v-s.net v0.6

Tuesday, 10:46 am in Geeking

I love my brick. Like, ohmigawd words cannot describe. Yes, it’s huge, though it’s mostly thick more than anything else, unless it’s opened out. But even then, all that means is that the keyboard is of a usable size, which was one of the things I didn’t like about the Nokia that was my other option (I forget the model). Unless you’re activley typing, you don’t need to open the phone out anyway; I have no idea where the mic is, but you can answer calls with the phone closed, which is cool. The swivel action is a little weird and takes a bit of getting used to, but it’s all okay because it plays a metallic shiing when it’s opened. Oh yeah baby.

I remember thinking when I bought it that I wouldn’t use it as an mp3 player; it has about 470 meg of onboard memory. What the shop assistant happily neglected to tell me was that by default it also comes with a 512 meg memory stick, which promptly got filled up with mp3s last night. Well, not exactly ‘promptly’ since anyone who’s ever owned a Sony MD will know how ‘quality’ their software is (not to mention the weird fact that running the connection application in the background on my PC causes my internet connection to drag to a halt, though Norton AntiVirus has the same effect, so who knows). I also found the headset kind of awkward to get started. I’m not sure if I just got a shit one, but it’s very difficult to get it to detect and turn on once it’s plugged into the phone. Other than that, the earplugs are comfortable and I’d rate the sound quality as being slightly better than my MD. The external speaker is not so great, but then again, it is a phone, not a stereo (and there’s actually a desk-stand speaker thing you can plug the Walkman series phones into).

The main reason I got a SE again is that I like their phone OS. The w900i is a slightly more fancy version of the one I had on my z600, I guess because the screen is bigger (in resolution at least; not sure about physically). Though I think SE is getting a bit ahead of itself with it’s animated desktop stuff, though; the animation runs very jerkily, so while it’s kind of cool for a while though it’s going to drive framerate freaks berzerk. I wonder how hard the themes are to make; one of the things I loved about the z600 was making custom themes for it.

The high-res screen means the w900i has a few cool chrome-ish features, like overlay context menus (including a copy/paste feature) and the fact that it displays the first line of text in an SMS as well as the title. Very useful for those ten thousand messages from Optus letting me know I’ve missed calls (did they leave a message? did they not?). All the text and icons are sleek and scream Look at me, I’m high res!

The keylock, incidentally, is a little toggle switch thing on the side (a la the ‘hold’ buttons Walkmans have had for years). Very, very good idea. Plus the phone has an option to auto-lock the keys if you want, which is good for people like me used to clamshells (the number keypad is internal, but there are just enough keys on the outside to really shit everyone in your phonebook off).

Oh, and the thing has not one but two cameras. The main camera is 2 megapixels (with a flash, which also has a funny morse-code ‘SOS’ feature… well, funny until you have to use it, I guess) and seems to work pretty well, even in dark conditions (I was, er, taking photos of the walls and shit last night before bed). There’s also a little camera on the front of the phone for videoconferencing, but I’m not sure if you can use it for photos or what the res is. Expect lots of photos of stupid things for a while until the novelty wears off.

The other thing about my new phone, of course, is that I’m on a plan for the first time in ever. Unfortunatley this gives me a bunch of ugly and unremovable (?) Optus Zoo branding shit (one of the desktop shotcuts is bound to some online feature I don’t have, the icon for which is horrendously ugly). The first month’s bill is going to be fun; I used the phone to send an email yesterday, just because I could. It wasn’t even a real email, either, just a test. $5 for something I deleted five minutes later. Oh well.

So yeah, phone; fun. Very cool, you should all buy them. Now I should probably pretend to go do some more work or something.

• Mood » woophone!
• Music » LUXT, "Mary Megalodon"