New phone

[Peter Korsten]

Here's to another dead-horse discussion! :)

My employer has kindly provided me with a Nokia N61e, mostly because it 
has Wireless Push E-mail (would be nice if I knew how to set it up) and 
I'm somewhat important, or so they seem to be thinking.

Now, how is it? It's big, because of the screen and the QWERTY keyboard, 
but it's also flat. The square-and-button is not very handy to navigate; 
it could have done with a touch screen.

What's cool, though, is that I just plugged it in with the USB cable, 
Windows starts installing all sorts of drivers and software, and then 
comes up with a dialogue where I can choose to download the Nokia PC 
Suite. It actually downloads a more recent version than the Nokia web 
page. :)

So it has WLAN. I try to connect, but something goes wrong. I want to 
change settings and network key, but no, I have to go to some 
sub-sub-sub-menu somewhere else. It actually *tells* me. OK, that's just 
plain daft.

It took me a while to figure out that my wireless network security is 
set a bit paranoid (in fact, it's called 'Paranoia'), but I need to 
broadcast the SSID, otherwise the phone won't find it. Hmm, Windows has 
no problem with that. Oh wait, neither does this one. Now I wonder, 
would there be software for this phone with which I could hack into our 
neighbours WEP-'protected' networks? :)

All in all, I can see the case for a really well-designed interface and 
a touch screen, so hey, but I've never denied that. I got it for free, 
so I'm not complaining. It's very nice - it's just that I see room for 
improvement.

And oh, you can use it as a SIP phone, over WLAN and UMTS and whatnot. 
So I'm not at all buying into that argument.

Now, where did I leave that Bluetooth headset they gave me...because you 
do look a bit daft with a phone the size of a pocket calculator stuck to 
your ear. :)

- Peter