Becoming a Phone Freak... Behind the Scenes

I would like to reflect a moment of my life where many people in my life have always asked me...

Why are you so obsessed with mobile phones and even PDA phones?

I can say it goes back to the days as a kid when you had cartoon heroes like Dick Tracy who had the super communicator watch or your gadget masters like Q from the James Bond 007 movie franchise. When laptops finally hit the market in a "fashionable" form, they were still big. Mobile phones just got big for consumers at this era and they were a little bare in features... I knew that mobile phones would get big with time and that maybe they would be a step to the "communicator of the future". It was something big that I was about to witness in my lifetime.

It wouldn't be until the GSM era that I would witness an explosion of improvements. You would quickly have music phones that could carry about a CD or two in the early days and now... you can carry up to 8GB of music on phones like the Nokia N-Series Internet Edition phones. The only thing that was hard to see evolve was the phone operating systems... because face it: early phone operating systems were rather inflexible, especially when lacking Java. Once the processors got faster, the operating systems got more advanced. Now, even your consumer phones have operating systems are very much like miniature computers on some aspects... But I digress.

I have tasted just about a lick of every phone brand you can name out there as far as GSM goes. I have not, however played with a $1,000+ phone or owned one... simply from the price is too prohibitive of an expense for me. The most I have spent is (so far) $300, but since I have learned to play by means such as eBay (not so much anymore) and my local craigslist postings for "newer" phones rather than shelling tons of cash to a hardcore seller trying to make a shot for profit.

For the curious... here's my phone timeline for the curious:

Circa 2002 - Motorola V60 (under parent's contract)
October 2004 - Nokia 3120 (Unlocked by myself)
October 2005 - Motorola RAZR V3 Black (Unlocked by Cingular)
January 2006 - Motorola SLVR L6 (Unlocked and hacked to quadband)
April 2006 - Motorola MPx220 Windows Mobile smartphone (unlocked)
May 2006 - Sony Ericsson T637 (Cingular locked)
June 2006 - Motorola SLVR L7 (Unbranded, unlocked, no iTunes)
October 2006 - T-Mobile MDA (Unlocked and custom hacked with super firmwares by myself)
January 2007 - Nokia E62 (Crippled and locked by Cingular)
July 2007 - Palm Treo 680 (Unlocked by Cingular/AT&T, updated with newest firmware)
October 2007 - Sony Ericsson P990i (unlocked smartphone) and W300i (AT&T locked music flip-phone)

I think I have found my niche with Sony Ericsson as far as phones go... just I hope phones continue to evolve and push the envelope on innovations. I loved just about every phone I have owned... but on some of the phones I had the most issues with were the Motorola phones ironically. Though Sony Ericsson's latest approach of form with function has been pretty slick... Their new phones have great looking shapes and even interesting functionality... The thing I am most in admiration is their team project with Fossil for the Bluetooth watches.

Check out their promotional page for their new watches here: Sony Ericsson presents "TimeMasters 3"