Looking for a new phone
A year ago, I bought a Nokia 6708, largely for the stylus input and Chinese dictionary. I was pretty happy with it at first, but I have to say that I gradually became more and more dissatisfied. It blue-screened quite a bit, frequently hung and needed a reboot, and regularlt seemed to just turn itself off. It took ages to boot. The lack of letters on the keyboard gradually became a real nuisance. I found that I hardly ever used the Chinese dictionary. The USB connection to my Windows XP laptop was really fussy, and hardly ever seemed to work, so I couldn’t transfer files. The camera quality was pretty lousy. I began to think about getting a replacement.
Then two weeks ago I accidentally left it in a taxi. I’ve filed lost property reports, but it hasn’t shown up and probably never will. I’ve been using my old Nokia 6108, but it’s really obsolete now - especially as I can’t transfer my contacts from my laptop, and there’s no way I’m going to type them all in manually! I had been planning to hang on a few months until Meizu MiniOne is released, but now I can’t wait that long.
Actually, the timing is a bit serendipitous. I’d also been thinking that I need:
- a music player. The Zling Nax (Chinese clone of an iPod Nano) that I bought as an experiment is actually pretty crap, with terrible battery life and sound.
- mobile internet. The 6708 was actually internet-enabled, but my current phone plan doesn’t include data transfer; I signed up for this plan when I first came to Singapore in 2002! My contract has long since expired, but I’ve never got around to changing anything
I’m even more convinced that I need mobile internet after reading this O’Reilly Radar article by Peter Brantley. The points he makes about the way the Millennials (he just says “younger generation”) work - constantly online, social, self-organising, flat hierarchy - are spot on, and remind me of things I was thinking about quite a bit last year: how is this going to work out in Asia? The cultural changes and power shifts that are being driven by ubiquitous multimedia technology, social tools, and mobile internetmean that it’s not just about management styles any more. Here in Singapore, the government is reaching an uneasy modus vivendi with the internet-enabled voice of its citizens, but I’m not sure how it’s going to work out. During the recent protests in Myanmar, we’ve seen how important mobile phone cameras and internet access were - to the extent that the junta were forced to simply cut off all internet access to the outside world. China, of course, will be watching all of this very carefully indeed. However, I’m straying into what’s going to be a separate blog post!
So: I need a new phone, mobile internet, and an mp3 player. To get internet access, I need to sign a new contract. If I sign a new contract, I get discounts on a number of handsets, one of which is the Nokia N73 “Music Edition” which, to be honest, seems to cover all bases, except that it doesn’t have wifi… Seems to be a good choice, though, at S$368, which is what M1 are offering…
Saturday, October 13th, 2007
