Take Two

Nadia has bought me a new mobile phone. Up till now I’ve been with O2, but this is on Orange. This means my mobile number will change in the nearby future, but my old phone will be lying around turned on for a transition period.

I’ve been wanting to change phones for a number of reasons, chief among them being:

• The keylock on my current Siemens phone (a c65, I think) is shockingly bad; in effect, it has no keylock. The result is that my phonebook is chock-full of garbage such as “##*#”, “###” and variations of that theme, and my bag has a habit of calling people on its own.
• I’m really fed up with being on pay-as-you-go. Every time I really need to call I’m out of credit, and O2’s credit top-up procedure blows goats. Unfortunately with my usage (5-10 ppm) switching to a contract phone is going to be at least twice as expensive as pay-as-you-go.
• I want bluetooth synching to my Mac’s addressbook. I abhor typing on phones, and trying to manually keep two sets of address books in synch is rather horrible.
• I have a terrible sense of direction so I’d like the ability to check google maps, streetmap or multimap when I’m trying to find the place I’ve agreed to meet with friends.

Thoughts about the new phone: since this is a Nokia clam phone, the keylock is not going to be an issue now. I’m still going to be on pay-as-you-go, but Orange offer direct debit so maybe this will not be so bad. Still no bluetooth synching; since getting a contract phone is out of the question, bluetooth phones are way out of my price range. However, Nadia transferred the numbers from my old phone for me, so I didn’t have to do that part, at least. As for maps, this thing does GPRS but I’m not sure if I can use any of the mapping services with that yet.

Update: After advice from a friend I’ve now gone through the steps required for keeping my old phone number. You can stop panicking now.