MY NOKIA 9500 is one of my longest-serving pieces of technology. It has survived five drops onto concrete, two major water spills and an unknown amount of abuse at the hands of several students during creative multimedia classes and while in the field as a mobile blogging device. Two of those students took the phone with them into austere operating locations in Kenya where it rang up thousands of euro worth of call charges. The phone served as an ultraportable computer and podcast recording device there in Africa and also during several runnings of the Schoolworks programme in Tipperary Institute. At an initial purchase price of €800 (discounted to €620 during a subsidised upgrade), the Nokia 9500 costs as much as a laptop today. However, it has outlived two laptops I have used during the same time period. Through its life, my Nokia 9500 has helped O2-Ireland notch up more than €10,000 of revenue, most of it for charges related to data services (texting and browsing). For that amount of data shock, I get double diamond upgrade status with my network. Unlike most of my friends, I like the form factor of the Nokia 9500 so I'm transitioning to the Nokia E90 for daily use now. I'm in the process of stripping most of the data from the phone and handing it over to American backpackers who will use it with a Cubic Telecom SIM in the States and in Ireland when they roam for free in Europe during the summer of 2008. I wish the phone had a better camera and I wish it used the Series 60 operating system because both of those capabilities would extend the phone's usefulness for another two years. It's a great phone for browsing the web while using wifi, it plays podcasts for me several times a day, and it can see videos through its Real Player. Unfortunately, its web browser crashes easily when it encounters a lot of Javascript and Ajax so I use the phone primarily for mobile-friendly sites and for browsing XML files served up as newsfeeds. Back in 2004, when I first started using the phone, I thought it would be a year or two before most of my colleagues figured out newsfeeds and reduced their tendency to click around to view websites. That hasn't happened where I work which means most of my colleagues would not like seeing the web through the small screen of the Nokia 9500. But it works for me and the phone is one of the reasons why I'm hardly seen viewing web pages placed at the front of web sites. It's simply more efficient to view the newsfeeds, as I've been doing nearly every day since 23rd of February 2004, when I first unpacked my Nokia 9500.
Previously -- "Nokia Communicator 9500" on 23 February 2004.
Common Questions about the phone -- "Nokia 9500 Items" on 15 April 2005.
Bonus Link: My 9500 photostream.
