I’ve owned a Nokia N95. Notice the keyword in that sentence, owned. I owned an N95 for around 3 weeks, before selling it on Ebay; thank goodness for Ebay.

 For 10 years I was a Nokia owner and thought I would never switch to anything else. However, over the last 3 years I’ve owned 3 Blackberry’s, the current one being the 8800 and I have been so impressed with every single one of them. Am I likely to change to anything else? Probably not after my experience with the N95. Or, at least the only thing I can see myself switching to is the iPhone, but that’s not going to be at least until V2 arrives.

Why would I switch away from the Blackberry? Purely convenience; being able to carry one device instead of two, plus, to be honest I really like the interface. Of course, by the time V2 of the iPhone comes out who knows what’ll be on the market, but based on my experience with the N95 I’d be really reluctant to go anywhere apart from Blackberry or Apple.

I live in an area of the UK where the only way I can get a mobile signal is to climb the stairs to the top floor, hop-out the window onto the ledge, shimmy up the roof slates and climb onto the chimney pots. This can get a bit scary when it’s wet or really frustrating if the weather’s great, because sometimes you find you need the step ladder to get a little further up in the sky, or it can get a little smokey if the fire is going! And sometmes, just sometimes it’s really annoying if the person you are trying to call is not in. Thankfully we have a landline as well.

What was so bad about the N95? To sum it up, “The experience”. One of the reasons I was attracted to the N95 was because it has Wi-Fi on board, which I could see being really useful. Don’t get me wrong I am well aware of the power drain Wi-Fi units can have on battery power. We’ve been a wi-fi family for 8 years now. The attraction would have been to occassionaly check email from the living room - maybe once or twice a day, avoiding the drudge of going upstairs to the PC.

Of course then there was the promise of GPS, but that always took 20 minutes to lock itself on to a satellite. I don’t care what the manual said - the first time will take a while, but from there on will be a lot quicker. That’s rubbish, it always took too long! The 5 Megapixel camera? Not that great. I have a fully functional 2 Megapixel camera, which always, but always gave better quality pictures than the N95. The actual feel of the machine gradually deteriorated as well. Initially it felt like a well built device, but after only a few days the slide mechanism was a lot more fluid than at first, which resulted in there being lateral as well as vertical movement. This makes the device feel a lot more flimsy. The fact is the N95 was shoddy and it’s impression is lasting.

There’s an old saying, “You only get once chance to make a first impression”. It’s true. Despite my prior long-term allegance to Nokia I am in no way inspired to go near a Nokia again! The N95 didn’t live up to it’s promise, the impression it has made is certainly lasting and the arrival of it’s latest incarnation doesn’t inspire me to “give it a go”. I’ll simply walk the other way. I’ll stick to my Blackberry, which doesn’t have a camera built into it or Wi-Fi. I’ll continue to climb the chimney pots, because at least I have the confidence the Blackberry does what it does really well. It’s reliable, predicatable and battery-life is outstanding! I’m tempted by the iPhone because it brings two devices into one and I have confidence the result will be someting that lives up to it’s bragging.

In this service-driven day and age, the argument isn’t about form or function, but about experience. It’s fair to say Blackberry and Nokia have both given me memorable experiences, only one of which I want to repeat. However, let’s keep this in perspective, we are talking about a mobile phone here. Life does go on.