Very excited – new phone in the post. SHould be here Weds.

I have to say that ever since I strayed from the One True Way (Sony Ericsson) I’ve been a bit disappointed with my phones. I got a Samsung P300 (weird calculator phone) several years ago, which was very cool in terms of size, battery life, and features – but a pig to use because the UI was horrendous. Right up the day I retired it, I often pressed the wrong button in response to a UI prompt.

I then jumped ship to 3 (largely because of free ‘unlimited’ Internet) and got an INQ1 (the Facebook phone), which in many ways I like a lot. The Facebook/Skype/Messenger/Phonebook integration is very nice – but it is also very irritating. Firstly it’s S…L….O……W. I mean really slow. It’s not unusual for the whole phone to freeze up for 10 or 15 seconds, sometimes in the middle of a text message. You can never be fully confident about whether you’ve pressed a button or not – and then of course it suddenly catches up with itself and you end up phoning Barack Obama, or something.

Then there’s the Facebook integration, which is good in many ways, but then you actually try to do something that seems obvious – and you can’t! For instance, look at the Facebook homepage. “James has been tagged in an album”. Try and click on it to see the album – no can do. Have to either try and find it via the “Photos” tab, or via the contact’s profile who posted it.

I like that it’s an MP3 player, and the music reproduction is fine. But the playlist management is awful. Got all my toons in one ma-husive playlist. It takes literally 2 minutes to go from selecting it to being ready to play the first track. And the shuffle is appalling – it’s not unusual to hear the same song 2 or 3 times in a few hours, and then not hear others on the list for weeks (and we’re talking several Gb of music here).

So anyway, I’m in the “upgrade” zone, and I’ve decided to return to the nest, and plumped for an SE W995 (one the “walkman” phones). I’ve had my eye on a walkman phone for a while, and this one ticks all the boxes I currently want to tick in a phone:

  • Quad band, 3G
  • Camera
  • Wifi
  • GPS
  • FM Radio
  • Java (goes without saying really)
  • E-mail & browser
  • MP3, with 3.5mm jack

I came very very close to going for an HTC Hero, but it doesn’t have FM radio. Plus I just “get on” with the SE interface. I’ve yet to have a Sony Ericsson I haven’t liked.

I think my next phone will finally replace my aging Palm Tungsten – I don’t think the W995 is quite up to that task yet, maybe the Hero would have been?