Nokia 7210
Well… as I noted a few days ago, my new mobile phone has arrived. Great phone. Period. I can’t help but to compare it to my dead Sony Ericsson T68i. The phones offer many of the same features; in fact, the only real difference is that the T68i had Bluetooth, but that is really a nonissue as I don’t have Bluetooth on the notebook (I sync using IR).
A small list of some of the best features:
- GPRS
- IR
- FM Tuner
- 12-bit color screen (128×128)
- J2ME (downloadable java applications/games)
- speakerphone
- MMS
- shared memory
This phone is the first Nokia phone to use the new Series 40 operating system instead of the well-known and quite ubiquitous Simplex UI found in all of their other phones. In all honesty, I can’t say that I’ve found anything glaringly ‘wrong’ with the phone in the last few days. The response time on the menus is incredible. This was especially noticeable when sending SMS messages (much better than the T68i in this area).
The loudspeaker is one of my favorite features. I’ve become quite accustomed to not having to hold the phone up to my ear as my land line phone has a speakerphone built into it as well.
The shared memory feature is really awesome, especially for someone like me. For those not familiar with this concept, it is just the idea that all of the programs within the phone share the same memory pool. If one program gives up some memory, then that memory is available for other programs. So, for instance, since I never use non-vibrating rings, I have NO use for all of the new-fangled polyphonic ring tones. I just delete them and automagically open up more space for images, java games, e-mails, etc.
The thing that really won me over was the initial sync that I did with my notebook through IR. To make the point here, with the T68i, the initial sync took close to 30 minutes. I moved over 6 months of future schedule entries and ~200 contacts. All subsequent syncs moved as slow but since there wasn’t as much information to move over, it wasn’t as bad. Regardless, it was simply unacceptable to sit there and literally have to watch each entry go by like it was racing the ketchup out of the bottle. The worst part is when it would just ‘die’ mid-sync and you’d have to start over again (which sometimes required a reboot of the phone). Anyways, enough of that. On to the EXCELLENT sync time with the 7210. The initial sync took, I kid you not, no more than 1 minute. It was insane. Actually, I thought it screwed up and so I checked it out. It moved everything over just fine. All syncs since the first one have taken ~10 seconds. Amazing and how it SHOULD be.
I could go on talking forever about all kinds of other small little features that make my day but I don’t have the time. I’m VERY impressed with the phone and plan to have it for quite a while (Don’t laugh! I had the T68i for ~6 months, I can do it again).
In other news today… LORD OF THE FRIGGIN’ RINGS tonight!