I already reported on the starting of Alvin Wong's experiment in using the 2008 Nokia E71, running S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the struggle of keeping something so old up and running with 2013 apps and services proved too much and Alvin gave up after six intense days. But his article series (here's the conclusion) has been fascinating and my only question is why he didn't try with the E72 instead, which, although almost as old, had a more advanced version of S60 and far better camera. Ah well, that'll be another article for someone (me?) for another day!

From Alvin's final article part:

Right now, I hear you saying, “So, an iPhone is better than an E71. Thanks, Captain Obvious, for that wonderful insight.” But there was a time when phones like the E71 made a lot of sense and became popular while the iPhone was a niche product at best, one that was ridiculed by many mobile enthusiasts. There was a time when the E71 sat on a store shelf right beside an iPhone, while Android remained in its infancy. As I alluded to in a previous article in the series, the smartphones of today are so far removed from the smartphones we used to have that it never ceases to amaze me how far things have moved along in such a short span of time. The smartphones of the past were voice-centric devices, but the smartphones of today are more web-centric than ever.

Symbian S60 was developed during an era when the mobile web wasn’t available to everyone, and as a result access to the Internet merely existed as an option that users could take advantage of if they really wanted to. The web and the services that exist on it were never a central focus of the platform, and that probably contributed in a big way to the strong US-centric sentiment that S60 was old and outdated; one thing that the iPhone provides is access to all the web services you use in the form of easily-downloaded apps on your homescreen in addition to built-in support for some of these services, while a phone like the E71 has just about zero support for any web service other than email and Flickr out of the box, and no easy or elegant way to augment its built-in functionality even back in 2008 when it was new.

You can read on in the full article, plus see the other parts in the series:

This is the conclusion to a 5-part series exploring whether one can buy a second-hand S60 smartphone for what it would cost to pick up a brand-new Asha feature-phone, and whether it is actually worth the effort to do so. If you’ve missed any of the earlier parts in this series, you can read them by clicking on the appropriate links below:

1. “You won’t last 2 weeks”
2. The days when setting up a smartphone took 8 hours
3. Hitting the limits
4. How can it be this hard to watch a YouTube video?

With regard to my suggestion that the E72 might have made a better experiment/choice, here are some of the improvements made for the later model:

• S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2, with hundreds of small improvements, not least in the area of more seamless connectivity
• Full compatibility with the free-forever version of the (Nokia/)Ovi Maps voice-guided satnav solution
• A standard 3.5mm audio out jack, with media control via a borrowed (or bought!) Nseries multimedia headset
• A really rather good 5 megapixel autofocus camera - it may not be Carl Zeiss branded but it still knocks spots off the 5mp cameras in (for example) HTC's smartphones of the same era. Or indeed some units from the current era.

Comments welcome!