I’ve spent a fairly large sum of money over the past couple of days, without really intending to! I bought a new phone – a Samsung S5600. I wanted something which could do basic internet (i.e., view and update Google Calendar), something which could take photos, and something which could do basic emails. The S5600 hits those criteria, and it wasn’t too expensive, so I went for it instead of a more expensive model.
It’s a decent phone as well. The touchscreen is responsive for the most part, although I do occasionally have problems when browsing when the phone browser will try and zoom out to fit the whole page in, and I’m not completely sure why it does that. It supports IMAP and secure SMTP which makes me happy, as it means I can use GMail with it.
The camera on it is only 3 megapixel, but to be honest I always laugh when seeing these “8 megapixel” cameras on mobile phones – the lens it what really makes a difference in order to take quality pictures. It seems perfectly adequate to take the odd snap when I’ve forgotten my actual camera – even with a built in LED flash! (Not that I’ve used it much yet).
I can also use it to update Twitter, which is a novel experience, but quite cool (for a geeky person like me, that is). It also supports MSN Messenger, although I haven’t tried it yet because I’m not sure whether I really want to use it on the go! Nice to have the option though.
The only real issue at the moment is that I can’t synchronise it with Google Calendar. This is because the software provided is… well, it’s standard bloatware which these mobile phone companies pump out. It will only synchronise the calendar with Microsoft Outlook, and – as I don’t have Outlook – I can’t synchronise. I have no doubt there is (or will be soon) software available that can fix this issue, so I’m not too worried.
In the meantime I can use Google Calendar via the web browser, so not a real problem.
All in all, it’s a pretty decent little phone which seems to give good value for money. Not perfect, but I think it will do for my needs quite nicely!
The second thing I bought which was quite expensive was a new electric razor. My old one was about eight years old (I got it before going to uni!) so it was desperately in need of replacing. I actually didn’t realise how expensive electric razors were, some of the ones in the shop were nearly £200! Mine was less than half that, but it still felt a bit wrong to be paying that much for what seems like a fairly simple bit of kit. Hopefully it will last as long as my previous one though (a Philips Philishave – what else?) so I’ll get my money’s worth.
Anyway, that’s pretty much it for now. We’re off to Edinburgh at some ridiculous hour of the morning tomorrow, so I won’t be updating the blog this week. But I will probably update my Twitter from time to time. That’s all for now!
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