So I bought a new mobile phone. The few months I spent without one have been excellent. For the first time since I first got a phone back in 2004 my electronic communications have been entirely on my terms. It is satisfying to know that you can go about your business doing exactly what you want, knowing that your email inbox and IRC logs are happily collecting everybody's calls for your attention for you to peruse in your own time.
As nice as independence from pestering is, I'm fully aware that phones are useful things so I'm back on the bandwagon. I wrote some time ago (while my old phone was still working) about why I didn't want an Apple iPhone, back when they were the revolutionary new toy and the cool widget to get. The same reasons hold true today---it's expensive, the contracts expect fairly extensive use, the phone comes locked and needs jailbreaking to do interesting things, you can only install applications from their sanctioned App Store, you can only run one app at a time, and there's the pervading sense that for things to work smoothly you ought to be using other Apple products too.
I bought a Nokia E63. It is the new baby brother to the E71, coming in a thicker plastic case instead of metal and lacking a GPS. I bought it for $AU320 delivered from eBay and it's working a treat.
Clearly it has a fairly small screen for modern so-called "smartphones", and with all those buttons it doesn't have a touch screen. If you're thinking that this makes it not very useful for web browsing, you'd be right.
I like it anyway, because these are the reasons I chose this model:
- QWERTY keyboard! Hell yes! It was only a matter of time before I had an aneurysm from trying to write SMSes with a numeric keypad. The physical keys feel nice and have a nice response too.
- Great battery life
- Easy to buy it not locked to any phone company
- Installs apps from anywhere by URL, and runs several at the same time
- It's very happy to talk to my IMAPS mail server
- Lots of free software available for Symbian S60, its operating system
- Reasonable price
- Favourable reviews on the 'net
- Played with one belonging to a friend, who also thought it was pretty good
Things like playing MP3s, web browsing, taking pictures on the built-in camera or using GPS software are not features that interest me in a phone. It's a good thing too, because this phone is not exceptional for any of those.
The thing I'm happy about here is that I actually took the time to evaluate my own values and needs before buying one of these fancy new phones. I highly recommend doing that.
If you want to you can contact me by phone or SMS again. I still reserve the right to ignore it for indeterminate periods of time if I feel like it though.