gdgt

I confess I am a gadget guy, I bought a Handspring Visor when it came out and bought every module I could. The camera, the GPS, and the Visor Phone. It was my main phone for a long time. It was great you had a favorite list you could call with only one click. When I first heard of the N-Gage I laughed. Nokia was stupid, it wouldn't understand the portable gaming market. It made a phone that doesn't look like a phone, you have to hold it in a stupid position to talk and all that for what? to be able to play some games in a tiny screen... Great Nokia! But then picture this, my Visor phone started showing signs of wear, falling on the floor wasn't good for it. The antenna had detached and it was harder and harder to put it so it could get a signal. I was entering a mall in Boca Raton when my Visor Phone fell for the last time. The metal piece in the antenna had detached, I was phoneless for the remaining of my trip, unless I could find an unlocked phone on the mall.

I started looking at T-Mobile, but their phones where all locked. Pity because an Ericsson T610 costed about half the price of the unlocked version in the electronics store. And still it was 400$! The guy in GameStop told me the N-Gage would work, he even let me try my foreign Sim into his own personal N-Gage and it worked. It cost only 200$ (minus a100$ mail-in rebate). I thought I would buy it, use it while on the trip, and resell it back in my country. I could even make some money.

Ah! Symbian! I didn't know you then. I started using the phone, using bluetooth to sync my contacts with Mac OS X that was something else! You could get a notice of a call and answer it through an SMS written in the computer. Is it possible to do that now? The phone was fast, had a browser that kind of worked. Had a music player. I even played games!

Yes, talking was weird, so much so that I was afraid a policeman would stop me while I was walking on the streets while talking to a Taco. The games were ridiculously expensive, hard to find, and not very good. Having to turn off the phone and remove the battery to play another game or to put a memory card was... well, very dumb. The phone also had the "problems with falling" issues of all my other phones. When it stopped charging I moved on to a 7610, but since it had the same battery I kept a battery charged for my N-Gage and turned it on frequently. I still have it and I feel happy every time I turn it on and see the two hands getting together and my games, my music, my contacts from years ago still intact.

This was the phone that made me into a cell phone freak. I love different phones, I love how different cell Operating Systems do things different, how is not everything uniform and septic like in the Operating System for computers. Change is good, different is interesting. I owned several more Symbian phones: The 6600 that my wife kept, the 7610 mentioned above, N80, N82, N95, all pretty good, but none of them fell as thrilling as my little N-Gage.

They finally screw it up with the QD. The change of frequencies and the raise in price was too much for a phone that basically solved the original stupidity. Nokia has no chance with the N-Gage. Neither the phone, nor the new service have a chance of succeeding. I just wished Nokia made phones today as advance and as risque as that original N-Gage I learned to love.