New Phone

I recently upgraded the old Motorola V3 RAZR to a Sony Ericsson K810i with "Blog This" capabilities, among other things.

The SE K810i is quite a nice phone, it's got a half-decent camera in it (well, the camera part of it is actually branded as a Sony Cyber-shot) it can play back all kinds of media formats (MP3, MP4, AAC, 3GP etc) it must have a pretty decent CPU in it as it can do 3D stuff in Java, syncs beautifully with my Mac (via the use of a £1.49 plugin from mobile.feisar.com) and generally has a nice, responsive UI.

I loved the build quality on the motorola, and the ergonomics of the hardware was pretty good, but the user interface on it was one of the most back-to-front, convoluted pieces of software it's ever been my displeasure to use.

Things that one the K810i are a single click (like deleting the current SMS that you're reading) involve going into the menus on the Motorola. Mototola didn't seem to like paying licensing fees for the T9 Predictive Text Input so they reinvented it themselves, quite badly too. Look guys, there's a reason Sony Ericsson and Nokia both use T9 - it's good.

Nadia also picked up herself a K610i which is great - aside from it also being quite a decent phone, now that we've both got a phone with the same OS, I can more easily answer her questions about it =).

Both the SE phones are 3G, and there's a 2 month free trial of the video calling and other 3G services - I'm not convinced that you really need to see the person you're talking to on the mobile, especially if you're trying to have a conversation in a crowded area (like on a train) as everyone can hear what's going on... I'm amazed at the pace of development of 3G phones, no longer are they similar to a GSM model only twice the size with a slow UI, they're compact, efficient and are now able to be pushed in place of regular GSM-only units...