Oh no ... I am actually excited about a mobile phone. In fact, I am not just excited - I am in love and want to take it to bed with me (in case the cat knocks it off my desk!).
Now, most of you already know that I am not a big fan of SMS as I have quite thick and chunky fingers and I find it difficult to hit the buttons on a normal phone. I have a mail server which supports IMAP and the Blackberry but haven't been able to find a phone that I like enough to actually use it. What I wanted (ideally) was a phone with the simplicity of the Nokia 3210 (remember them!), the touch screen convenience of the iPod, and the communications integration of a true "smartphone". It might suprise a lot of you reading this that I *hate* Windows Mobile and really cannot wait for Microsoft to get it together and launch a real Mobile Phone O/S - a topic for another time I think....
My iPOD interface works quite well and seems to be very accurate and I've been toying with the idea of getting an iPhone. My big problem with the iPhone is that I had a very bad experience with O2 (or Cellnet as they were then) and swore I would never deal with them again.
So - facing a huge problem with Orange who are billing me for a phone I haven't had for nearly a year and faced with their inability to understand why I refuse to pay the full bill each month I gave them an ultimatum - sort it out or I switch providers. I've been with Orange since the days of the Rabbit when they were called Hutchinson and I LOVED them. BUT - they have ****** me about so much in the last six months that I have switched to Vodafone (and if you are reading this Orange I really didn't want to but you forced me into it!) and got myself a shiny new Nokia N97 into the bargain. I feel like a traitor to Orange but how hard can it be to send me a bill for £35 a month and then debit it from my account? If they start charging me for a phone which was (by their own admission) cancelled a year ago then surely it is also not beyond them to understand why I refuse to pay it? A year on and I still get bills I won't pay because they are wrong - I gave them an hour to sort it out and two months later they were still cocking it up so today I went to Phones4U and got a lovely new Nokia N-97 phone and.....
I am in love. Totally. Utterly. This phone is everything I have ever wanted (and I've had a lot of phones!). It has a Qwerty keyboard which my fingers can use, it checks my mobile email address between 9am and 6pm (my working hours), I can add personal ring tones for my contacts, check my email, stick some of my music on it and broadcast it to the car radio (for the ones that aren't on my iPod) and is generally just a lovely lovely piece of kit. The nicest thing it has done in the eight hours since I bought it was display www.ladybirdinternet.com perfectly - drop down menus, buttons, form validation - the lot displayed perfectly and again highlights the importance of ensuring that sites we build are 100% standards compliant.
I never get excited about phones. BUT - if anyone tries to take my new one away from me I swear to God that I will kill them stone dead as I think it is going to be the centre of my communications very shortly. My 0844 numbers and YAC number (including FAX) will all be diverted to it in the next few days and it even synchs with Outlook 2007 without the hassle of my old Jordana and Compaq iPAQ units.
Speaking of which, I'm off to sell my old phone and iPAQ and Jordanas on ebay......