"The best phone/PDA I ever owned"

[spblat]

If you hate dumb trivial threads, move on please.

Still here? Good. Consider every mobile phone and/or PDA you ever personally owned and used. Place it in one of two categories.

• Category one: at the time you owned it, you would have agreed with the statement "this is the best phone/PDA I have ever owned." Category 1 devices are/were satisfying to use and have few if any annoyances. Remember to judge the devices according to your expectations back then, not with hindsight.
• Category two: at the time you owned it, you didn't especially enjoy it for any number of objective or subjective reasons.

Now please list all of your category one mobile devices. Optionally share notable devices that left you disappointed for whatever reason.

I'll go first.

Category 1 (remember, each of these was for me "the best ever" at the time I owned them):

iPhone 4
iPhone 3G
Blackberry Curve
Blackberry 8700
Color Sidekick
Palm V
Pilot 1000

Category 2:

Blackberry 7100
HP iPAQ
Apple Newton Messagepad
Sharp Wizard

 

[yg17]

Category 1: Nexus One, Blackberry Pearl, Blackberry Curve
Category 2: Some Windows Mobile PDA that I had a few years ago, I forgot the model

The iPhone 3G falls somewhere in between. Not the best phone I owned, not the worst, not anything I regret buying. I'm just glad I moved on to something else after owning that for almost 2 years.

 

[*LTD*]

Category 1:

Nazareno Gabrielli "Memory" PDA (1989-90)
iPhone 3G
iPhone 4

Category 2:

Casio BOSS SF-6700S&
Palm something-or-other
Motorola V551

 

[runplaysleeprun]

Category 1: original iPhone, handspring pro w/ cell phone attachment.
Cat 2: palm pilot.

 

[mscriv]

Category 1: Palm 755p (currently using), Palm Tungsten T3,

Category 2: Palm m500

 

[maflynn]

1. Psion Series 3c, Nexus One, Droid X

2. Blackberry 8700c

 

[Stella]

1. Psion 5
2. Some ancient Sony ( pre-SE ) phone

 

[ChazUK]

Category 1:
Nexus One (currently own)
Dell Streak (currently own)
iPod Touch 32GB (currently own)
HTC Hero
iPhone 3G
Nokia N95
O2 XDA II (Qtek 2020i)
Nokia 3210
Ericsson GH628

Category 2:
HTC Wizard
Nokia 5800

I pretty much research the hell out of any devices I get and normally enjoy their use.

 

[notjustjay]

At one point it was the Sharp SE-500 mobile organizer.

Then I really liked the Handspring Visor.

Then I had a couple of Sony CLIE's.

 

[aethelbert]

1. Sony Clié TH55, original iPhone, Palm Pre Plus
2. Palm V, x51v, Nokia N800

 

[kdarling]

Perhaps the answers need a category in the middle

There are devices that I did not consider "the best", but still enjoyed using.

For example, I liked a PN-820 smartphone because I needed a clamshell and it worked well. But there's no way I'd call it the "best" device at the time. Far from it.

Fond memory: wirelessly surfing the web on a 640x200 pixel HP Jornada 720 back in 2000 over CDPD at 19Kbps... using IE 4 under Windows CE.

Since most websites were built for IE4 and 640 width at the time, it was as close to the "real internet" that you could get on a mobile back then. Rarely even had to scroll sideways.

 

[sysiphus]

Only really have Cat. 1 answers for you:

Nokia E90 & NEC MobilePro 780