Extenuating Circumstances

Ian Betteridge is having a phone conundrum – he can’t decide whether he wants to carry around a Blackberry Pearl or a Nokia N73 as his day-to-day phone.

I’m quite convinced now that I’m sort of some strange edge case in terms of my phone needs/wants/desires, but having seen Ian’s post, I’m a little more reassured that I’m not the only person occupying this particular space.

Like Ian, I want something that has good, high-speed data, so that means 3G. I’m not really prepared to put up with something like EDGE. That rules out all the Blackberries, unfortunately. I also want a good(ish) camera – at least, one that can punt decent photos to Flickr, or ones that are good enough for me to be able to take a picture of a label lest I forget what it was I was supposed to buy the next time I stepped into a Sainsbury’s.

So yes, the Nokia phones have 3G. They’re good on the data front. I also want a keyboard, or at least a non-T9 text input method, so that rules out Blackberries again, and also rules out the majority of Nokias apart from, say, the E61. Which I’ve got, and which we know I don’t like, and leaves the E61i, which, well, let’s just say it’s probably just got a camera tacked on to it and a slightly less-shit firmware.

I don’t want to have two phones. I just want one phone, that will do a few things well. Not even really well. Just well. I mean well enough not to annoy me on a daily basis.

• Take pictures
• Read email
• For bonus points, IMAP IDLE
• Have a moderately good web browser (Safari, I’m looking at you)
• Threaded SMS messaging
• A contacts/address book that doesn’t suck
• Enough memory so if I install native/Java apps, I don’t have to keep closing them all the time

See? That wasn’t too hard, was it?