As a former member of my country's
OCD Olympics team, I had reverted to form and spent months researching, considering, questioning, pondering, researching, pricing and reviewing all of my options. But I did it well!!
I loved the solid build, superior user interface and once class-leading feature set of my trusty old Nokia but the keypad was getting less and less reliable by the day, the tiny, monochrome screen was really making me look like somebody's grandfather and WAP 1.2.1 simply doesn't cut it anymore.
I'm a geek, dammit! Hear me roar!But what to get? I had heard all about and experienced a small amount of Nokia's legendary penchant for storing contacts in a format that simply does not translate well to other phones. I am a heavy user of the faux-PDA features of the 6310i and most of my several hundred contacts have several phone numbers and notes attached and often also have email addresses and web URLS. I simply could not afford to spend weeks un-munging data on which I so heavily rely.
But I hate everything Nokia makes now. As far as I can see, Nokia has the market cornered for phones that fail to present everything I need. If they're cheap, they have almost no features. If they have the features I need, they're stupidly expensive. And, if they have the features I need and aren't too expensive, they're too big. Or they're butt ugly. Or both. What's the deal with Nokia these days?
What's the point of combining all the features of a phone, PDA, digicam, video camera, MP3 player, radio and portable gaming console if the unit ends up nearly as big as all those things in a pile?
And then you drop it. Once. Boo hoo....
And, oh yes, don't tell me you haven't noticed that Nokia's motto seems to be,
"Why cram all the features in now when we can use some of them to issue another expensive model later?"On top of that, all of Nokia's smartphones run Symbian and my perception is that this would lock me into a rather expensive lifestyle as well as a tonne of risk from viruses and worms. If I was going to get a smartphone (and it was by no means certain when this would happen), it was going to be Windows or Linux.
Skype was the final decider for me. Skype is only available for Windows Pocket PCs. My devious long-term plan is to get a Windows smartphone with built-in WiFi, install Skype and then while away entire days, nursing a coffee at whatever local cafe has free WiFi while I catch up on free phone calls to my thousands of fans all over the globe. Ok, so it's two (my parents), but they're, like,
thousands to me.
Of course, this reintroduces another important factor. Well form factor, in fact. All the Windows PCs/phones with WiFi built in are too damn big! On top of that, the newest O2 Xphone model with WiFi built in is not available here yet. To be honest, I cannot even remember where I read about it and it's not on the O2 site, either.
I hummed and hawed about whether or not to lay down a fat pile of folding NOW for a Windows smartphone or bear in mind the number of starving kids on the planet and get something far less ostentatious. The fact that no smartphone running Windows with built-in WiFi AND the size I want is available did it for me.
I decided I would get the Sony Ericsson 500 series. The features I need at a price that won't have me feeling guilty for the life of the phone. Which is probably far in excess of several million starving children. Sigh.
I duly trotted round to the Chinese guy I knew I could trust not to rip me off or sell me a complete piece of junk. Trust ME that's an important consideration in these here parts. I had been wasting the poor guy's time for months with my repeat visits to enquire about phones and prices, only for him to see me trot off into the distance every time.
But this time, things would be different! Oh yes! Or would they....I rocked up, all ready to buy the Sony Ericsson only to find out they have discontinued the model I wanted! Man oh man has Murphy ever been working overtime in my part of the world lately.
But that's not all folks! Not only does it slice, dice and julienne, my friendly neighbourhood Chinese vendor of mobile phones had an ace up his sleeve.
It just so happened that a lady customer of his had bought an Xphone II from him a couple of months before but found it too complicated. She had bought another phone and asked him to flog the old one on her behalf.
Substantially less than the retail price of a new Xphone II later found me the proud owner of a new Windows-powered smartphone with a year remaining on the warranty. My logic was that when the version with WiFi is released, I can chop this one in for close to what it cost me and KAPOW!!! turn into WonderGeek, master of his domain! Ok, not quite master. Oh, and blogspot.com isn't my domain but you get the idea.
Mwahahahaha.Now all I need is the ultimate ringtone - a wav file of YAMS (Yet Another Mad Scientist) from the
Justice League of America/
Super Friends screaming, "NO! NO! You meddling fools! I could have saved the world!!!!"
