you got in return for the data mining was a bargain — and for a lot of Android users I suspect that’s true. But what finally sold me on this new OS was learning how I could take Google out of the equation entirely yet still use Android, through the magic of custom ROMs. The hard part was getting started. The Nexus One was sold with an unlockable bootloader, like the BIOS on a Windows-based PC. By unlocking it you could flash a custom recovery image, and in turn use that to flash a custom ROM. But unlocking the bootloader required no less than a desktop computer, the Android software development kit, the Android Debug Bridge (adb), and something called fastboot.

If all this sounds confusing believe me, it was. But patience and the seemingly endless cross-referencing of forum threads finally paid off, and a universe of custom ROMs was now just a wipe and install away. My Android handset, powered by the Linux kernel, was as customizable as my Linux desktop computers. From this point onwards, nothing less would do.

King of the Android ROMs was CyanogenMod, which was famously ordered to unbundle the “Google Experience” — that is, the proprietary Google apps. FDroid, an alternative app market featuring only open source software, proved to be a worthy substitute for the official Android Market. Much of what is available there is excellent, but my freedom-hating reliance on the proprietary stuff — Flickr, Foursquare, games — had me using Google’s Market again before too long. Remember too that my new carrier, affordable as it was, provided almost no signal in my home. As such, Google’s chat service was a lifeline between me and a new lady in my life.

When I moved on to my second Nexus device my girlfriend got my Nexus One as a hand-me-down, which she uses to this very day. Her custom ROM of choice is MIUI, made available to the public by Chinese handset-maker Xiaomi. A big draw for MIUI is its themes — you can easily customize not only the wallpaper on your device but also the app icons, on-screen fonts, even the boot-up screen. But there’s more to it than that — MIUI has its own built-in backup and restore system, plus an excellent security feature giving you control over the sometimes suspicious permissions that apps can request.

If nothing thus far has sold you on the Nexus line of superphones, consider this final point: Google quietly revolutionized the mobile phone industry where Apple deliberately chose not to. The first three Nexus devices were sold through carriers just like the iPhone; but very much unlike the iPhone they were sold unlocked. My Nexus One has been to Malaysia, Hong Kong and Spain, and in each of those places expensive roaming charges were replaced with affordable service via a local SIM card. As you can imagine this is not a feature that carriers go to great lengths to explain, nor is it something that many customers appreciate or even understand. But it’s there, and like my Nokias of old it made my $500 CAD Nexus One a bargain.

That November I boarded an overnight flight to London, the first leg of yet another once-in-a-lifetime trip that would take me onwards to Bangkok, Singapore, Taipei and Tokyo.

I was met the next morning in Piccadilly Circus by Tom Hall of WOM World, who graciously gave up his Sunday to give me a personal tour of London and loan me a Nokia for the destinations that lay ahead. Over brunch an N900 and N97 mini appeared on the table, plus a handset that was earmarked for me: the N86. Truth be told I was initially more drawn to the N900, being a desktop Linux user and all. But the N86 quickly proved to be the better choice — in fact, its camera was so good that my standalone point-and-shoot didn’t leave my suitcase for the next two weeks.

In Bangkok I took spectacular photos of the gold and purple Grand Palace and documented my first-ever tuk-tuk ride on video. I was also lucky enough to catch Al Pavangkanan, whom I’d met that summer on the N97 24/7 tour. Thanks to him I got to see Bangkok’s two famous IT malls, Pantip Plaza and MBK Center.

In Singapore I documented my first-ever durian fruit and a sunset view of the city skyline aboard the Singapore Flyer. I also got stood up by someone I was supposed to meet there. But I’m over it, really. More importantly, I snagged a local SIM card with unlimited data — a good thing, because by my fourth day abroad I had already burned through a two-week data roaming package from my carrier back home.

In Taipei I scored another local SIM, and kind of went insane with Qik, the live streaming video app that I first used on my E71. I kept it running over an entire breakfast in my hotel’s restaurant (much to the horror of the other guests there, I’m sure) and streamed an end-to-end walk-through of a night market. I’m pretty sure this is what would eventually win me that white N97 from the company.

