flashback, part 53 of n

In January 2006, I scooped up a SonyEricsson Z520.  It was part and parcel of migrating my work-provided phone from the old AT&T Wireless to Cingular, and the Z520 had a lot of things going for it.  It had the SonyEricsson UI, which was the best-of-breed at the time.  It had a loop antenna, so nothing to snag in pockets.  It was compact enough to go in the change pocket of my jeans, it featured Bluetooth and speakerphone both, and it was purported to have greatly improved battery life.  And despite the fact that my personal phone was the aforementioned V635, I was drawn to this one – sure it didn’t have a megapixel camera or EDGE speed, but neither did it have the Motorola problem of the side buttons constantly blipping in your pocket to change the ringer settings unexpectedly.

The funny thing is, within a month at least three of my co-workers had ordered a Z520 for themselves.  Its performance on GPRS was better than the V635’s on EDGE, so looking up scores and things was perfectly viable, and it worked well with iSync on the Mac, so you could actually use it to sort of keep your contacts and calendar.  And the battery life turned out to be around four days in normal usage.  I used the phone for text messaging, for the occasional call, for my alarm clock every morning, and essentially never had to worry about the battery.

It didn’t hurt that the SonyEricsson UI had a very easy-to-use implementation of themes.  I spent many a night downloading piles of themes for the phone, most frequently related to some sort of Euro soccer team.  Tons of Celtic themes, of course, along with Newcastle and Spurs and Chelsea as I cast about looking for a squad to call my own in the Premiership. 

I ordered other phones, of course – there was a Moto L2 which I got in a vain attempt to get a signal at the desk in my new office, and some sort of Nokia flip that I got out of desperation in spring 2007 – but apart from the brief loan of a co-worker’s SonyEricsson W800i to test out the camera (which was much better as it turns out and a damn good phone all around), that Z520 was my daily carry phone for a year and a half…until the coming of the iPhone.

It dropped five years ago today, although I didn’t get mine for about a month – the 8GB model given to every employee happened at the end of July – but that was the end of my phone glee.  I’ve gotten other phones since, but the only phone other than an iPhone that I have spent money on since that day was a $20 Nokia 1112 as a backup piece and nostalgia device.  (I did get a MOTOFONE F3 as a Christmas present in 2007 and was briefly issued a Blackberry Bold when I started this job, but the Bold lasted less than two months before I dumped it in favor of a stipend for using my own phone.)

It’s hard to oversell what an amazing thing that iPhone was in 2007.  It was unlike anything else out there – just a slab of glass and steel that responded to your touch and had all sorts of bells and whistles, not to mention a legit browser and email client.  There were no apps back then, and even web apps were a bit sketch – you couldn’t even bookmark them on the phone’s “desktop”.  But it was pretty clear from day one that I might never want to carry anything else, and from that day, the phone obsession has dwindled to pretty much nothing.

Meanwhile, that Z520 was my travel phone in Europe in 2007 and 2010, and has kept my UK phone number alive for over 7 years now.  Sadly, it’s beginning to flake out a little bit, and I suspect that its days are numbered; the unlocked iPhone 4S will almost certainly be the travel device from now on.  But I’m going to keep the Z520 as a pleasant reminder of an old hobby of younger days…

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