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by Russell Beattie.
Original Post: Lunch with Anil
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I had lunch with Anil today and you can check out the pics here. He brought along some new toys of his for me to fondle, including the *massive* Motorola A830 that Anil scored during his trip to that Motorola conference I wrote about earlier this year in London.
There's not much nice to say about that phone, and the fact is that we've all moved on to cooler phones like the Motorola A700. But since that was the very first WCDMA phone I've ever held in my hands, it was still pretty interesting. First the bad bits: It had a pitifully slow UI, it was HUGE and heavy, and it was ungainly. The parts I thought were pretty neat was the fact that it accepted SD cards and had a real MP3 player with stereo sound, and you could reduce the size a bit by removing the camera, which is *actually* attached with an external "backpack" sort of thing. But seriously, *anyone* who is unlucky to have this phone in their posession has to be cursing Motorola and Three daily. Anil did quite a bit of cursing about it himself.
Believe or not, as much as I've written about the SonyEricsson T610, I actually haven't spent a lot of time with it. It is opposite in every way from that Motorola Monolith. It's light, but solid in the hand with that nice aluminum feel. The UI was fast and well designed and I thought very navigable. It's true that it was hard to see in outside light, but Anil pointed out the two quick buttons (one dedicated for taking pictures, the other for checking messages) really showed some of the thought put into that phone. It's really nice. He just got an upgrade to the firmware and when you start Java apps, you get the cool new Java logo while the JVM is starting up. Rock on.
The other toy was Anil's Tungsten C with WiFi. He's wandered around Madrid with a Net Stumbler like app and says he's discovered "hundreds" of hotspots - including in the Metro! That's pretty cool - I had no idea that Madrid was getting so wireless so fast! Anil is thinking that the overhead TVs showing news bits and silent commercials in the Metro are actually being run via WiFi, which would be very interesting if it was...
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