This past week has been a week of gadgets. My Orange contract ran out a couple of weeks ago, so I was due an upgrade from my SPV E200 (more on that monstrosity later). I've been with Orange for 6 years now and although I've found them fine for voice their data performance has been patchy. I'm not a heavy user, but it's annoying to not be able to rely on it at all. People Who Know seem to rate Vodafone as the best UK data network so I went looking to see what they could offer. At first the Nokia 6230i looked like the best option, but then I noticed the Sony Ericsson v600i (which I think is just a Vodafone branded K800i). This is a 3G phone that isn't a lot bigger than the 6230i and still manages to be smaller than the SPV.

So it arrived Tuesday week ago, but unfortunately as I was porting my number from Orange it only became active this Tuesday. Bit odd as at first it worked for outgoing calls but incoming were still going to Orange, but it sorted itself out within a few hours. Whole process was reasonably smooth except for a complete inability to order online if you want to port a number; I ended up having to ring up. How retro.

Anyway. Kathy disappeared off to her parents yesterday, so I made my first video call last night (she has a phone on 3 as mentioned previously). It's actually pretty neat; jerky, but enough to tell facial expressions that are held for longer than a moment. I dread to think how much it cost and I doubt I'd use it in general, but it's Pretty Cool.

Then, while fiddling with it on the way to London today (a joyous day in the datacentre) I discovered it does IMAPS. And actually checks the cert. I'm impressed. Now I'm on my way home I had a fiddle with getting dialup over Bluetooth working and that seemed relatively straightforward too.

So far the downsides I've found are that it really doesn't want to talk OBEX to the telecom/ directory, which I understand to be how you pull the phonebook and things off the phone. I don't know if this is something I'm doing or if I'll have more luck with SyncML. The other problem is a lack of decent games on it. I want something simple and addictive to pass the time on trains. There are a couple of demo games, but both a bit too complicated for instant addiction. Brett tells me sending Java apps should be a simple matter of an OBEX upload, so I'll try that later and see what I can find.

All in all I'm happy with it so far. We'll see how I feel after the first month I guess, when the bill's hit. :)