LONDON, England – Rushing out the door yesterday morning to catch a train (after my phone ran out of juice in the middle of the night, and the alarm failed to go off) I grabbed the nearest device I could find – my N95 – on the basis that when I last looked, it had some juice. Turned out it didn’t (I’d actually previously switched it off because the battery alarm was going off). But I’d been to a party the night before and so not of sound mind. Still, I managed to get a charge for the N95 so it became my phone for the day. In fact, I’ve not yet switched back.
Playing with the N95 (my original, from April ’07) made me think about it. It still feels nice and looks, in my opinion at least, pretty good. It’s a solid phone that hasn’t gone out of fashion. I defy anyone to disagree that the N95 was (and is) a ground-breaking device. One that pushed more boundaries than is reasonable, and that has spawned a festival of technologies that are now, as was predicted at launch, filtering down to mid-range models.
You can’t actually get the N95 any more in the UK, at least not in the bigger stores. So does that make it retro? Or a classic? Or simply forgotten? Die hard fans, I believe, will never forget it. How could they (we)? Anyway the N95 is too big a device not to have some kind of positive status.
So surely it’s either classic or retro. But I can’t decide which. Can you?
Photo by robadob