We've now booked our summer trips! I am going to meet my parents at Virginia Beach in mid-July, and we are doing our annual BC/Tofino trip in early August! Fun stuff coming up! Other than that, things have been pretty quiet around here. But I thought I'd blog about our new cellphones. Ted and I both got new cellphones about 1.5/2 months ago, and I thought I'd write a little review about them.

Ted got a new phone because of his new job, and I got a new one because I got "phone envy" with all the new cool GSM/GPRS/color features his phone has.

Ted got the Nokia 3650, a borderline PDA/phone combo with an integrated camera. This phone is quite large and bulky (I would never buy a cellphone that big, but Ted doesn't mind the size like I do). After about two months of using it, Ted is finding that the features of the phone are great, but the strange keypad layout is not as easy to get used to as he hoped. It has a really strange round keypad, and if you are used to typing text messages and such with a normal keypad layout, this can confuse you! The camera pictures are not really good quality, but it's cool for just having fun. The menus and colors of this phone make for a really nice modern looking interface.

I got the Sony Ericsson T68i in the "adriatic blue" color. I picked this phone because of the following features: the size, GSM/GPRS network, WAP browsing, color screen, synchronization with MS Outlook. This phone is very small, a tiny bit smaller than my previous Nokia 8260. It is my first GSM phone (the 8260 was TDMA) and so far I have not had any complaints about the coverage except for one dead-zone on Greenville Ave. WAP browsing is fun but expensive, however it can be really useful for things like "Where is the nearest Taco Cabana restaurant?" And I just love, love, love being able to sync with Outlook, which is what I use for all my contacts, meetings, and other reminders. I've never had that in a phone before and I was always manually entering the numbers into the phone's memory. This feature is so great. I will never own a phone that doesn't sync again! I used to have a Palm that I only really used for meeting reminders - now I don't need any device other than this phone.

The only downsides I am finding for my new phone are: 1) the response time of the phone is very slow compared to a Nokia. I mean, when I press a button or scroll a menu there is a bit of lag. This is quite annoying but I can deal with it. 2) The screen only has 256 colors, as compared with Ted's 4096 colors, you can really see the difference. When he sends me pictures he took with his camera they look totally crappy on my phone!

We are both on the AT&T network, and so far that is fine too. I have been on AT&T for years now. Ted was on T-Mobile previously but since the new phone came from work he switched over to get the special Nortel rates at AT&T. I think T-Mobile is a "nicer" company, but so far we have no real complaints about AT&T. EXCEPT they don't reward existing customers very well! For example, it was $70 cheaper for me to sign up as a "new customer" to get this phone than to do an upgrade with my existing account! This meant I had to change my number, which is a pain, but not worth $70 to me!

Anyway, that's my quick review of our new cellphones.

Also thought I'd add... for anybody who has a T68i or any other SonyEricsson or Ericsson phone, there is a great resource at Esato with discussion boards and stuff.