Life is grand

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.

I am rarely excited by modern mobile phones. They tend to pack too much into an unusable interface and end up being slow at what they are meant for; voice calls and text messages. My current phone is a bare-bones Nokia; it doesn’t have a camera, radio or 3G, it doesn’t double as a PDA or an MP3 player (I have an iPod nano for that.)

This Sony Ericsson W950i though is giving even this mobile-phone troglodyte heart palpitations. It looks good, the flush keyboard is gorgeous (and I hope usable), and has dedicated controls for the music functionality. That is an absolute must, the dedicated controls. It has a lovely 2.6″ touch sensitive screen too. It is also slim opting rather to be wide which is a form factor I prefer (and which Motorola are doing well with in their Razr phones.) It has 4gb of memory, twice what my iPod nano has and apparently will work like a USB drive which makes transferring files a doddle.

A plus is the lack of built in camera. Well done Sony Ericsson for not trying to shove in a crap mobile phone camera.

All in all it looks like a winner. My only reservations are interface speed, voice quality and whether the interface might be too crammed with options. As soon as O2 Ireland get it on their shelves I’ll give it a go.