Monthly Archive for September, 2004

First:

I went to the pub last night. After a quick game of jukebox-bingo, a non-regular went to put some ‘choonz’ on. I made a point of looking at the jukebox just so that I don’t ever accidentally buy the complete and utter tripe that he put on. I even made notes. The worst offenders were ‘bands’ [sic] called ‘DMX’, ‘Special D’ and ‘DJ Casper’. Each to their own and all that, but come on. If you want to listen to that kind of rubbish go and put it on in your 1 litre XR3i lookalike. Grrr. (Is now a good time to admit that I listen to Radio 2 and Radio 4 because Radio 1 just plays noise? When did I turn 40?)

Second:

I received some interesting spam this morning. Not your usual ‘cheap software’ or ‘cheap drugs’ kind of thing. This one is about ‘cheap bombs’. And I quote:

You’re invited to shop for large selection of bombs and different kinds of rockets such as surface-to-air, surface-to-surface and weaponry available at reduced price. With the following types of rockets you will be able to commit terrorist attacks, destroy buildings, electric power stations, bridges, factories and anything else that comes your mind.

Two seemingly separate events. But mix ‘em together and you have a whole lotta fun… )

There comes a time in every man’s life when he looks down at his trusty mobile phone and thinks “You’re getting a bit long in the tooth. In fact, you’re kind of a sabre-toothed phone now, ready to be put out to pasture for the few final years that your circuits remain intact.”

And so it was with heavy heart that I took myself along to the local phone shop and said “upgrade me!”.

Or, back in the real world, my Orange SPV had been really getting on my proverbials, and I jumped at the first chance to get rid of the thing.

It’s not that it’s a bad phone. Well, actually, yes it is. It’s all very clever being based on Windows CE, and being able to use all the mobile office apps, and Mobile MSN Messenger, and all those games, but when push came to shove, the thing didn’t actually work as a phone. When I want to make a call, I want to make a call now, not when the phone’s timeslicing algorithm deems fit to devote enough CPU time to the UI to acknowledge my button presses. This is even more frustrating when I have an incoming call – the phone is ringing, I’m pounding on the ‘Accept call’ button, and the phone is helpfully displaying its equivalent of the hour glass… “Please wait”. Grrrr.

Oh and then there was the time when I ran out of SMS memory. Admittedly, I had never ever deleted a received or sent SMS, so I should probably shoulder some of the blame, but, well, I think the ‘recovery’ process could do with some work. You see, I was only alerted to the fact that I was running a bit low on memory just after the point that the phone became unusable because of lack of memory. Key presses took literally minutes to register, and getting a list of messages to delete was beyond a joke. The ‘recovery’ process? A reformat. Yep, that’s right… I had to reformat (ok, reflash) my phone to get it working again. Sigh.

Anyway. Enough remonstrations – on to the future. My new phone is a Sony Ericsson K700i (again from Orange). And, to put it simply, it’s nice to have a phone again. It makes calls. It sends texts. It’s bijou and petite. It looks quite nice. Best of all, when it runs out of room for texts, it just pops up a little window asking you if you want to delete some. That, in my book, makes it a winner.

The K700i also has an OK camera on the back (examples here), Bluetooth which works (even with Microsoft’s Keyboard and Mouse Dongle with a bit of fiddling), a working J2ME environment (now to find a use), and, well, it’s nice.

I’m sure I’m still in the honeymoon period though… I seem to remember being pretty enamoured with the SPV when I first got it, too…