New Toy for the Boy (and Girl)

As you can see in the picture I've got a new toy to play with. It's the brand new Sony Ericsson K800i. A very flash bit of kit indeed. It's got a 3.2 Megapixel Sony CyberShot digital camera capable of all manner of jiggery-pockery such as combining three images into a panorama (see bottom of full post), an mp3 player, RDS radio, 3G internet access, video camera and all manner of technological niceties. You can even make phone calls with it, if that is your kind of thing.

Perhaps the best thing about the phone is the price, it didn't cost a penny. I've switched from pay as you go to a monthly contract and the phone comes with the deal. There's something great about having a new toy when one is skint, it makes the world a brighter place. Of course there's the usual stress of making sure everyone has the new phone number and an opportunity to cull a few people who you wish didn't.

The move to a new phone comes following a few weeks of hell for my beloved L. She lost her mobile, a beloved and ancient item, with the only store of certain important numbers to old friends. Our search for a new phone for her resulted in two conclusions. Firstly we couldn't afford any of the decent ones. And two, having used my O2 branded monstrosity, she agreed with me it's the most useless, hard to use PoS ever. So I joined her in search of new mobile bliss.

In the end we've both switched to monthly contracts to get new phones and we've got pretty good deals with O2. I think L especially, given the number of texts she sends in a month, is getting an absolute bargain. I need the phone for work, to separate calls from PR folks and game industry contacts from the domestic landline - so a good phone is a must.

Poor L is stuck at work today while her new phone lies in its box across this room. I imagine by the time she gets home from work later she's be reaching Christmas morning levels of excitement to open her new technological terror. She's gone for a Nokia model, which she may tell you about when she's had a play, but it looks like an attractive feature-packed handset.

So far I'm very impressed with my own new phone, though I do have one gripe. It makes use of yet another new Sony memory card format, the Memory Stick Micro, which isn't something I own. Which means coughing up for more Sony media next month if I want to store mp3s even though I have other spare Memory sticks lying around. Despite that, it's a great phone and the camera is so feature packed it beats many a dedicated digital camera.