I’m not sure when I first began using the term “beta” with my Nokias, but I think it was Opera for S60 Symbian on my Nokia 3650. However, I really ramped things up on the beta-front when I bought my E61. Back then (2006), I was excited for the E61′s connectivity, namely WiFi. Not for the most-used app’s like web-browser and email, but for VoIP calling which I had been using for years via PC. The E61 was one of Nokia’s first handsets to get WiFi and it was rumored that VoIP calling was possible on it, so I bit.

Not so fast. What it took a bio-chem engineer with little IT knowledge to get a VoIP account set up on that E61, months before a fix via firmware update helped everybody else, was countless hours of frustration and just as many handset hard-resets. Most importantly though, my More >