The Beautiful Oblivion

Mwahahaha! I’m generally pretty chilled out about almost everything but there are certain things that give me a buzz, namely technology. Especially technology. Especially technology when it’s you getting it! I know most people shove off cellphones as just a craze with wonderfully capitalistic companies dripping out new models at exacerbated prices, but man, it still doesn’t take anything away from the thrill of getting to play with something that’s “new and improved!”

Even better is when it’s a contract upgrade and you don’t pay a cent for it! (Okay, you’ve really been paying for calls and subscriptions for years and years but you can block all that out.) My last model phone was one of the first ever to incorporate full-colour in their screens. That was about two years ago and since then I’ve been watching the cellphone world wizz by my “insignificant-after-a-week” model. Cameras, 3G, MMS, MP3, television and on and on.

Something as simple as being able to snap a random picture of scenery and be able to send it to wherever you want has been eating away at me! It sounds so cheesy now that I’m reading these words, but sheesh! My wonderfully fancy “new and improoooved” phone is the Nokia 6680 Imaging Smartphone.

In a nutshell it incorporates a 1.3 megapixel camera at the back, a smaller VGA camera on top of the screen, Bluetooth data transfer, GPRS and 3G internet connectivity, MP3 and video playback and an SD memory card slot on the side. That’s just the start of the perks. The phone is designed to appeal to those businessy types of people who can afford the 3G service and utilise things like the mobile versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Me, being a video and photo sleaze, erased those applications to make space for my future photographic exploits!

One of the things I was worried about, after observing some previous models of similar phones, was the operating system. In the “first generation” set of media phones it seemed like the manufacturers packed their phones full of software (half of which you would never use) and would experience some quite severe response issues. Luckily for me, Nokia seems to have tweaked their OS and the entire package runs like a dream. You can have multiple tasks running in the background of other applications, such as having an MP3 song playing while you punch up an MMS containing a picture you just took as you’re connecting to GPRS with little to no slow responsiveness.

The Nokia PC Suit software which comes along in a CD with the phone is also highly useful in customizing your phone, extracting and adding files like pictures and contacts and can even use the phone as a 56k GPRS modem for you PC!

But enough about all the nerdy-schmerdy aspects. It’s ergonomically pleasing, very light and very stylish. This phone is a winner for me and I’m pretty sure I’ll be enjoying the full functionality of it for at least a few months… until it becomes just another one of “those” phones.

Weird exposure with the flash enabled…

Building in Sandton with “night mode” activated.