OPEN

How satisfying to simply discover the potential of technology that you’ve literaly been carrying around with you.

A week or so back Vodafone was kind enough to replace my Motorola Razr after we complained about a problem.* The Nokia 6280 is excellent for mobile internet – it just seems to work very well, where previous phones never did. Excellent display, the connection seems to be reliable and well, it just works.

So Gmail mobile started to be useful, where it only seemed to connect about half the time before. Then so did the BBC headlines. Then Bloglines mobile version kicked in and suddenly I’ve got a really useful bunch of mobile internet functions on my phone – brilliant.

I was an early enthusiast for the mobile internet. I remember demonstrating the first WAP services to my wife back in 2000 (she was my girlfriend then) and being shamed by her for just how rubbish it was. I later met the person responsible for the phrase “Surf the BT Cellnet”, but he was a client so I resisted the urge for revenge upon his person for the overhyping of the mobile web. Now it really seems to work at last.

I’m really quite impressed with the 6280 generally. And now it’s even started saving me money. I’ve found out that you can get a 2GB mini SD card for about £25 on Amazon. Pop that in and I don’t need to buy another iPod that’s going to die on me (if the perils of my pockets don’t get it then, by all accounts, the battery will die after a year anyway).

Hurrah and hurrah for mobile phones. It even took these quite decent snaps of my cycle commute along Brighton Hove beachfront with the 2.0 megapixel camera that works as soon as you press the camera button on the side.

I know all the uber-geeks are using Nokia N70s as multimedia production studios, but the 6280 is great if one turns up on your free options list for a new contract or an upgrade: take it.

*If you’re interested the problem was the glass on the outside of the handset seemd to be prone to cracking. Comparing mine with other people’s older Razrs you could see the problem – the glass had been made larger in later models. It seemed to crack just being In your pocket. Now I appreciate that my pockets are tough places to be – keys, and clumsiness are going to all conspire against a delicate glass screen, but still struck me as a starnge design choice to say the least.

It was a rubbish phone anyway. Nothing seemed to work quite as it should. I hadn’t had a Motorola for about five years for a very simple reason – the last one I’d had was a poor device. Poor navigation, design the works. The Razr came as a standard corporate issue with the new job and I’ll admit I was seduced by its looks.

But the menus, the predictive text, the internet browser – all of it was quite poor. Especially when compared with the Nokia 6280. Ah, how good to have a Nokia again.

: : Update: yes the photos don’t look that great – but they do on my PC. Blame Live Writer or my own ineptitude, as you see fit.