This is tougher than trying to buy a house I tell you. My trusty Nokia packed up a few days ago and since then I have been scouring the interwebs looking for the perfect replacement.
Up till now I have bought mobile phones that did two things and only two things; voice calls and SMS. Up till now that is all I wanted out of a mobile phone. Phones that included a camera, MP3 support, PIM features and such were off my list.
Things change though as the project I am working on has taken a mobile focus. I have begrudgingly realised I had better get with the new century and get an advanced mobile phone.
So far every device I have looked at is compromised in some way. The nearly perfect looking Blackberry 7130g doesn’t have WiFi. The well featured Nokia E61 looks a bit bulky to slip into the back pocket of my jeans. The Sony Ericsson M600i has no WiFi. The Nokia N91 has everything but it is bulky and is more a multimedia phone than a work machine. With sluggish performance the Nokia N73 is out.
There is one phone though that is ticking the right boxes, that is a decent size and it passes my aesthetic test; The Nokia E60.
It has two problems though. Not terribly important but it takes RS-MMC memory cards, why Nokia why? More importantly is that no Irish network operator has one. I can only get it from one of the “SIM free” mobile shops and it will cost me near to €400, which is a bit out of my budget. I am on O2 at the moment but if one of the other networks provides this phone I would swap without hesitation.
So, what phone do you recommend? Here are my thoughts on the ideal phone:
- Fast. The software has to be fast, anything that looks swishy but takes 5 seconds to get to the SMS screen is out.
- Fits in my back pocket.
- Looks and feels good. So many phones feel like they were made from cheap plastic, especially the slider-phones. I like clean, simple lines with a solid, well built feel.
- WiFi, 3G and GSM.
- Email (POP3 preferably) and IM (Jabber/GTalk mainly).
- Memory from 64mb and preferably expandable.
- Good screen.
- QWERTY keyboard like the Blackberry 7130g does it, sharing one key for two letters.
- 3rd party app. support with Java and Flash Lite
- USB.
Features that don’t interest me are:
- Camera.
- FM radio.
- Music support.
- Video support.
- Kitchen sink.
