23 July 2007

Mobile madness








Anonymous said...

For what's it worth, I was in a similar position two weeks ago.

I went for the Nokia 6300 - with an additional 2GB microSD card. I haven't really investigated whether a Symbian phone would be nicer, all I gathered that those are "real" OSs, so you can run "applications" in them, probably even simultaneously or in the background. From what I see, the usual Java stuff runs on this gadget as well as anything. The included mp3 (media?) player runs in the background (as in, you can browse around the menus while it plays), that was enough multitasking for me.

The main selling point for me was that pressing the call button instantly shows the call log -- as opposed to start the "let's staaaart redrawing something" operation that will in a while become the call log :)

Other things some complained about: some phones have a pretty picky microSD connector - it disappears sometimes until a power cycle (I didn't experience anything like this). It also apparently doesn't have 3G (HSDPA?), just the EGPRS variant, and the camera is *very* low resolution for recording movies. The sound quality is somewhat worse than my old one, though that's not just subjective, but easily changing with times.

Other good points include the display, mp3 player, microSD expansion, bluetooth (hey, it's my first bluetooth phone), including A2DP -- though it quite often skips similarly as an old record, but the convenience is overwhelming :)

Battery time is also fine for me, it can go on all day of listening to mp3s via bluetooth -- but this is getting to be almost an A2DP review now, so I'll stop. :)

Derek Fowler said...

Thanks for the comment Janos.

The 6300 is a great phone and you're right that it has enough multi-tasking ability. The multi-tasking of the 6680 is useful but can be very annoying because I'm used to quitting applications by pressing the hang-up key however on the Symbian that just takes you back to the home screen leaving the app running in the background (hold down the menu key on a Symbian phone to see the running apps). To quit properly you have to navigate to the "Quit" menu item in the application.

You're also right about the slowness. A Symbian phone is great so long as the handset has a decent processor on board - the 6680 doesn't.

The thing I think I'd really miss about the Symbian however is the selecting of text, cutting and pasting feature. I've found that invaluable for writing texts and e-mails.

Danny Tuppeny said...

I used to always go for some sort of PDA (usually an XDA), but after having them for about 3 years (because I could write .NET for them!) and never actually using them for anything more than a phone, I went for a "normal phone" this time.

I picked the Sony Ericsson W880i in Silver this time. It's tiny, the battery lasts for ages, and it looks pretty cool :-)