Every phone I've owned, 2009 to 2015: from Nokia fanboy to a Galaxy S6

So, a month back I posted “My only vice? GADGETS!” and welcomed a Samsung Galaxy S6 to the team. Three days later I was already shooting in manual mode on it and flexing the nerd stats in the caption: “#GalaxyS6 Manual mode | ISO: 64 | Shutter speed: 1/100 sec.” :P

Those who know me know I have been narrating my phones on Twitter and Facebook for six years now. This blog has reviews, launch posts and buying guides for a LOT of phones, but nowhere does it say which ones were actually in my pocket. So here it is, the full list, in order, with receipts. Let’s get it started!

2009: reviewing phones before I even had a blog

On 16 November 2009, I was 16, in Class 12, with preboards just a few weeks away. And what was I doing that evening? Posting four phone reviews to Twitter in about eight minutes! :P These were user reviews on FoneArena’s phone pages, and each tweet carried a snippet and a link back to the page.

• On the Nokia N73 Music Edition: “Best N series phone available till date under 20K, Camera quality is tooo good man”
• On the Motorola A810: “useless phone … selling for about Rs 4500 in Delhi”
• On the LG KP500: “bad os used and UI is pretty bad … it feels like a comical toy in hand !!”
• On the LG KU990 Viewty: “SmartPhone - No … in 18000 u can get urself a decent N series smartphone … look for Nokia XM 5800”

Notice something? Two of the four end up praising Nokia, and only one of them is actually about a Nokia. The Viewty review basically tells you to go buy an N series instead. Fanboy much? ;)

The N73 one I can vouch for. The N73 was my first phone, the one I carried in 2009 and right up until the Galaxy S2, and as recently as January 2014 I was tweeting “#ThoseWereTheDays when my Nokia N73 #Smartphone used to have the Best Camera 3.2MP #Carl #Zeiss optics !”

2010 to 2011: the Nokia years

On 20 February 2011, in my first year of engineering, I posted “yay! Got a new nokia E5 :-)”. The E5 was Nokia’s QWERTY messaging phone on Symbian, and strictly speaking it was my dad’s.

In July 2011 I had a Nokia E6 in my hands for a couple of days and wrote it up as “the last milestone of Symbian”. A couple of weeks later I was asking whether Nokia was dying. So yeah, even the fanboy could see where things were going.

The other big gadget of 2011 was an HP Pavilion dv6 with an i5, 4 GB of RAM and a 1 GB ATI Radeon, which I showed off on Facebook in October. That laptop is the reason my old Pentium 4 PC sat in a corner for years, until I revived it with LXLE this May.

2012: the Galaxy S2, the hard way

By December 2011 there was no Nokia on my shortlist. On 7 December I posted: “in the dilemma to choose from Htc Sensation, SGS2, Xperia Arc s ? :P :/ any suggestions pls ?” And on New Year’s Eve, “new phone” was right there on my list of things 2012 was going to bring.

The Galaxy S2 won, and I bought it in January. A 30k phone, and it came with a FIGHT. The box and the bill said GT-I9100, but the phone inside was the I9100G, a variant with a different chipset. The camera and the music player kept hanging, and it took me about six weeks of mails, calls and tweets at Samsung India before I got a sealed I9100 on 23 May 2012. Got a call that morning, rushed to Samsung’s Nehru Place office and had the replacement in my hand within an hour. The whole fight is written up here.

Same day, I was already downloading a custom ROM for it (“Pure Nexus ROm :D”), and by the 26th I was explaining to a friend why: “getting ics before it us released via custom rom, blocking adds from the phone, changing boot animation etc…”

The S2 on a custom ROM, the screenshot I tweeted on 26 May 2012.

Flashing wasn’t new to me though. That February I had put an early CyanogenMod 9 build on an LG Optimus One (not mine) and written a preview of it. But the S2 is where it turned into a proper habit. I ran Paranoid Android (a hybrid tablet-and-phone ROM) in dual boot on the Siyah kernel, undervolted for battery life, and spent a whole year as the ROM help desk for friends with the same phone. In May 2013, a year after the replacement, I was still bragging: “#IFeelRoyalWhen my friends are astonished how I am already running #Android #4.2.2 on my sgs2”. Samsung’s own updates stopped at 4.1.2. Just saying. :P

It also came along to my first developer events. On 9 May 2013 I took 43 photos at the Nokia Asha 501 launch on that S2.

Two things about 2012 are funny now. In June I got an offer to exchange my S2 for a Galaxy Note and asked my friends what they thought. The S2 stayed, but the Note kept coming back (you’ll see). And in May I had tweeted “I wud buy a nokia android with my eyes closed but it doesn’t exists”. Two years later Nokia made one, and I got it for FREE!

2014: the year it rained Lumias

By late 2013 I was a Windows Phone developer without a Windows Phone 8 handset. Ironic, right? On 26 December I asked Nokia on Twitter whether I should get a 1020 or a 1520. DVLUP, Nokia’s rewards programme for developers, ended up answering that for me.

