Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

I decided yesterday to swap my old Nokia 6310i for a Nokia 6230i. This was a hard decision that's taken a long time, because I'm quite attached to the 6310i. It's a long phone, which fits well in my larger hands and makes the keypad easier to use, and it doesn't have all these modern folderols - camera, video, colour screen, MP3 player, FM radio and so on - that I don't really need. OK, the MP3 player is cool, and being able to have a ghastly scream or the "Radiophonic Stomach" effect off the Goon Show as a ring tone has been an objective of mine for years, but they haven't been make or break decisions.

What finally brought me to upgrade was the keypad, specifically it's gradual deterioration into senility. The 8 and 0 keys now no longer always register, and texting away to find out that it's misspelled something because it didn't know to put a space in there, despite you asking nicely, is really a pain. The desire to change over to a new, cheaper phone plan was another way to entice my sentimental side to go for the new and the swish.

The big disappointment was having the retail Optus outlet that I got it from unable to transfer the old 6310i's phone memory into the new phone. I have to go home, transfer the data off the old phone (presumably using the old crappy Nokia PC-only software, because I haven't got the Linux bluetooth utils working yet), swap the sim over, and swap it back. I have to do this because no sim card yet invented has thought of the idea of having an address book with multiple contact details per entry. Get with the 19th Century here, guys, people worked out how to do this with paper and pencil.

The minor disappointment was the keypad. The keys feel a lot more wobbly and you have to push them fairly squarely in order to feel like they aren't going to spring off the phone like a particularly badly made calculator. From observation, I would say that the old 6310i's keys were rounded so you put force on the middle, whereas these are flat and rectangular so it's easier to get a fingernail near the edge. Gee, that's a feature. I'm glad it looks better than it feels to use...

So I've updated its wallpaper, changed the ring tone a bit, send a text message and made a phone call. I still haven't found the games yet, which is important for me when waiting for buses or whatnot. And unfortunately the 512MB MMC card and case will come next week. Still, I haven't played with the bluetooth earpiece I got for it, so that may be my next little bit of fun.