USA – I met Phil Schwarzmann a few years ago in Madrid at the S60 Summit and have been a big fan of his work at Nokia. Phil asked if I wanted to put together a post listing my favorite three Nokia devices. I started using Nokia S60 smartphones with my free Nokia 3650 back in 2001 and then when I was invited to participate in the Nokia Nseries Blogger Relations program in 2005 my usage and adoption of Nokia smartphones took off and Nokia created a monster who just couldn’t get enough of these devices. I have owned or used extensively over 25 Nokia devices and thus choosing the top three took me a bit of time. I know we get the latest and greatest devices and think they are the best most of the time, but I tried thinking back to my entire history to see which devices excited me the most and truly were the most useful and enjoyable to me at the time. I could easily pick 10 out of the 25+ I have used and say they were my favorite, but here is the top 3 for me.
Nokia E71
No matter how hard I try, I just can’t stop loving devices with hardware keyboards and the E71 is arguably the BEST front facing QWERTY device on the market. The stainless steel casing and super slim form factor is unbeatable and anyone who holds this device will fall in love with the form factor. Nokia has the best notifications, shortcuts, and status updates available on the E71 standby/home screen and it has been an extremely useful and sexy device. My wife has finally started using a Symbian device and it took the E71 to have her try one out and she loves the form factor, durability (she is hard on phones), long battery life, call quality, and notifications. The one weakness we both find is the lack of threaded SMS that Nokia needs to get figured out soon.
Nokia N95-3
I was immediately impressed with the dual slider form factor, loud stereo speakers, and high quality camera on the N95 when it arrived through the Nseries Blogger Relations program. I then bought my own NAM N95 (the N95-3) to take advantage of the AT&T 3G network and couldn’t have been happier with a Nokia device. It was fast, the keypad was quite usable, and I enjoyed being able to capture high quality images and video anywhere I went.
Nokia N97 mini
I was very excited to purchase my first touch screen Nokia S60 device and jumped on the preorder offer for a Nokia N97. Overall, I was pretty happy with the device, but did not appreciate the low amount of RAM and thought the form factor was a bit chunky for a 2009 device. Nokia then sent me a Nokia N97 mini to try out and just a couple days later I sold my N97 so I could buy my own N97 mini. Even though the N97 mini has a smaller display and much less internal memory, the better keyboard design (more key travel and more useful directional arrows), much more solid and sleeker form factor, and latest operating system version sold me on this device and I LOVE the N97 mini and it is currently my FAVORITE device. There could be more RAM included to be just about perfect, but there is so much else I enjoy about the device (good camera, usable touch screen, small form factor, excellent keyboard, and awesome 3rd party app support) that I am completely happy at the moment.
The other devices that were almost picked as a top three were the Nokia N73 and Nokia N86 8MP. The N73 had a beautiful display, sleek form factor and took some great photos. The N86 8MP takes everything I loved about the N95 and made it better with a nicer form factor with more solid design, bright OLED display, and latest OS, but the N95 was a real game changer and impacted my life more at the time.
Matt Miller runs NokiaExperts.com