It's funny, I used to be very anti-iPhone and very pro-S60.

I think this is turning around now due to some recent fumbles on Nokia's part and some recent wins on Apple's part.

No, at&t is still the devil incarnate but I guess in order to get a good phone you have to dance with the devil.

So what did Nokia do to change my perception of its phones? Well, it's what Nokia did not do, and what Apple did (or rather what iPhone developers did). When I was a staunch supporter of S60 (don't get me wrong, I still like the platform), I supported it because it was more stable than Windows Mobile, I liked it better than Palm and let's not get into Blackberries :-)

S60 had a lot of apps and many of them games. They've had some pretty nice hardware which included great cameras with nice optics (Carl Zeiss anyone?). Nokia has been trying to compete in the touch arena and has released a kickbutt product, the N97 (seen on the right). The problem is that for a flagship product, the camera is a the flagship camera. The N97 sports a 5MP camera while a non-flagship product sports an 8MP camera. The N97 process is a bit anemic and the OS, from several accounts, is a bit sluggish. Nokia did not put their best foot forward.

The second issue with S60 these days are apps. There is a lot of cloud functionality available now that didn't exist at the conception of S60. Social networks, blogging, microblogging, photo sharing, video sharing and so on. All of these are great applications for a phone like the N97 that sports a nice camera, good video recording and a keyboard! However there are no apps to be seen? How about blogger or wordpress apps? Take a photo you took and upload it to your blog or tumblr account. Makes sense right?

On the other hand, the iPhone has so much development going for it where you can get blogging apps, microblogging apps, social network apps, photo upload apps. OK there is no Qik yet, but we're hopeful. With the release of the IIIgs, the camera has been improved to be 3MP with autofocus. Now this may be inferior to a 5MP or 8MP with Carl Zeiss optics, but it's good enough for the money. It would be preferable to pay $200 for a 3MP/autofocus camera phone and pay another $500 to get a separate camera (with better specs) than to pay $700 to get the N97.

I suppose the economy has taken a toll on this geek's wallet and things like this are now things that one should really consider. At this point, when it comes to smartphones - iPhone and Android are at the top of my list. I would consider S60 for feature phones.