Welcome to a new interview series here on Fone Arena, something we wanted to do for quite some time now. We invite you to (virtually) meet the team working behind the scenes, we invite you to meet the Fone Arena Team! Each week I will conduct a new interview with one of our authors, in which you'll get to know us a bit better.

This week, we'd like you to meet Rita El Khoury! You don't know Rita El Khoury? Oh it seems like you have spent the last few years on the moon then ..

Who are you? Introduce yourself!

Hi, my name is Rita El Khoury, I am a pharmacist by profession, a mobile enthusiast by passion. I have lived in Lebanon almost all my life, aside from going a year to Paris, France, for a Masters in Medical Research. When I'm not trolling the internet for medical or mobile news, or managing my pharmacy, I can be found watching a movie, listening to music, swearing at the traffic in Lebanon or testing my creative talents with some new video.

Tell us a little bit about your "mobile career". What did you do prior to FoneArena?

My first smartphone was the Nokia 3250 XpressMusic, a limited device I pushed to unlimited heights. I started blogging in January 2007 about it and Symbian in general, under the "Dotsisx" nickname and it was a slow and painful rise to become read and known back then. In December 2007, I got my first trial device, a Nokia N95 8GB, and joined Ricky Cadden on Symbian-Guru as a writer. I grew with the website, becoming an Editor and acquiring more loyal fans, readers and Nokia contacts along the way than I ever anticipated to have. About a year later, I joined FoneArena as a regular writer and well, two years later, here I am, doing photo galleries, device, application and accessory reviews. Right now, aside from my personal blog and FoneArena, I contribute to Android.Appstorm, and manage a weekly editorial column on MobileRnR.

Which Device(s) do you currently use?

Currently, I own and use an HTC Desire Z as my main phone, a Nokia N8 as my secondary phone and an iPod Touch 4G. I love each of them to bits, for different reasons. The Desire Z is fantastic for productivity, the N8 is unequalled at photography and maps, the iPod is stellar for music and gaming. On the computer side, I am a Mac girl, with a 3yr old 13? Macbook as my only unit.

Your favorite OS at the moment?

Android, by miles. I've been a Symbian fan for as long as I can remember, until I tried Android last December. It was a revelation. The open nature, the multitude of apps especially professional medical software, the ability to customize every bit of it,… all are great, but there are two aspects of Android that aren't available on any other platform and that make it a winner for me: the Share menu and the drop-down Notifications bar. These two, employed as they are by 3rd-party software, make it a breeze to be as productive on the Desire Z as I can be with a computer. I have finally true mobile computing and well, it was worth the wait.

What was the coolest thing that ever happened to you, involving mobile phones?

There is no "coolest thing" really, there's the opportunity to attend several events, meet and connect with people from various backgrounds, and interact, learn, grow. I'm all about the social aspect of blogging, and the community I have been a part of, online and offline, is the best thing I take from this whole experience. Also, thanks to Nokia specifically, I've participated in competitions that yeilded unforgettable memories and travelled to several countries.

Where do you see mobile phones in the future?

I think you don't want me to explain that, haha. But if you insist, I have a vision of mobile future that mixes Minority Report-like interaction, with Matrix/Tron-like virtualization, in something that looks like the Nokia Morph concept or embeddable chips in our body… Don't say I didn't warn you In the more immediate future, I'm interested in NFC chips, as well as new display and text entry technologies.

And last but not least, how would your dream device look like?

Pretty much like the Nokia Morph concept, a wearable, bendable screen, that auto-cleans, adapts to my environment, folds away when not in use and unfolds when needed. One can dream, right?

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