Now, I was never going to get an iPhone – I don’t run Windows or Mac OS, so I wouldn’t have been able to use it anyway. The Palm Pre, whilst much advertised before launch by O2 (and at the time my only non-iPhone upgrade option) was a bit of a non-starter for a few reasons – most notably that they were already being removed from stores in the US (and soon after Palm were bought by HP). So I was left with the choice of either Nokia’s N900, where the OS has now merged with Intel’s offereing, or an Android based phone.

Having played with both the N900 and a HTC Desire, as far as I was concerned it was an easy decision to go with the Desire. It won out due to three main factors: the device is a more sensible size when already carrying a blackberry for work, Android offers more applications and a proper multi-touch interface, and the contracts available were much better for me.

Decision made, I sorted out all the stuff related to migrating my number and got the phone. Since thebn, there’s been no looking back. The phone is as good as I hoped and probably more: I find myself recommending it to anyone who’s interested – and from other people with them I haven’t heard any stories of dissatisfaction.

The one thing that I will note is that the battery life isn’t fantastic. I’ve found that if I use it heavily (especially with lots of network traffic) it will need a full charge within the day. Turning off data and not playing around with it all the time, however, sorts a lot of this out and it will last a lot longer.

In terms of apps, I could probably go on for a while about those, so I’ll leave that for another post, as this one has gone on a bit already. However now I have a device I can blog from (most of this post was written on it), hopefully I’ll update a bit more often.

With this in mind I headed down to my local phone retailer and eventually settled on the Sony Ericsson C902. The main reasons for this choice being that it’s not a smartphone that tries too hard to do everything and fails miserably, and that it’s around the same size and weight of the Nokia with minimal moving parts. It also has a 5-megapixel camera (and the C905 an eight… I wonder if there’s any reason for the off-by-three model numbering…) with flash, which I might find myself using for those moments that I wouldn’t normally have had my camera with me but there’s something that I would have wanted to take a photo of.

Of course, in changing phones there’s a whole host of problems that arise. There’s a mostly common interface, with the numbers being laid out the same and the T9 letters being on the same numbers; but the space is a different matter. On Nokia phones it’s on 0, but Sony Ericsson have it on #, which lead to lots of hitting 0, realising I’d added a + instead of a space, and then having to remove the character. This lead to another issue, as my Nokia had the clear button on the same button as back, so it was the top right soft-key. The Sony Ericsson on the other hand has a separate clear key, so for a period I’ve ended up hitting back when I mean clear, and then having to recover from that. Still, with time my muscle memory will adapt; and I’m already getting better with things like the space issue.

There was another issue with changing phones; especially to one with Sony involved in its manufacture: Naturally Sony use memory stick based technologies (M2 in this case) and Nokia used MicroSD. Memory cards are rather cheap anyway these days, and I picked up a 2GB one for £15, along with USB adapter so I could ensure I was able to use it as the Sony Ericsson “mass storage” mode doesn’t seem to work too well under Linux, although seemingly “phone” mode works fine under Ubuntu on my Eee.

Still, it’s not all bad about having switched to a new phone. Sony Ericsson have clearly put in some effort with what they’ve done during manufacture. For example the charger, which connects to the same port as the USB cable and hands-free kit, can act as a passthrough connector for either of these other devices so you can connect it to the mains and your laptop and not worry about obliterating the battery life on the laptop through charging the phone through the USB (something else that the Nokia didn’t do).

They’ve also been rather clever with the handsfree kit, making it effectively a mic on a cable attached to their proprietary connector, with a 3.5mm connector for headphones on the end. This means that I don’t have to put up with using whatever crappy headphones are provided, and can instead use my own ones for when I want to listen to music.

My favourite feature still has to be the camera though. When using it there are of course certain modes that you might want, and they’ve handily placed these on 4 “buttons” on two touch sensitive bits either side of the screen. Normally I don’t like touch screens, there’s a complete lack of feedback from the touch so you don’t know how hard you need to press to get something registered. This phone, however, makes use of haptic feedback to provide some reaction to your press; triggering a vibration from the phone when you provide input via these touch sensors. This is great as far as I’m concerned, and was a great surprise when I tried the phone out prior to selecting it.

It also contains an accelerometer so it can detect which orientation it’s in for media uses (it saves photos in the correct orientation so you don’t need to rotate them manually) and games, with one of the games on the phone being a Need For Speed mobile version that allows you to turn the phone to steer.

In summary I like my new phone, usage is pretty straight forward and the little things like the handsfree and haptic feedback have made it quite nifty. I just need to re-train my muscles to the new key layout for spaces and delete and I’ll be very happy.