My smartphone history goes back a bit and is difficult to rank so here it is in chronological order -
1. Sony Ericsson P800. Touchscreen, full internet browser, apps, music and video, email, multitasking, and a camera all in 2002. It’s rumoured that Steve Jobs had one of these at one point and was impressed with it. For all its rough edges and many limitations, this was the start of the whole smartphone dream for me. There were a few good third party apps available for the P800 but because of the limited niche market they were all horribly expensive - and, for the very same reason, pirated copies were very freely available.
2. Sony Ericsson P910. Really just a warmed over version of the P800 but in a much more business-like silver and gray case, and with a very awkward to use qwerty keyboard grafted onto the front flip - it was good at the time but in retrospect it’s obvious that having pioneered much in the P800, Sony Ericsson just didn’t have the resources or the flair needed to overcome the problems - and they saw the future of the smartphone purely as a business device, rather than something personal.
3. Sony Ericsson M600i. This used an all new version of the UIQ Symbian OS from the P800, and was smaller, lighter and faster, but designed mainly for email with a clever rocker style keyboard and no camera built in. Great to type on but again felt like SE were going down the wrong cul-de-sac. They all but gave up on UIQ after this (especially once the iphone hit).
4. HTC Tytn II. I was on the Vodafone network in the UK when the first iPhone was launched as an exclusive on O2. At that time I thought the iPhone was a joke as unlike the smartphones I’d been using up until that point, it didn’t support third party apps. I had no interest in getting one, but Vodafone were so spooked they did a great deal on this phone to keep me from jumping anyway. The HTC was a Windows Mobile device (the old WM, nothing to do with Windows Phone) and offered the wold on paper, with an autofocus 5mp camera on the back, a front camera for video calling, a full qwerty keyboard that slid out, GPS for sat nav, wifi, the works. Like other Windows Mobile devices of the time it ran a myriad of widely available (free and pirated) software, and was highly customisable through the use of homebrew ROMs etc. It also ran abominably and was a disaster to use as an actual phone.
5. Apple iPhone 3G. This was the first iPhone to launch with a proper App Store and support proper third party apps out of the box, doing away with my one big complaint, and it was cheaper to buy than the original iPhone too. It immediately blew me away with how quickly it ran, how polished the whole user experience was, how well it worked as a phone as well as a smart device, and the appstore was a real revelation - here for the first time was a huge collection of well made apps all available in one place, very easily installed using an app right there on the phone (not via a PC), and all available at very reasonable pocket money prices (due to the scale of the market for developers). No more need for pirates. Of course there were many flaws still (no copy and paste, no background third party apps, crappy camera etc) but this phone was a massive leap towards fully realising the smartphone dream.
6. iPhone 3GS. Not a big upgrade in many ways, but it did have an improved camera (with video and autofocus!) which felt important at the time as I was about to become a dad. This later became my wife’s first iPhone and fully converted her too.
7. iPhone 4S. I loved the size and feel of this phone at the time, as it was first really premium steel and glass phone I’d owned. The retina screen was awesome and meant I could never look at a 3G/3GS style screen again. Also the first iPhone to have Siri, which I swear worked better and more intelligently when it was first launched than it ever has since (I’m pretty sure they dumbed it down after that to keep the servers from crashing).
8. iPhone 5. Probably the upgrade I regretted the most and the last time I ever did a “year on year” update, as the 5S left it behind in many ways with both Touch ID and the 64 bit processor. The lighter, aluminium 5 felt cheaper after the 4S and the taller screen, while nice, looked a little odd at first.
9. iPhone 6S. Should have been a great phone and for the first year I absolutely loved it - bigger screen, faster performance, better camera, and Touch ID was a revelation. Unfortunately, just before the first year was up it started crashing randomly, and when I sent it into Apple for warranty repair they told me that the lightning port was damaged (despite it working perfectly) and I’d need to pay for out of warranty repair on that before they’d even look at the rest of it. I felt completely cheated by this and refused to pay, offloading the phone instead. Just days later, Apple announced a recall over a battery issue that was causing 6S’s to shut down and crash, just as mine had been doing - meaning they had known full well what the problem was with mine and had just been trying to avoid dealing with it (it was this battery issue that later caused them to intentionally slow down older phones in software).
10. iPhone SE. After hobbling along with my partner’s old 5S for several months after the 6S disaster, I picked up the first SE - essentially the 6S again but in the body of a 5S. Great phone as far as the power to weight ratio went.
11. iPhone XR. Absolutely fantastic, especially coming from the old SE design to a huge, full screen phone. I immediately loved Face ID and still do. I was also really impressed with the camera for the first time on an iphone - although it was only a single lens, it still managed a convincing portrait mode. Similarly this was the first iPhone to really impress me on battery life too.
12. iPhone 13 Pro. Really it goes without saying this is the best of the bunch, and I’d say this really does completely deliver and much more so on what the earlier smartphones promised. The OLED and pro-motion is amazing, the camera is amazing, the overall performance is amazing, it’s just the full package and beautifully realised.
