Mobile phone

I think it was Tuck who joked by saying I better change my phone before I start teaching in Singapore, as all students would be laughing when they see me answering my old Nokia 8310. I had no concern about it, I rally think that I was using the good old classic, maybe even something that one day might be a worthy collectors/museum item :)

Though, unfortunately my classic developed some problems during my stay in Croatia: it couldn’t recharge properly and the slight shake would shut it down. On the bright side, if you’re goanna have your phone die, then it’s a good thing that it happens on the way to Singapore, a place of cheep communication (relative to Australia/Croatia). It turns out that here, plans provide a much better talk/sms value, plus you get a new phone for cheep, then the prepaid options. But wait there’s more, the Poly has a corporate agreement with Starhub, one of the telcos here, so the staff gets 30% discount - and everybody likes a nice discount.

So for $20 a month I get 160 outgoing minutes, free incoming calls, 100 SMSs and the new phone for $98. It was bit difficult to forecast the usage pattern, but they give you an option to start cheep and upgrade, charge free, to a higher plan should you require it later. Considering the amount of mobile phones per kilometre square in this country, it's no wonder that the price of communication is rather cheep here. Talk for 15c/min, and send SMS/MMS for 5c.

Apart from using a ‘stone age’ Siemens for a month in Croatia, this is the first time I’m using non Nokia phone, and all is great. Love all the new features that found their way onto a small sized phone (aka, form factor) in the last 5 yeas, and especially its ease of use -> me a happy customer.

The only disappointed I came across (so far) was the other night when I started transferring numbers from the old phone to the new one. Using them both simultaneously, there was a big difference in the way the phones felt while pressing the buttons. Comparable to the old one, the new phone felt clumsy, toy like, cheep…

Wondering if that is just the case for this particular phone, or if it can be generalised to the whole brand, or it’s the case for all models that are on the lower end of the price scale…?

Update, after using the phone for few days:

The calendar on these new colour screened phones is (almost) great. Why my one doesn't have an option to set an event as reoccurring one (e.g. bBall every Tuesday evening) is puzzling... Guess having an option for 'remind me later' would be asking for a bit too much.

It would be nice to have an option to reply to SMS including the original text. I figured a way to (sort of) overcome the problem by using the forward option.

The message alert tone is to quiet. When trying it out within the settings it sounds great. Though once a msg is received you can barely hear it. You are probably thinking why don't you just increase the ring tone volume, well if I was to increase it any more the tone for incoming call would jeopardize well being of my hearing. There must be something somewhere to set this properly.

Any pointers on any of these from SE users are more then welcome!

And lastly the good news, after putting in some tape below the back cover (between the cover and the battery) the fit of the cover is significantly improved – the good old sellotape.

Phone + Mp3 player

Few years back, when I got an iPod, I was talking about my wishful thinking to have a phone integrated with it (note the order)... surely that's gonna happen one of these days. Although Apple did get iTunes into Motorolas, I wasn't impressed. My thinking was more along the lines of what the guys at Sony are doing lately by squeezing the whole walkman, not just a music application, into the phone. This latest offering, Me like, a lot: 4GB, touch screen, yet still pretty small form factor. If only the calendar is on par with the one in the Outlook...

...or Phone + camera (update, 28 sep)

I've first seen the 3.2M camera on the phone that my cousin Daniel was using when we met in Croatia this summer. I was rather imprssed with the phone that had integrated camera which is as good as my digital camera, it's smaller then my camera, and ...err... it's not actually a camera, it's a phone.

A few years back, while I was studying subject on HCI there was lots of talk about which devices should be bundled together to create a mobile device such is a smart phone, and the current trend by SE and Nokia seems to be to emphesise either a music playing functionality or a picture taking ability of their phones.

So the question becomes, which option is the better one. The answer comes from that HCI subject, as another question: 'what do you need it for'. So for my current situation where I want to preserve and share the experiences, such as the non-planed walk along the river, the camera phone is more suitable. Whereas, once the life routine kicks in, as I had it in Melbourne during the past few years, an MP3 player becomes (to a person like me) an essential traveling companion. On that note, I should mention that my iPod has not moved from it's docking since arriving here.