Just a Gwai Lo fun within prescribed limits [?]

Alex: “The N70 may not be particularly impressive to my international readers, but we have essentially nothing comparable Stateside. That the phone has a decent camera, wi-fi, a quality web browser (based on the same code Safari uses), FM radio, good media playback, and is extensible by both usual Symbian means and a special version of the Python programming language is a package totally unmatched here. Our “smart phones” are clunky PDAs with mobiles grafted on to them running crippled versions of Windows. No thanks.”

Alex goes on to bemoans the increasing gap between American cell phone technology. Not really knowing much about it, I rely on ex-telco employees Boris and Roland to do the talking and to point out which phones I should want. Roland has been writing extensively about his Nokia N70, which he got as part of Nokia's blogger outreach program—see Kami Huyse's 5 blogger relations cultural facts to help run a successful program—and thanks to him I've been writing about and posting photos and video from my Nokia 7610. Alex wants to hand money over to Nokia to give him the N70, and I similarly want to hand money over to buy the N91. Not that I'd be able to do much with it without a respectable data plan, but it has a wifi modem in it, so I could go to the second office, buy a coffee to assuage the guilt of using their free wireless access, and upload whatever media I had recorded to my favourite sharing services. As Alex points out, though, the lack of good infrastructure and decent plans makes it hard for me to interact with my environment and stay in touch with the people I care about. Or at least, not as easy as I'd like.

Thanks Roland for giving me his Nokia 7610. I lost all my old text messages from the reformat, but the phone has a camera—or does the camera have a phone?—and that means I should be able to take some pictures of random things. I don't have an unlimited data plan, which would be crazy delicious, so uploading them to a photo sharing service will mean waiting until I sync with my computer. It also takes 10 seconds of video with audio, so that should be fun.