Destroy All Onions!

I am lacking in moral fibre, and finally got myself an iphone this week. I’ve wanted one for months, but O2 decided that I needed to learn the value of patience, and kept me waiting for my contract to finish.

There are a lot of things to like about it.

• Bluetooth works nicely – with my little in ear headset for calls, with the stereo headphones for music, and with the car. I had the stereo headphones with me to the gym tonight, and had a carefree wirefree evening. Great!
• It is a lovely small but functional internet browsing device.
• In addition to my own music and videos, BBC iplayer streams beautifully on it (using wifi), but even on lesser connections it was happy to stream radio in the gym over the internet.
• It’s a terribly clever controller for games. There are some where you turn and twist it in your hands to control things, and others where controls get drawn on the smooth surface and can be as complex or simple as the game requires.
• It has some clever apps, and some useful apps, and some that are both, and some that are neither, but I’ve been impressed so far.
• It has good taste in shuffling! It picked Lee Morgan’s The Sidewinder for me to run too, following by Mark Ronson’s God put a smile on your face. Instrumentals are great to run to, since you don’t have to put any effort into singing along (mainly silently when I’m in public, thank goodness).

A couple of weeks ago I finally got myself a new mobile phone, after much pondering. It’s taken me a little while to get into it, but today clinched it, and I’ve decided that I definitely like it.

It’s a Sony Ericsson C702. For me, it has two key features – it’s a Sony Ericsson, which means it works pretty much the same way as my previous phone (a Sony Ericsson K800), except that it’s got a built-in GPS.

I’ve been tempted to buy a sat-nav for ages, but I’ve been resisting because I don’t often drive to unknown places; however I’ve always remained very keen on the technology. Now that GPS is available in phones (some of the new Nokias, and of course the devil’s own iPhone), it’s even more attractive.

Of course, multi-purpose devices can never work as well as a dedicated single-purpose one. Sat-navs work out where they are very quickly, whereas this one can take quite a while to pick up the satellite signal (a few minutes sometimes). For the first few days, the performance was very poor, but it has improved as it has downloaded more info from the satellites (something called an almanac, apparently). And once it does get locked on, it’s pretty reliable, and works fine inside a car.

I’ve been experimenting with it on my bike, with some success, but today it managed to guide me reliably from Manchester Airport to a meeting in Doncaster, and back again (over 2 and a half hours of driving) with the voice telling me every turn of the way. And since it was just my mobile phone sitting in the car, and not a GPS stuck on the windscreen, I am very impressed. It also still had enough charge to make phone calls, which is also useful for a phone.

I know the camera isn’t as good as the old one was, and in time I’ll probably miss that, but for now, I really like my new phone. 🙂