milliAmp

A while ago I decided to use my mobile phone for what I wanted to, as often as I needed and not worry much about the costs associated with it. This gave me a better estimate of how much I would normally spend instead of having it biased by how much I had left in my prepay balance. Recently, I investigated how much I was spending and figured out that it is pretty close to $50 a month. So I decided to sign up for Vodafone’s TXTer Plan. It is $40 a month and includes more minutes than I currently use and more text messages than I currently send so it has a bit of growing room. The key for me was that it was less than I was currently spending. The early termination fee, if I should terminate in the first 12 months (of the 24 month contract) is only $160. Along with the plan is a $130 3G Handset subsidy which I used to purchase a Sony Ericsson v640i.

If I cancel and sell the phone at the 6-month mark, if I sell it for $30 less than the purchase price, I work out even as I would’ve been saving $10-a-month on prepay costs.

Anyway, that is enough about the contract, more about the phone. Now, I had a set of criteria for a new phone and a budget so my options were cut down for me quite well. Here are the reasons for choosing this phone:

Awesome Bluetooth support

It supports more Bluetooth services than anything except the Symbian-based Nokias. I use a Bluetooth integration program on my Mac called BluePhoneElite for storing text messages, sending and receiving text messages through my laptop, call logs and proximity actions. This phone had no known issues on their compatibility page and had ticks next to all the functions. No other phone in my price bracket had such good support so that was a definite tick.

Price

This phone dropped to $299 when I got it ordered so that made it very affordable ($160 after the new handset subsidy). I couldn’t justify more than $250 on a phone so that meant I gave it a tick for price.

Size

This thing is small and not very heavy. Until recently all the 3G-capable phones available here have been very bulky and ugly so the small factor of this one was pleasing.

The Style

I really don’t like flip phones, they always feel like they’re going to break when I shut them and to open them you have to either have to use two hands of jam your finger between the halves and flick upwards. It just feels like its putting unnecessary wear-and-tear on the thing. This phone is “candy-bar” style which means it is a solid, one-piece unit.

Colours

The red and black version of this phone is nice but feels a little bit tacky. What I wanted was the “Havana Gold” version which I think looks awesome.

Niggles

There are a couple of things which bug me, they aren’t deal-breakers but they are things which I think should be improved.

• You can’t change the function of the top left and top right buttons. You can reassign the directions of the navigation key but not those two select buttons. You can on Nokias like the Nokia 6085 and on the Motorola RIZR Z3 which I had before this. I don’t know whether this is a restriction added by Vodafone so that you can’t remove their shiny “Vodafone Live!” logo from the Home screen or if it simply was never a feature of this phone but it is a little annoying as I’m unlikely to want to use Vodafone Live and I’d prefer it to be something like “Bluetooth”.
• Text size in the menus. It is quite big, I’d prefer to be able to shrink it like on a Nokia 6085 where you can choose the text size for different sections.

I’ll post another blog entry later about the HID-compliant Bluetooth Remote Control Program Sony Ericssons come with which can be used to control a Mac or PC and the complementing Desktop Application for creating new remote control sets. I’ve set one up now to work exactly as I want and can perform a host of functions straight from my phone (things like controlling music).