best..phone..ever

(This post has been sitting in my drafts folder for a few months now...)

So I've got a new mobile, the Nokia e63. This is the baby brother of the e71, that comes extremely recommend by such net lumineries as Joel Spolsky, who even puts it up against and above the much commented upon iPhone.

So far its been great and (after only 3 days of ownership) I'm extremely happy with it. Happy as in rating it as the best phone I've ever owned. I have to admit it took me a while to decide on it over the upcoming 5800 (well upcoming in Aus, its been available in the UK for weeks) but in the end I decided email was one of the most important use-cases for it for me and having a proper keyboard seemed preferable over a touchscreen, tough having a full-phone screen would be nice.

I have to say that having owned quite a few different Nokia models over the years, even a minor thing such as the packaging seems much improved with eht e63.

Of course its not perfect and by going for it over the e71, I did give up a GPS and a slighty better camera. But I'm not missing either really and since I've owned a 6110 for over a year now, I've found I've actually used the GPS quite infrequently and not really enough to justify the extra $200 in the price between the 2 models.

Another small annoyance over the last few days has been that it keeps a opening connection to 3's "Planet 3" access point. Its actually an amazing testiment to the superb battery in the phone (a whopping 1500mAH!) and the radio power management in the firmware, that its hardly used more the 20% of battery over 48hrs. On my old 6110, holding an open network connection (eg. IMAP using IDLE) would drain the battery in a matter of hours!
Well that problem as only an issue upto about 30min ago, when I finally googled up the answer. So it turns out 3 actually has Nokia customise their firmware, not just the silly background images :-)