Sunday, June 15, 2003

I looked at the Sony Ericsson P800 which is a very nice phone/PDA and would do a lot of what the 9210 did for me. But it was too pricy and didn't have fax support. A week ago I'd blown my savings on ordering a Sharp Zaurus SL-C760 to use as a PDA so I didn't really need the PDA functionality of the P800. I just wanted a phone. I ended up sticking with a Symbian based phone so I could still develop software for it and extend it with third party applications. And hopefully I'll be able to use the C760 and the phone to communicate with each other in novel ways. I went for the Nokia 3650. Things I like are GPRS. Wow, much better than dial up to the internet which I used on the 9210. The Series 60 user interface is great. And the phone takes MMC cards allowing me to reuse the 64MB card I used in the 9210. The built in camera is pretty nifty and my ex-flatmate and I have already played around with MMS and sending photos back and forth (She has the optional camera for the 5100). It's more fun than I expected (I used to be an anti-phone camera person). I installed Opera on the phone and it's great. Very useable for browsing web sites I was quiet surprised. A big step up from the web browser on the 9210. It's possible to get an application that adds Fax support but I haven't bothered since I'll wait for the C760 to arrive and see what if I can use the fax support via that. I miss a qwerty keyboard on the phone - I'd forgotten what typing via a phone keyboard was like. Again, I hope to be able to use the C760 to do most of that. Time will tell. So I'll be back to two devices, a PDA and phone, instead of one integrated device (the 9210). It'll be interesting to see if I end up dropping the PDA and going back to one device. Of course the PDA has to be released first (7 days away or so I hear). And I do plan to get a Lisp working on at least the PDA and on the phone too - although without a keyboard some way of sending lisp code to the phone would have to be implemented. 3:19:57 AM

I recently bought a Nokia 5100 phone for my friend and flatmate who recently moved out as a 'going away' present. It's a pretty nifty phone with lots of bells and whistles (FM Radio, Java games, flashlight, thermometer, etc). Importantly it is 'shock resistant' given what her other phones have been through in the past... But on the very day I buy it, five minutes after I part with the money, my own phone, a Nokia 9210 dies on me. I dropped it one too many times and now the display flickers and half the keys don't work. Noooooo. I do everything on that phone, treating it like a little laptop. Faxes, messages, spreadsheets, word documents, programming, the lot. So I had to find a replacement. A cheap one since I'd just spent dollars on the 5100. 3:06:34 AM