My first smartphone
3 weeks ago I bought my first smartphone, a Nokia e61. Whilst I like to keep abreast of current technology (or at least try), mobile phones are something that I’m not too bothered about. I rarely use my mobile phone as I can organise all my social events via the web through the likes of Facebook, sharing Google Calendars and various instant messenger clients. I also don’t have a mobile phone contract, I’m on a pay-as-you-go plan.
For these reasons it was something of a revolution when I bought the Nokia e61. It was so different to my old phone, an aged Sagem myX-6. It didn’t have Bluetooth, no MP3 playback, WAP1.0 not WAP2.0 and a poor camera that might as well have not been there. The e61 on the otherhand has Bluetooth, MP3 playback, WAP2.0, WiFi, USB connection, and extendable memory via MiniSD amongst other features I am still to explore.
So why did I get a new phone? Surely I won’t use half of these features? Well as a web designer/developer I thought it was getting necessary for me to get up-to-date, and whilst the e61 is hardly brand-spanking-new it is somewhat close to the what the latest phones are capable off. The phone allows me to retrieve and send emails without me being sat in front of a PC via WiFi and GPRS (though that can get quite expensive). I can also surf the web at pace through the WiFi and make VOIP calls. In essence it’s a mobile office.
At work I can sync my phone with my work PC should I need to update my calendar or contacts on my phone, and I can do the same at home. With the recent release of Google Calendar Sync, I can sync my Microsoft Outlook calendar with Google Calendar and my phone’s calendar allowing me to retrieve my agenda wherever I am in the world, and with more and more Google products being ‘ported’ for mobile use I am moving more of my life over to Google Apps allowing me to retrieve data through my phone.