New toy, Nokia 7610

Or rather, I got a Nokia 7610 as a much needed replace­ment for my old Nokia 3650. I should prob­a­bly have went for some­thing more pow­er­ful (I could defi­nately do with wifi etc.) but I really felt like own­ing a phone again and as I’m car­ry­ing my Power­book pretty much always, I guess I’ll give this combo a try.

Thor­ough reviews can be found at Rus­sell Beattie’s and at Mobile­Burn, so I’ll just chip in with the few thoughts I have so far:

Form fac­tor! Oh yes. It’s not that much larger than the iPod mini (which I also recently got my hands on, but that’s another and really unin­ter­est­ing story) so I now own a real phone; one of those things you can hold in one hand, have in your pocket while rid­ing a bike and take out with­out being stared at as if you either have no sense of taste (which might, hov­ever, be true) or are really geeky since you’re car­ry­ing what has to be a feature-rich gad­get — who would oth­er­wise bring along some­thing so ugly (which is true). It isn’t really that small but when you com­pare to the old 3650 it feels half the size…

Feature-wise it isn’t that much of an upgrade though. The 3650, while huge and not pretty, had quite a lot of nice fea­tures. Apart from the megapixel cam­era and the pos­si­bil­ity of shoot­ing video up to 10 min­utes, not much has changed. It does come with more appli­ca­tions, but apart from the included Opera (nice one) I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet. It’s much faster and the UI has improved quite a bit. It basi­cally just seems more solid.

Sync’ing: I’ve pre­vi­oulsy writ­ten about the lack of iSync’ing, which unfor­tu­nately still is true. And the accom­pa­ny­ing PC soft­ware sucks ass as always, although the USB cable prob­a­bly is a good thing. Don’t know, haven’t tried is — Blue­tooth is all sta­ble now, not like my old phone, so so far I’m quite happy trans­fer­ring stuff that way.

What’s new is the video options. You can shoot up to 10 min­utes of video which is quite a lot once you actu­ally do it. The qual­ity is noth­ing spe­cial as you might expect, but it works and might prove to be good for lit­tle exper­i­ments. The phone is almost square allow­ing it to stand by itself which is a neat lit­tle detail. I did a lit­tle test­ing — “View from inside TjiliPop on a rainy day” (tjilipop.mov) — prob­a­bly the most bor­ing piece of footage since Die schönsten Bahn­strecken Europas, but it’s 10 min­utes long. My Quick­time Pro skills might have caused the .mov file con­verted from the orig­i­nal .3gp to end up larger than it should have, but hey ho…

I might update this post if and when I dis­cover good and bad stuff about my new friend. So far I’m just really pleased to have a func­tion­ing phone — that’s nowhere near the sad plas­ticy feel­ing I’ve bitched about before…