I owned a Nokia N95 for 13 months. Great video playback and a comparatively excellent camera among mobile phones, but terrible sound quality. Despite feeling somewhat chintzy (especially for the $500 price of admission when I bought it brand new) it had admirably resisted all kinds of elements and drops without any appreciable damage. I was impressed by its hardiness.
Then I moved on to a Nokia N85 for about a month. The sound quality was much improved, approaching the enjoyability and general proficiency of a stand-alone digital audio player (though it was still not there yet). In many other respects it was a thinner N95 with a better screen, but I moved on due to my boredom with the stagnating Symbian S60v3 platform. Moreover the plastic used was cheap and creaky and I definitely do not think it could take the abuse my N95 did.
I followed with the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 for a month as well. The screen image quality on the high-resolution (800x480, ridiculous PPI) was sublime for video playback, though the recessed nature and flexy resistive layer bugged me. I was fine with Windows Mobile and enjoyed the level of customization I could achieve simply by loading different ROMs (mostly lightweight ones with WM6.1 and the TouchFlo3D interface from the Touch Pro 2) through Hard-SPL. The sound quality was a noticeable step down from the N85, but not as deficient as that of the N95 although there certainly was much more bothersome hiss which made music playback even less enjoyable. This is the best-built phone I have used. The build was exceptionally solid, as if I were using a slab of solid steel; the overall size was deceptively small as well. Beyond this, it was also the most handsome and charismatic. Poor sound quality meant it would not find a permanent place in my life.
The iPhone 3G 16GB was the first iPhone I had owned. I used an iPod touch 1G that came with my Macbook earlier, but the experience was NOTHING like what I had with the touch. After using the iPhone I realize I could not go back to an iPod touch. It just being a phone and having only those few extra capabilities made it much more suitable for me as I am a man of convergence. The music playback quality was a night-and-day difference compared to my XPERIA X1 (my eyes popped when I heard the same track) and probably a step beyond the Nokia N85 as well. The lower-resolution (480x320, more than 2 times less pixels than the XPERIA!) but larger-sized display was perfectly anti-aliased and I had no pixel-picking problems like I would have expected. Apps were wonderful, especially the games, and so far this was the best mobile phone experience I had yet. It was just really a joy to use.
I tried the Nokia N97 since last Monday for a taste of S60v5. I did not like it as it felt too much like S60v3 was shoehorned into using a touch interface. The interface was not intuitive at all (even less than raw Windows Mobile) and it is clear Nokia put no effort into adapting and optimizing their aging OS for touch. Many of my favorite S60v3 apps like CorePlayer and DIVX Player were not compatible with S60v5, which meant that the relatively impressive resistive 3.5" 640x360 screen was wasted and useless for me. Music playback quality was almost comparable to my iPhone 3G, but probably between the 3G and the N85 in reality. Widgets were buggy and crashed often, and the 32GB mass storage and digital compass just felt like afterthoughts built-in. It's loaded with features, sure, but I just found many of them implemented half-heartedly and the OS was just a pain to use. In its defense it is a pretty beautiful, solid phone. It is second to only the XPERIA in this respect but its construction is mostly plastic so it is considerably more lightweight (even surprisingly so). The hinge mechanism just feels great and the keyboard was awesome.. but I could not return to an OS that was looked after so carelessly while aging so miserably. I decided at this point I would not be returning to Symbian S60 or buying another S60 product.
I then purchased the iPhone 3G S 32GB. The 3G S was an intended purchase whether I enjoyed the N97 or not because I had really liked the 3G. It was more of the same, but the speed so far has made it an absolute staple. I do believe it sounds subtly better than my 3G as well. Once this thing is jailbroken I may not go for any other phone until next June.