In Tokyo there was sadly no option for local unlimited data. I spent about half an hour in a DoCoMo service centre before giving up and walking out, having come to the conclusion that the staff there were too afraid to talk to me. I also had a moment with one of the N86’s few shortcomings, Nokia Messaging. Nokia used to have a regular email client that worked great. Nokia Messaging was their “improved” next-generation email experience, designed to mimic the push email you could get on a BlackBerry. But this was no BlackBerry — quite possibly due to the low amount of RAM, Nokia Messaging on the N86 was crap. Deep within the bowels of Shibuya station I spent what seemed like an eternity struggling to find an email with directions to a dinner engagement; then I remembered that I could find that same message using a free email-over-WAP service.

Despite that little hiccup I ordered an N86 to call my own almost as soon as I got back to Toronto. The next spring it would accompany me on a visit to Moscow and a high school friend-turned-diplomat. That summer I got invited on another WOM World tour, this one promoting the N97mini to Canada. In a tricked-out recreational vehicle from Montreal to Toronto I got to hang with a Mr. James Whatley, whose 2009 bungee-jump over Victoria Falls with an N86 strapped to his wrist had first piqued my interest in this device.

The swan song for my N86 was a Kenyan safari in September of 2011. I had been to Mother Africa twice before and knew how popular Nokia phones were there. But I was caught completely off-guard by the presence of Android devices, at least in Nairobi. Every local carrier had not just one but an entire selection, from the cheap and cheerful to the high-powered and high-end. Kind of ironic considering I had left my Android phone at home and brought the N86 just for this trip.

That’s right, this unabashed Nokia fanboy was now a full-time Android user.

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 October of 2008 I had trialled a variety of smartphones from Nokia’s WOM World. The N82, N95 (8 GB version) and E90 had all come and gone. All of them were fine devices, but not a one threatened an early retirement for my E61i. The E71 was a different story, being the official update from Nokia and all. It was smaller, yet had the same screen resolution and a better qwerty keypad. The camera had autofocus and a flash, and best of all there was a version with 3G data service tuned for the Americas. The lanyard loop sealed the deal.

3G data became a lot more useful when Fido, my carrier, started selling Apple’s iPhone 3G — and offered a 6 GB/month data package for $30 CAD. It was still a rip-off, to be sure, but at least it was better than the 3 megabytes I was getting for $25 just two years prior. It was around this time that I started using an app called Qik to stream video from my E71. The results weren’t stellar, but it bears repeating: in 2008 I was streaming live video to the Internet from my mobile phone.

Another S60 innovation was an app called JoikuSpot, which enabled my E71 to broadcast access to my cellular data via WiFi . Such things are taken for granted today, but in 2008 the idea of tethering your phone to a laptop instead of using an expensive hotel Internet connection was the stuff of magic. Only problem was that JoikuSpot, even the paid premium version, was a bit finicky about providing a stable connection. But the idea was bang-on, even if the execution was sometimes lacking.

My E71’s star turn was a week in Hong Kong to ring in 2009. I booked that trip in August of 2008; students of economic history will recall how the global economy kind of went to shit the following month. Despite the doom and gloom I resolved to enjoy myself, and my biggest indulgence by far for that trip was the data roaming fees. I made a pilgrimage to the local Nokia Flagship Store, where I tried the new flagship N96 for the very first time. I would end up trialling that device from WOM World the following month, but it wouldn’t woo me away from my E71.

Truth be told, my most vivid memory of this vacation had nothing to do with the phone. Someone at my hotel had pegged me as some kind of patsy, and sent no less than five, shall we say, “working girls” to my room over the course of an afternoon. Serves me right for blogging instead of taking in the sights, I guess.

My E71 came along on another, more fateful trip in the summer of 2009, one that would put it out of the spotlight and pretty much change my life forever…

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.