Feckoff.net

I got a free upgrade from 3 last week after being a bill pay customer for a year. Whatever about their rubbish mobile broadband products, I am very happy with their phone service. I got a text message last Thursday telling me I’m now entitled to an upgrade. Off I went to their website to check out what was on offer. I ended up selecting a Nokia 6120 classic as it was one of the handsets that was a totally free* upgrade. The phone arrived the following day, which was impressive considering that I placed the order at 4 in the afternoon and the next day happened to be Good Friday!

Its a nice piece of kit. The built in camera isn’t up to much but I don’t really care about that as all mobile phone cameras are pretty rubbish, Sony Ericsson K850i notwithstanding. It is a slim, light device that runs a proper Symbian S60 R3 multitasking operating system so there’s plenty of scope there for installation of your own applications. I’ve tried Google maps and the GMail app on it, as well as Fring and an S60 PuTTY client. Apparently you can get S60 version of ScummVM and some old console emulators. Nice.

Here’s the bad bit. 3 seem to be traffic shaping the crap out of VoIP stuff that goes outside their walled garden. There’s a Skype client bundled with the phone that works perfectly but can only call other Skype users, not SkypeOut. If you try to use Fring or any of the other alternatives to make SkypeOut calls, the call will either be instantly disconnected or there’ll be such ridiculous latency and jitter that its completely useless. Bastards.

Moving swiftly on, the 6120 has a decent email client built in, with proper support for SSL-secured IMAP, making it perfect for GMail. It took me a bit of Googling to figure out how the hell you get it to use IMAP in a push mail fashion, but I eventually hit paydirt and it now works flawlessly :).

This phone looks like a pretty decent media player too, with support for a load of different audio formats like MP3, AAC, AAC+, M4A, etc. There’s a built in FM radio too, which as usual requires you to use the Nokia headset as it uses that as an antenna. It also has a slot for MicroSD cards, meaning you can load it up with lots of dirt cheap storage. I have a 2GB MicroSD on its way to me for less than €20 including VAT and postage.

Here’s what’s in the box:

• 6120 classic phone
• USB cable (which won’t bloody charge it)
• Battery
• Mains charger
• Radio headset/wired handsfree
• Manual
• Nokia PC Suite CD

For a freebie upgrade I can’t fault this phone at all.

* free but requiring a further 12 month contract, standard fare in any mobile upgrade scenario.

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Today I switched my mobile phone contract over from O2 to 3. I’ve been using O2 for about five years but their lack of any upgrade offer or anything else as an incentive for me to renew my contract means they’re out the door

I joined 3 on their cheapest tarriff (€19 - 100 minutes to all networks) and got a lovely Sony Ericsson K800i from them. Surprisingly I actually get 3G coverage at home. I also went for the €5.99 mobile broadband add-on which gives me 100MB worth of internet traffic per month - perfect for frequent email/news access. They offer unlimited traffic for €20 a month on top of your tarriff, though I’m sure they mean unlimited in the ridiculous Irish ISP sense of the word - i.e. unlimited as long as we don’t think you’re using it too much.

Anyways - K800i - awesome phone. I had a K750i on O2 (who are dragging their heels about unlocking it) and that was a good phone, but this is a great step up. Lovely high-res screen and 3 megapixel camera. That’s nice, but as usual with phone cams and their tiny, tiny lenses the image quality is not comparable to a proper 3MP digital camera. The K750i’s charger and accessories are compatible with the K800i also.

3’s network coverage here in Kilkenny seems pretty good, I haven’t seen any non-3G spots yet, although I’d put money on it not being available where I work. Word has it that 3 users get serviced by Vodafone’s network in areas where they have no coverage, which suits me as Vodafone’s network has always had excellent coverage around here.

The only problem I’ve had so far is that the mobile broadband add-on wasn’t working at first, but that was quickly resolved by a call to customer service, where (*shock*) I didn’t have to hold in a queue before getting served.

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