LOL! It's not that wondrous, it's just that I've got a couple of questions from people wondering what kind of a mobile I've got. First of all, since I'm Norwegian I have to make sure you understand I bought this phone because I needed a new one, not because I change phones every three months. OK?

My new mobile is the Siemens CX65. I used to have the SL55 but it was crap. Well, not crap, the software was very good and the phone itself was a catch, but the size was sufficient for someone with tiny fingers, and since I don't appreciate giving mobile phones to toddlers, I'd actually advise against this phone. I would still stick with Siemens, though, because I've grown quite fond of them this past year since I bought the SL55. AND it's a big hassle to learn yet another SMS layout. ;-) My first mobile phone, back in '97, was a Motorola brick which had one line of text and no communication between the phonebook and SMS messages, meaning you'd have to remember the number of whomever you were texting. It also had just two volume settings: Off and really loud. I kept that phone for two and a half years, before switching to the then very popular Nokia 3210, a few weeks before the price plummeted. Oh, well. It still works, although it needs a battery which probably costs more than the phone is worth. That's why I switched phones again last summer; soon the Siemens SL55 came home with me and we had a passionate love affair until last week when I dumped it for the younger model CX65. ;-)

It's quite impressive, this little thing. The screen is what is the most attractive part of the whole phone; it's got 65,536 colours and room for nine lines of text in addition to both a menu at the bottom and a "title indicator" line at the top of the screen. I was afraid this phone was going to annoy me, as it took a couple of days for the battery to become fully charged. It seems to have stabilised now. Due to the large colour screen, however, the battery needs to be either powerful or recharged quite often. I'm hoping for the first option.

The camera resolution is 640x480, which is crap for a digital camera you bring with you on holiday, but very good on today's mobile phone market (can you tell this is my line of work?). You can even make film snippets, but they're really no more than snippets because of the storage limit of 11MB (of which about 40% is used by pre-installed software, photos and sounds.)

Thanks to the Mobile Phone Manager program available from Siemens, you can quite easily move photos, tunes and messages between your PC and the phone (you'll need an inexpensive cable, though). Ever since polyphonic ringtones were introduced a few years back, it's become very easy to make your current favourite tune the ringtone for your mobile, and the MPM programme lets you copy them to the phone without having to download them from some greedy company. Just find the tune on the 'Net (ever heard of MIDI?) - they're everywhere, really - and copy it to the phone and hey presto! You'll be able to hear your favourite tune whenever your phone rings. I'm also VERY pleased that I can copy my favourite photos from the computer to my phone. This way I can have the same photo as a background on my PC as well as on my phone (although in a smaller scale, naturally.) Yum.

The calendar feature has become an important part of my daily life this past year, and I can't see how a scatterbrain like myself would ever do without its reminder function. ;-) The downside is that for some wicked reason it's not possible to synchronise the calendar with Outlook's calendar, even though its little brother, the M65, built on the same hardware and much of the same software, can do that quite well. We're hoping for an update soon, but that may never happen. Thanks to the infrared interface I can, however, move info between the phone and my PDA, which is a nifty feature.

There's been a leap in mobile technology since my first mobile phone back in 1997 and it's constantly evolving, so I'm pretty sure what impresses me now is laughable in a few years' time. Bigger, better, faster, right?

Disclaimer: I do not work for Siemens. :-)

Current track: Roxette - It Hurts

Labels: technology