After a huge argument with Orange, the mobile phone people, due to a nuts bill following the 2006 Classic Le Mans, I closed my account of 11 loyal years, and went to Virgin PAYG, the only other phone company worth bothering with around here (signal reasons). I saved a fortune in the year I was with them, but missed the flexibility and facilities of a contract phone, mainly:
- Saving voice messages for longer than three days and using sensible buttons, not ‘press seven to save, hash to delete’
- A proper recorded message on the answerphone
- Shedloads of talk time and no running out of credit mid-conversation
- Rollover minutes
- New phones with decent features
- Proper invoices that you can put in against tax
and so on. Thus I recently succumbed to the lure of a contract phone and returned to Orange, older and wiser.
I love buying tech. I love the research, comparing this and that and ultimately forgetting it all and just going for a decent price, despite the purported faults in the phones according to the 13 year-olds who write the single sentence ‘reviews’ about ‘crap battery life, innit’ on Revoo etc. In the end, I went for another Nokia, the N73 Black (good detailed review here). The model is over 12 months old now, but has recently picked up hotshot upgraded firmware and does everything you want it to do, plus it has absolutely the best camera you can buy on a phone. The camera is why I bought it, with the added incentive of £30 a month for 400 minutes anytime cross network, 100 free texts and a whopping £210 cashback a month after connection. A killer deal.
I have to say that the phone itself is a nice looking thing, but it’s not the perfect phone to use, though much of this is just me getting used to something other than the wonderful old 6310i I have been using since 2003 or thereabouts. The shape is wrong for holding to your head: I find the speaker is very difficult to centre on your ear for example. Must be part of the plan to get us all wearing Star Trek bluetooth headsets - no thanks. Some people say the little joystick is hard to use, but you get used to it within 24 hours fiddling. The internet connects all too quickly but it is free for the first two months on this plan, and only a fiver a month after that, so I will keep it. The keypad is overly small but again, you get used to it.
The rest is EXCELLENT. Feel, weight and size in general are all good. Battery life so far is great, not lost one bar in 2 days with lots of messing about here and there. Software is very quick, though it takes a tiny bit of time to accesss the (thumbnailed) main pic library on the internal memory. My mini-SD cards come this week so will seee how they work out. Diary and all that works great, contacts import from old phone via bluetooth was no problem, got to set email up yet though.
Like I say, I have lots to learn about the phone, but so far so good, and it is nice to be back on Orange, with good home reception and talk time to burn. I was going to port my old number but they have given me a nice set of 911/915 numbers by total accident, so am probably going to keep it and drop the old one.
The camera on this is the thing though: a 3.2 megapixel device with Carl Zeiss optics. I am really impressed with what I have tried so far. OK, it’s not my DSLR but it beats the chunky little Sony 5MP Cybershot I have been carrying around with me for such along time. Very excited about what might be possible with this unit and a big SD card – video quality not bad either. Here’s a few pics of nothing, but they give you an idea of what the future holds, for this blog if nowt else. Highly recommended unit so far.
