Also on Friday, in a shocking turn of events, I bought a new mobile 



buy the phone plus a SIM card that you're going to throw in the bin for 


Suffice it to say, I how have a completely working but unused SIM card 
as well as a new phone. ;-)

The phone is a Nokia 2760. (It was the only flip phone in the entire 
shop that said Nokia on it.) I say "phone"... In truth it is of course a 
telephone. You use it to make phone calls. However, it seems to be under 
the sad delusion that it's a video camera, or perhaps some sort of MP3 
player... Very odd.

Still, at least it's a Nokia. Among other things, that means it has a 
menu system that normal human beings can actually, like, *use*. With 
stuff grouped together *logically*, and even in a sensible ordering, 
with the most commonly used stuff at the top and so on. It also means 
you aren't forced to use that retarded "predictive text" thing that my 
last phone had and you couldn't get rid of.

In addition, this phone has a colour display. I'm not really sure how 
that's useful, but it's certainly more pretty. It even appears that I 
could change the background image on it to... say... some POV-Ray 
creation. That is, if I had some way of getting the data into the phone. 
(It looks like the only way to do that would be to possess some kind of 
Bluetooth interface device.)

Best of all, you can adjust the volume on this phone to the point where 
phone calls are actually *audible*! You can *hear* what the other person 
is saying to you! I cannot begin to emphasize how useful this is. My old 
phone had a volume adjustment, but it didn't go up nearly high enough. 
You can hear it in a library, but if there is even a tiny amount of 
background noise, you just can't hear a damn word.

Actually, this phone has a "speaker phone" mode, where anybody within a 
few feet can hear it. Which is an interesting idea. Just don't 
accidentally trigger this feature while trying to use the phone 
normally! ;-)

The phone is roughly the same size as my old one. Maybe slightly bigger. 
But it's thinner. And it doesn't have an arial sticking out of it to 
prevent you removing it from your pocket. And it actually appears to be 
fairly solidly built, so it's hopefully not going to *break* in five 
minutes flat.

My old phone had such a flimsy hinge that it eventually wore out. And 
the arial soon snagged on things and got cracked and broken. And now 
much of the silver paint has worn off, revealing the off-white plastic 
underneith. And worst of all, the battery life has declined to the point 
where the phone is nearly unusable. My new phone looks a tad more 
solidly built, so at least it shouldn't fall apart quite so quickly.

Well anyway, at the end of the day, it's a telephone. You use it to make 
and receive telephone calls. (And the odd SMS.) Unless to social life 
takes a dramatic upward turn, I doubt I'll ever use this device all that 
much. Still, at least it plays Soduku. (No, I'm not kidding...)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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