Snazzy New Phone

by Kevin on Wednesday, April 9 at 10:56 AM GMT-4

Well, I've entered the 21st century in cell phone technology finally. I had been using a work blackberry for a bit so my personal phone had gone completely out of date. It still worked great, but with the impending ban on driving and talking on your cell phone without a handsfree, I figured it was probably time to upgrade to something that had bluetooth. Our contract expiring with Rogers certainly helped as well, as it's always fun to tangle with their customer disservice team.

I ended up getting a Sony-Ericsson k790a for me, and a Samsung A516 for Kim. I had some reservations about buying a Sony product as I'm not particularly a fan of their habit of creating new useless standards and screwing the customer, but I'm very happy with the phone. Kim seems to be enjoying hers as well.

The best thing about k790a is the attached camera. Not only does it make a great phone, it actually is a pretty decent point and shoot camera. It has no optical zoom but 3.2MP, auto-focus and a flash make it very usable as a walk around camera. Being able to surf at EDGE speeds instead of GPRS is nice as well. I did of course get screwed slightly by Sony in having to get a Memory Stick M2 card, which are almost twice as expensive as SD Micro anywhere else but eBay. Thanks Sony again for creating a completely unnecessary extra memory card format.

I did of course have to argue with Rogers yet again about their upgrade policies. They continue to attempt to screw their long term customers (almost 10 years now..) out of the deals they will give a brand new activation. I shouldn't have to argue with them over price like this, but hey it does work.