Proving the Obviously Untrue

Just before we went on our family holiday, I went with Karen to look at new phones for me and for her. Karen liked the look of the phone, but wanted it in a specific colour and was prepared to wait to order that. I decided I liked the look of the Nokia N95. The iPhone is not an attractive prospect for me, apparently it's a poor phone, a poor camera and there even seem to be issues with its sound. So no amount of astounding user interface makes up for that. The Samsung Omnia, coming out soon, looks really interesting but it runs Windows CE, and that's a big minus for me. I'm very interested in the OpenMoko FreeRunner neo which can, among other things run my favourite operating system Debian, after the great work done at debconf. Apparently it's not however a useful and reliable phone, which is definitely a minus too. Maybe next generation, and I can't hack everything at once.

The Nokia N95 runs Symbian which is a plus. I was warned that the battery life was poor and given the choice between the conventional model with an 8 Gb card, and the N95 8Gb which has the memory totally internalised. The former also has a shutter cover for the lens, which was discarded in the latter to allow a larger battery. I wanted the cover. I got the handset from Phones4u and it's an O2 handset, who I have my contract with. It took a while to put the order though, so they gave me £50 for waiting. So, seriously, I got the free upgrade, the memory card, a screen protector and £50 in my hand. The bundled accessories are good, a USB cable (like the much criticised N800 it doesn't seem to do charging) a car charger, a tiny regular charger (same as the N800 actually) and the usual ear phones, with a small control panel on a cable for the sound.

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