My Nokia 7280

Dear God, it was awful. Took me about 10 minutes I think, because it has no number or letter keys on it! You have to use the scroll wheel (or Navi™ Spinner as Nokia like to call it) to scroll back and forth along a row of letters on the screen, selecting the ones you want as you go. I hated it so much I considered taking it back and changing it for a 7260. At least that phone has buttons on it.

This has all changed now, though. I am becoming a master of the Navi™ Spinner. The predictive text on this phone is a huge step up from that of all the other Nokias I’ve had. I’m currently able to write a message at about 50% the speed compared to when I’m using a ‘regular’ phone. The thing which slows it down is when you write a relatively uncommon word, or words which aren’t in the phone’s dictionary (especially abbreviations). You then have to type out each letter - choosing them from the entire alphabet - as opposed to just whacking the centre button repeatedly.

As for the other features, it’s pretty much packed with them. It’s got the latest version (I think) of the Nokia XHTML browser, infrared connectivity, Bluetooth, EGPRS (whatever that is), and all the other regular things like an integrated FM radio, voice recorder, MMS, polyphonics, voice activation (ok I guess that’s not regular) and a cleverly integrated telephone (who’d have thought!). To top it all off, it’s really fucking small. The only disappointment is that it hasn’t got video recording, though it has got a supergroovy zoom on the digital still (VGA!) camera to make up for it :)