A New Phone
As many of you know, I had an HTC K-Jam smartphone running Windows Mobile 5 for almost a year. I HATED that phone. At least once a week, I would fling the phone across the front seat of my car while growling, “F***ing phone”, because I had inadvertantly touched the touch screen while attempting to answer an incoming call. The touchscreen touching would result in a disconnected call. Talk about maddening. Windows Mobile 5 works against both the user and the phone. It’s not optimized or streamlined for a mobile platform - even though it claims otherwise. The only reason I stayed with the phone for as long as I did was because of its very nice QWERTY keyboard and my resulting addiction to email and calendaring functions on my phone.
I’ve been in the market for a new phone for quite some time. So, Last week, Peter and I made a quick side trip through downtown Chicago so I could stop by the Nokia flagship store to check out their wares. Bingo!!!!!! Great store, great phones and great salespeople - very personable, very hip, extremely knowledgeable. I walked out of the store with a Nokia E70 smartphone. I think I’m in love. The phone’s design is fabulous -some say it’s a little chunky. But after the K-Jam, I’m o.k. with a pleasingly plump phone. The gullwing foldout keyboard is fabulous - I’m of the opinion that’s it’s the best mobile phone QWERTY keyboard on the market. Extremely well designed and easy to use - even if you have big fingers (or so I’m told).
The Symbian S60 operating system is great - it is a smartphone system but optimized for mobile use. Pretty intuitive and navigation is very straight forward. It’s what a smart high powered mobile operating system should be all about.
The Safari based browser is totally sweet and omigod - it loads fast - even at putzy EDGE speeds. Its default display does a great job of resizing web sites that are not originally mobile friendly and it is really amazing on web sites designed for mobile access. The difference between my E70 and the K-Jam is stunning. My sample site is ESPN’s mobile baseball game-tracker. It’s ten thousand percent better on the E70 than on the K-Jam.
I do admit I had to jump through several hoops to get email up and running. Nokia’s Mail for Exchange (a client that allows your phone to access Outlook email) is very problematic. I could not get it working. From the numerous blogs and helpsites that I visited, it was apparent that I was not the only with the problem. I gave up and tried a different tack - Blackberry Connect for Nokia. We run a corporate Blackberry Server, so we just needed to get me configured on the server side (BES - Blackberry Exchange Server) for Blackberry and away I went. It works like a total charm.
No phone is perfect and the E70 has a few issues - I think number one on my list is that I either have vibrate mode on for everything or nothing. For someone like me who gets an absolute ton of email (about 200 messages a day), you definitely want vibrate notification off on email. But, in regards to incoming phone calls, I like the phone to vibrate before it actually rings. That way you get a chance to grab it before the phone disturbs everyone with a ring. However, if you want vibrate on for incoming phone calls, vibrate is also on for incoming email messages. Ugh. I’ll continue to poke around on this one. I can’t be the only person with this complaint.
The other relatively minor issue I’ve discovered is that Blackberry Connect does not sync contacts via the over-theair interface. You actually have to hook the phone up to the computer and do a hard sync. At first, that sounds totally grim. However, unlike email and calendaring, contact data is not very dynamic. So, I’m o.k. with synching the phone up once or twice a week.
Oh - and speaking of synching, the Nokia PC Suite Sync software is waaaaaaaay better than Microsoft’s Active Sync user application. PC Suite is so simple and it is rock solid.
Needless, to say, at this moment, I’m in the honeymoon phase. But boy, what a great phone!!!!!!
Hello. I am 
I’m afraid I’m one of those people who wants a phone to be a phone and that is all. I like my palm pilot to be separate because the phone lives in the pocket more often than not. Does sound like all of that e-mail vibrating would get you an interesting office name if you carried it in the pocket.
Wanted to let you know that Jeremy was at Yankee Stadium tonight to see them beat you Red Socks. I tried to root for Boston but it just didn’t work. Maybe tomorrow he will see a defeat. Although for his sake I guess the Yankees winning wouldn’t be so bad.