Between January and August 2014 I collected a Lumia 625, a Lumia 620, a second 625, the Lumia 1520, three Lumia 520s, a green Nokia X Dual SIM (there’s my Nokia Android!) and a Lumia 1320. A Lumia 1020 also turned up at the end of March, outside the count, and a free Asha 310 had come in June 2013, before any of it. The DVLUP post has the full tally. Most of those were test devices. The one that really mattered was the 1520.

The Lumia 1520 out of its box. I collected it from Nokia’s Gurgaon office on 14 March 2014.

Six inches, 1080p, a Snapdragon 800 and a 20 MP PureView camera. What a beast! During Nokia’s #1520Reasons campaign I tweeted that the camera “is equivalent to all other #1519 reasons for buy #lumia1520”, and on 31 March I posted “Yeah baby..that’s my phone #lumia1520 #nokia #ftw” with “#fanboyism” in the p.s. so nobody could accuse me of hiding it. ;) The camera let you zoom into a shot after taking it, so OBVIOUSLY I pointed it at a screen and zoomed in until the pixels showed.

“Ever seen a pixel?” A zoomed-in 1520 shot, tweeted on 26 March 2014.

The 1520 also gave me my second warranty fight. A violet streak on the display in September, a screen swap, then ghost touches in November, which I wrote about at the time. It went to the Nokia care centre on 22 November 2014, the 1320 filled in for it, and the 1520 came back repaired in early January. It was still my daily driver this March, when I made the case for it in five reasons Windows Phone rocks.

That November thread has one line I keep thinking about: “I should have opted for @SamsungMobile Note :(”.

2015: a Nexus, an office iPhone and a three-way dilemma

The 1520 was still my daily driver in 2015, but it wasn’t the only phone I had to look after. There was an LG Nexus 5 in the mix too. It wasn’t mine: I had bought it for a friend around November 2014. On 6 May it turned up on the charger with its battery swollen and the back lifting off the frame, and since I was the one who had bought it, I was the one chasing LG for a replacement. SIX months old and under warranty! “The battery swell, its really scary. At one time, I thought it’s gonna blast.”

The Nexus 5 on 6 May 2015, swollen battery and all.

In March my office handed me a brand new iPhone 6 for testing the framework I am working on. My Facebook post that day: “When your office gives you a brand new iPhone 6 and you argue for an Android flagship like Note 4 maybe :/ :( #JustFanboyThings”. See? There’s that Note again. The iPhone stayed with me though, and a month in I wrote Living with the Apple iPhone 6 for 30 days. Short version: after the 200 g brick of a 1520 it was super easy to carry, but the 1520’s PureView camera had spoiled me.

The office iPhone 6, still around in November 2015.

That January a OnePlus One ownership review ran here as a guest post, written by someone I had passed my invite to. I never had a One myself.

By the summer I was shopping for my next Android flagship in public. On 28 July Motorola launched the new Moto X range and I posted: “Moto X Style looks gorgeous <3 It’s OnePlus Two v/s Moto X Style v/s Nexus 5 (2015) for me now.. :P” Next day I wrote Hello Moto!, and a day after that the OnePlus Two launch post went up here. Two weeks later Samsung announced the Galaxy Note 5 and I tweeted “The new king is here!” In October the blog ran five top 5 lists, one for every budget from Rs 10,000 to over Rs 40,000.

And I bought NONE of them. :P

Now: the Galaxy S6

On 5 November the Galaxy S6 joined the team. It wasn’t on my July shortlist, and nope, it still isn’t a Note. In the end it beat the OnePlus Two, the Moto X Style and the Nexus 5X on camera, display and build quality. The camera already has me shooting in manual mode, and so far I haven’t had to fight Samsung India over anything. Fingers crossed! The same post that welcomed it was also a farewell to the good ol’ Lumia 1520.

Here’s the whole list in one place:

When	Phone	How it ended up with me
Nov 2009	(reviewing phones on FoneArena)	Class 12
by 2009	Nokia N73	“my Nokia N73”
Feb 2011	Nokia E5	my dad’s
Jul 2011	Nokia E6	a couple of days, for a review
Jan 2012	Samsung Galaxy S2 (I9100G, then a replacement I9100 in May)	bought, then fought for
Jun 2013	Nokia Asha 310	free, Nokia Premium Developer
Jan-Aug 2014	Lumia 625 x2, 620, 520 x3, 1320, Nokia X	DVLUP rewards
Mar 2014	Nokia Lumia 1520	DVLUP reward, daily driver
Mar 2014	Nokia Lumia 1020	outside the DVLUP count
Nov 2014	LG Nexus 5	bought for a friend; I handled the warranty
Mar 2015	Apple iPhone 6	issued by the office
Nov 2015	Samsung Galaxy S6	bought

Six years on, and the fanboy is still very much in there. Just last month I was tweeting at Microsoft’s TechRewards that the Lumia 950 XL is “#love”. Some things never change! ;)