I have learned to hate many mobile phones over the past few years. They have promised much but delivered little of that promise. They often even failed to deliver on the basic promise of making telephone calls reliably.

Sony Ericsson invented a really complex and multi-layered menu system that I gave up on quite quickly. Although, for a phone it did play music quite well.

Nokia provided reliable phones that generally worked but which failed to deliver on any promises over and above making phone calls. Using the Internet or GPS navigation on them was a pain. Also these features killed the battery in mere minutes. It is worth noting that I never did get around to acquiring an N95 (on many accounts an impressive device).

But the phone that I have hated the most is a Samsung. The quality issues with the Samsung were so bad that it went back to them for repairs three or four times in the first 3 months. It barely worked as a mobile phone and totally failed to deliver any other functionality. As a result I now refuse to purchase anything manufactured by Samsung as they are synonymous with rubbish quality in my mind now.

Now I ponder, how hard is it really to design a mobile phone that reliably works as a phone, enables connection to the Internet, plays media files and allows email access? Based on my experience to date this must be harder than putting human kind into space.

The picture above shows a selection of my phones dating from about 2003.