Smart phone

Mobile contract renewal time again. Handy, since my Nokia 6500 slide was starting to develop odd habits like switching itself off and forgetting the time and date. Silicon senility? Maybe I just dropped it once too often.

I had generally been happy with the Nokia, but wanted to replace it with something sleeker and a little more capable - Nokia's non-smartphone series 40 operating software is showing its age these days. That latter fact disallowed a number of attractive phones and the Nokia N series were all too bulky and/or ugly, leaving two main contenders: The Nokia 5800 'tube' (Nokia's first touchscreen phone running the Symbian series 60 smartphone operating platform) and Sony Ericsson's slimline C902 Cyber-shot camera phone.

On paper, the Nokia looked like the winner, with a much better gadget-score and lots of cool high-tech packed into it. In person, the tables were quickly turned: The Nokia was bigger than I had imagined, felt slightly plasticky and had had unfortunate contrasting red-coloured trim. The Sony Ericsson, on the other hand, was a sleek, black monolith: Very slim, very well made (with a metal back panel and touch-sensitive glass screen) and with that oh-so-cool sliding case hiding the camera mechanism. The decision was quickly made.

So far, I'm very pleased with the C902. It's a lovely design and very pocketable, with excellent call quality, 3G and a good web browser. It's not perfect of course - the camera is actually not that much better than the old Nokia (though the touch controls are cool) and the battery only lasts 2 or 3 days, but it meets the criteria I set very well and the Sony Ericsson operating software is miles ahead of Nokia's Series 40.