Nokia E71

I know I've said it before, but I truly believe that my good ol' Sony Ericsson K750i was the best phone ever made. It was fast, functional and had very little annoying bits to it. However it's important to recognise that this ace phone was from an age where a phone didn't really have to do that much - make calls, manage contacts and perhaps take a decent photo and you were done really. Personally I need a few other bits and bobs including a candybar form factor (moving parts equals wearing out in my opinion) and REAL BUTTONS™ instead of this touch screen nonsense - how else are you supposed to use your phone without looking?

But now you need a phone to do much more than that - mainly because of the Internet factor and being able to communicate and remain connected at all times. Although for many this means a fast data connection and ability to run fancy photo-geotagging applications, for me it means one thing - and that's a QWERTY keyboard. This was the silver bullet for me: no more struggling with crappy T9 implementations placing "of" instead of "me" (or vice versa at times when you needed the opposite), or having to delete and respell garbage that the "intelligent" system thought you meant to write.

In fact my perfect phone would have simply been a faster K800i with a hard keyboard - I just don't need any of that smart Symbian/Winmob/OSX/Android stuff to send emails and text messages. Unfortunately the market for dumb QWERTY phones just doesn't exist, even though you can get dumb touch screen ones.

But even if I did open myself up to considering a smart phone, there still weren't any that cut the mustard - there were either major omissions (like a camera, no matter how poor), or a lack of cutting edge technology (which I realise contradicts the above, but if I'm getting a new phone I may as well have one with HSPDA and GPS, right?).

But then Nokia went and released the E71. A candybar QWERTY phone (already repeatedly mistaken for a Blackberry by some friends) with an okay camera (which appears to be slightly worse than my K800's) and all the bells and whistles I could want? Yes please.

Okay, so I would have to convert to the church of Nokia and their weird way of doing things (what? Still no abstract connection pools? I have to set each application?) but the cost should be worth it. And besides, it's not like I'm going to be using it to do anything but text, mail, surf, instant message, track my running, use Google Maps, blog on the go, take random notes... Hmm, wait a minute. Perhaps this will change the way I do things after all?

Anyway it's fast (no more waiting for menus to catch up with me!), slick and does the job so far. And I can finally type what I want and when I want to without relying on some dumbass typing aid getting in the way. Hooray.