But by the summer of 1999 hope had arrived in the form of some new carriers. One of them was a company called clearNET. Like Bell their service ran on a digital PCS network; very much unlike Bell their pricing was easy to understand, and their plans generally cheaper. The trade-off was that clearNET’s service was confined to urban areas; to get a signal out in the country you had to “roam” on Bell or Rogers, at extra cost. For me a mobile phone was still a luxury, so this wasn’t an issue. And I spent most of my time in downtown Toronto, anyway… I was a hipster before hipsters were cool.

And so this mobile hipster became one of the early adopters of clearNET. I wasn’t alone, by any means; many of my friends and colleagues signed up with clearNET as well — thanks in no small part to their effective marketing. clearNET’s motto, “the future is friendly”, was a direct jab at the obfuscation practised by Bell and Rogers. Too many people would unwittingly walk into a Bell or Rogers Wireless store looking for a cheap cell phone and somehow walk out with a multi-year contract and a handset they didn’t want. Not so with clearNET.

Another clever clearNET idea was selling generic accessories with their own branding. An acquaintance of mine (who went on to star in a hit Broadway show) had a speaker phone for his car powered by the cigarette lighter jack. Though it was made of cheap plastic and sounded fairly tinny it had a very obvious clearNET logo on it, and I therefore wanted one.

My clearNET phone was a Nokia 6188, very similar to the 6185 I had used on Bell immediately prior. The big difference was the colour of the housing — whereas the 6185 was a morose grey my 6188 came in a funky sharkskin green. The only problem with this was that the surface was prone to scratches when dropped or even put into a pocket with keys. Fortunately for me clearNET had an extremely liberal return policy that allowed a customer to exchange any handset for a new one within 15 days of purchase, no questions asked. I abused this policy big-time, burning through at least three ever-so-slightly-scratched 6188s before finally succumbing and buying a protective pouch — a clearNET-branded one, of course.

In the year 2000 clearNET was bought up by Telus, a company from Western Canada. But I had already moved on to another upstart carrier, one that ran on an entirely different digital network from Europe. It proved to be a good choice; I stuck with them for the next ten years…

Here’s the clearNET version of the 6188 in all its sharkskin green glory, courtesy of the Nokia Museum.

There’s still a review of it online, from the first mobile phone blog that I ever followed — Steve Punter’s Southern Ontario Cell Phone Page. It was a phone so nice he reviewed it, twice.

There was certainly nothing wrong with the hardware. It was my second Nokia, the 6185, in a business grey housing instead of whimsical blue. It also used a fancy new digital cellular network called PCS. In practical terms this meant that the screen (now LCD instead of LED) was now exponentially more useful because the phone supported call display. Yay, progress! Unfortunately a service bundle offered by my carrier ruined everything. I should have known that Bell couldn’t possibly deliver what they promised, a quantum leap forward in mobile technology that would put the power of the Internet in my hands, wherever I happened to be. It was — brace yourself… email on my mobile phone.

It was supposed to work like this: I’d log in to my Bell account on a desktop computer, and enter details for the email address I wanted to connect to my phone. I’m pretty sure the service only supported a single email address but remember, this was bleeding edge technology for the time. BlackBerry had launched their very first email device earlier in the year but I had never heard of it… Anyway, once the connection was set up my email would be forwarded in real time to my mobile phone. Even better, I could email replies — again, in real time. This was all made possible by some obscure mobile telephony standard from Europe called SMS, but I cared not for such trivial details… Email on my phone! How cool is that?!!

On the morning of my departure for Montreal I dutifully logged in to Bell Mobility’s website and entered the details of my Sympatico email address. Sympatico was the home Internet service offered by Bell Canada — come to think of it, I think Bell’s mobile email service only worked with a Sympatico account. Go figure. Back to the story… With everything set up I powered down my computer for the weekend and my girlfriend and I headed down to Union Station to catch our train, where I would surely use the next six hours in a productivity coup — sending and receiving emails like a boss and generally being the envy of everyone else on-board.

Instead, I spent the afternoon-long journey looking at a blank screen.

At the Bell in Montreal there was much furrowing of brows and scratching of heads. The staff were obliged to offer support, but I got the distinct feeling that this bleeding-edge technology was as new for them as it was for me. To their credit they finally got it working — intermittently, at least — and then the promise of email on the go was met with the unfortunate reality of a small screen that could, at best, display six lines of text. Worse, because of the 160-character limit of this SMS technology even a short email had to be broken up into five or six separate messages. It took the first two or three just to spit out the sender and subject!

Immediately upon my return to Toronto I proceeded immediately to the store where I’d purchased my “smartphone”, slammed it down on the counter and demanded an immediate refund. The experience was so frustrating that it moved me to write my first-ever blog post on the Internet, wherein I vowed to never again be wooed by the empty promise of new technology. In a blog post. On the Internet. I was doomed.

I owned a Bell version of Nokia’s 6185 for exactly one weekend. It was technically my first smartphone, and nothing that it was supposed to do actually worked. The experience was so bad that I blogged about it.

You can read another review lumping the 6185 and 6188 together on this popular mobile phone review site of the day.