New phone...

Got another phone this Monday, again. Our secretary wanted to switch phones since she had recently ordered a Nokia N76 for herself, but wasn't liking it after a couple of days. So I gave away the 6110 Navigator that I had and got a shiny, red N76. I typically don't post that many comments/reviews on things, but I guess this time I'll do an exception and type up some comments.

Firstly, the clamshell is useless. You can't open it easily with one hand. You need to use two. A very big annoyance. Secondly, the back cover is a real pain in the ass to remove. If you have slightly sweaty hands and are trying to remove it for the first time, it's pretty damn difficult to do. That wouldn't be such a bad thing but occasionally when S60 freezes, you have to remove the battery to do a complete reboot. And try doing that while driving on the motorway. Wasn't easy with the 6110 Navigator and it'll be even less easy with this phone.

One of the most common use cases with a phone is switching the profile. From General to Meeting to Silent and back again. But if you have the cover open, you can switch the profile easily because the upper half of the cover blocks to power button that you've become accustomed to using when you want to switch profiles. The 3.5mm audio jack is also next to the power button, meaning that when you plug in a headset, you can't open the cover all the way open again.

The top side of the phone contains a small external screen that doubles up as a mirror. Except that it smudges very, very easily. Then the keypad. It's metallic. Even RAZR-esque. Actually it's pretty damn near identical. Unfortunately that means that it's almost as useless as the RAZR's keypad. Then there are the keys to control the audio player on the cover of the phone. And I haven't figured why it doesn't go into keylock mode by default -- meaning that you occasionally turn on the player and start it playing while just playing around with the phone.

And then the battery. The battery is awful. It can't take any sort of punishment. My old E70 stayed on for days and days. And this phone can't even make it through 24 hours. And apparently it can handle about 2.5 hours of talking. Wouldn't know, I've always had it plugged in when I'm in longer calls.

So to sum it up, the phone is pretty terrible. Or not really terrible, but annoying. It has lots and lots and lots of silly design flaws, which is a real shame because otherwise the phone is actually sort of decent. But it seems that this'll be the phone that I'll be using for a while anyway. Or at least until I get seriously annoyed with it and switch back to the E70. Which at least has a QWERTY-keyboard.