Seven things I regret about swapping my crappy free phone for an iPhone

Last week, I finally joined the smartphone masses by getting an iPhone 3GS. I know I’m late, but for my Day Job purposes, I decided that I really needed to get in on all of this “App Store” jibber jabber and “Mobile Web” stuff I keep hearing so much about. I had a good reason to upgrade: my old phone, a beloved-and-free Nokia 6131, finally bit the dust.

In short, the iPhone is a lovely device. The user interface is immaculately crafted and the overall experience is painless and a joy to use.

But, surprisingly, I find myself missing a lot of the features in my old Nokia 6131. This free phone, by all rights, should be completely gone from my consciousness as I let myself fall into the lusty beveled curves of the iPhone, but I keep finding things I can’t do on technology’s Best and Brightest that were a piece of cake on my dog of a phone, which was free and three years old.

A few of the biggest thing I miss:

Transfer files over Bluetooth.

Never once did I plug my Nokia into my Mac. I don’t even know if that’s possible. But I transferred tons of apps, photos and music back and forth over the Bluetooth connection. So, when I tried to connect my iPhone via Bluetooth, it did absolutely nothing. I hear that Apple did this because it would have been too slow to sync apps, but the average speed of Bluetooth 2.0 is still faster than AT&T’s 3G network, so that doesn’t make sense.

Run a different Web browser.

The browser that came with the Nokia phone was a horrible, “lite Web” text browser, comparable to what comes with most free phones. But, thanks to the fabulous developers at Opera, I was able to download an incredible full-featured browser that, in some cases, actually rendered pages more accurately than the iPhone.

The little screen would show the entire Web page and an outline you could tap the center button to zoom in on. It was fairly slow over GPRS service, but worked quite well.

Take a photo of myself.

The Nokia 6131 had a forward facing camera, and the clamshell had a small color LCD on the front, so I could take “High Five Friday” photos, and make sure I didn’t look too ridiculous in the process.

I tried to take a photo of myself with the iPhone camera last Friday, and it was ridiculously complicated. The lack of a physical button means I had to turn the camera at a bizarre angle, crane my hand around and try to remember where the screen button was. And then I had to turn the camera around to see the resulting image, and find myself mostly out of view.

I ended up ditching the process and just snapped a quick photo using my laptop’s webcam.

Run a Nintendo emulator.

To say Apple is kind of strict about the apps they allow to run on their phone is like saying that Hitler wasn’t particularly nice. Needless to say, a largely illegal emulator isn’t likely to make the grade anytime soon.

But I downloaded a Java-based NEScube for my Nokia 6131, and was theoretically able to run any Nintendo game ever created. Sound was flaky, and it ran at about 1/2 of the speed needed to enjoy the games, but in theory, it was very cool to play Contra on the little gizmo.

Add more storage space.

The Nokia 6131 came with a whopping 11MB of storage space — not exactly comparable with my iPhone’s 16GB. But the Nokia also had a MicroSD slot, meaning I could swap out 2GB SD cards all day.

Change the battery.

After a few years, my old phone’s battery started to get a little limp; replacing it was, of course, a piece of cake. I kept the old battery around as a spare, too — it still gave me a burst of talk time if I needed it. Changing the iPhone’s battery seems to require a majority vote from Congress, a doctor’s note, and, of course, a visit to the loathed Genius Bar.

Click a button to spring the phone open.

By far, the most enjoyable feature of my Nokia 6131 was a little button on the side. Pressing this button would spring the phone open with a rapid click and switchblade-like speed. As satisfying as the “unlock” slider is on the iPhone, I completely miss the tactile swish of the phone springing open when I got a incoming call.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t feel completely like original-series Kirk every time I punched the springloaded open button.

Editor’s note: Yes, I know I could jailbreak the phone and solve a few of these problems. But, after trying to break the phone without success several times the other day due to baseband issues, I’ve given up — at least for now.