I’ve got a Nokia 7610. I like it. I use Cingular, and so far, I don’t hate them.
My phone runs the Symbian OS. It’s a Series 60 device. There are a whole lot of applications I can install on it. A whole bunch of applications.
I’ve installed a bunch of applications on my Nokia phone. I still manage to make and receive calls just fine, and I’m 99% sure I’ve never disrupted the Cingular network in any noticeable way. If an application I’ve installed misbehaves I usually just delete it. There is at least one app I use that doesn’t quit, and I use another utility to force it to quit. (Hmmm, my Mac does something similar with applications that get stuck.) There is one game I installed that froze my phone so bad, I had to remove the battery to reset it, Luckily, removing the battery was very easy, and I don’t use that application anymore. Besides those two bad app(les) they other two dozen applications I’ve installed work just fine.
Just fine…. Just like almost all the other phones out there that people have installed applications on.
I didn’t just randomly pick this phone, I got a Nokia phone so I could take photos, shoot video, record audio, and transfer the things I created to my computer under my control. I can create my own ringtones at no cost. I can sync the calendar with my desktop calendar (though I do need iCal in the loop to make it happen.) I can sync my contacts with my desktop contacts. Damn, it’s pretty good. Things work. I like my phone and how it works.
Nokia is a big believer in open source. I like open source. I like to use my phone (which is really a mobile computer) for all sorts of things Nokia and Cingular probably don’t care about. Have you seen the Nokia 770 or N800? Those are cool devices, very open to new applications and new ideas. All of the Nseries devices look interesting.
Remember, we still have choices, and we vote for those choices with our dollars and our words.
We’ve also had some weird permission problems. We’re a Mac-shop, and most of the files don’t really rely on having their unixy-permissions correct, but some do, like the files that go onto the web sites. A file on my Mac set to -rw-r–r– gets copied to the NSLU2 and is then set to -rwx——. This is bad bad bad! If we try to upload files directly to a web site, or even to our Macs, and then to a web site, they can’t be viewed, as the permissions are hosed.
