Lol. At least you guys had actual phones to work with. Until we became Nokia all we had was a techview UI shell running on H2, or later, H4 boards that would boot an MMC card. Of course, when we became Nokia we got the flashing stations and access to Phoenix. Only a particular part of the company ever saw phones that were in development and you needed special access to get into that part of the building.

> Only a particular part of the company ever saw phones that were in development and you needed special access to get into that part of the building.

Oh, I remember it was near impossible to get access to service manuals Level 1 & 2 (just for understand how to repair/replace few parts on my N82), and fully impossible get its Level 3 & 4.[0]

AIKON service centers had monopoly on repairing devices.

[0] http://www.s-manuals.com/phone/nokia_n82

First job out of uni was writing device drivers for Motorola Symbian devices on H4 boards (I want to say LDDs and PDDs?). Codewarrior or carbide if you fancied a reboot every 2 mins, 40 minute turn-around times to flash and boot your software, boards without working SD and having to log to the screen ...I do not miss those days at all. BlackBerry was like a bloody dream.

I also went through a dev board phase later on when I was working on Maemo, etc. but they took it easy on me when I was fresh out of school and let me have real production hardware

I totally know what you mean - the sense of satisfaction and joy when you get even the most basic "end-to-end" functionality working in a new environment is hard to match.

It still is; try blink or counter on a new fpga board.