Okay, so my old phone broke and I had to grab a new one. What’s changed since the last time I looked?

Hmmm – well, I get a camera that actually works decently (with flash), a big touch screen, Bluetooth (which works properly these days too), GPS, wi-fi, combi TV-out/headphone jack, live BBC, live Sky Sports, BBC iPlayer, various mapping applications (of which Google Maps seems to be the best), decent web browsers that run Flash and umpteen other media formats, a full QWERTY keyboard, handwriting recognition, impressive battery life, IMAP/POP3 email, an accelerometer, excellent audio, microSD, video and sound recording (30 fps), an office document viewer, video calling, MSN chat, Yahoo! chat, ICQ, Skype, Geocaching, a radio, USB, and loads of other things that aren’t interesting enough to mention.

A few screenshots from the new phone …

Google Maps satellite view:

And Google Maps street view:

The main menu:

Part of the applications menu:

BBC iPlayer:

Fring:

IMAP email:

Some of the connectivity options:

QWERTY keyboard:

Playing with the on-phone photo editing (size reduced for web):

I’m impressed

All part of a free upgrade on an existing cheap contract. I’m delighted to have had my expectations surpassed for a change.

Well done, Nokia. Maybe everybody will stop havering on about iPhones now. :O)

Why is it that so many websites require you to jump the login barrier before you can do anything these days?

Try to donate to the NTS so they can carry on their path-building work and you need to create an account first. More and more websites seem to be doing this lately. Christ, a lot of blogs are even requiring a login simply to leave a comment.

Get over yourselves! I don’t want to create, verify and remember another login just to do one thing on your website once!