While I'm keenly interested in where mobile phone technology is going, I've never been much for living on the cutting edge of new and expensive phones.  I originally wrote Hecl for the humble Nokia 3100, and got a Nokia 6210 classic a few years ago.

For the first time in… probably something like 10 years, I got something that wasn't a Nokia: a new Samsung phone with Android.  I find it interesting because my own, small purchase appears to very closely mirror a broader trend in the market.

Since more or less the day it came out, Android jumped out at me as the place to be for an open source guy like me, and indeed, I'm quite happy with the phone, even though it's towards the low end of the Android range.  It does everything I need though – music, GPS, photos, email, Kindle, etc… etc….

To tell the truth, even though it's a cheaper phone (around 140 euros) than the Nokia, it does far more.  To some degree, that's of course to be expected, because the Nokia is at this point something like 3 years old, but going from the traditional rocker switch to a touch screen is really a night-and-day difference.  Many of you are probably saying "duh" at me and wondering what sort of luddite I am, but like I said, I started hacking on Android when it came out, but it took me a while to finally get one.

For a few things like making calls, the Nokia experience is in some ways still superior.  It's got 'call' buttons that you can hit and be talking to people in short order, but for most of the rest of the applications and software are just night and day better on the Android phone.  Gmail and Maps both strike me as something I could use more readily, rather than the hacky, slow Gmail that ships for Symbian.

And of course, with a slightly bigger screen, the web is also a bit better.

More than anything, it feels a lot more like a 'system' rather than a very, very solid core phone/sms system with some other junk bolted on.