New mobiles
We treated ourselves to new mobile phones at Christmas:
Sony Ericsson T68i, Palm Treo 650 and in the lower row, two Nokia E51 mobilesIn the top row the old ones: Ruth’s Sony Ericsson T68i and my Palm Treo 650; in the lower row, our new Nokia E51s.
Here’s a view showing the thickness of the phones:
The Sony is actually very light, as well as being small – only 85g, and one of Ruth’s requirements was that the new phone shouldn’t be much heavier. The Nokia weighs in at 100g and also includes enough software that Ruth can also throw away her Palm Tungsten T5 (100g) as well as the Sony. My Treo weighs in at 178g and is much bulkier than the Nokia.
So, with somewhat heavy hearts we have ditched Palm’s devices, despite having a fairly heavy investment in navigation software, dictionaries and other bits and bobs. Quite frankly, they are no longer competitive – an operating system which is, despite having reached version 5.4, still prone to crash when running the navigation software; hardware which is bulky and starting to look dated. One thing which I do like about the Treo is the excellent keyboard, but at nearly 200g it is really too heavy to carry in my shirt pocket, which is where I like to carry my phone.
On both Palms we used to run PasswordsPlus, which we also ran on the Macs and replicated regularly to the Palms. Since we have nearly 200 records in PasswordsPlus, we needed a replacement for that. They haven’t got around to issuing a version which is compatible to Apple’s Leopard operating system, so we needed a replacement for the Mac too. We found SplashID, which has similar functionality and supports a larger number of platforms (Windows, Mac, Symbian, Blackberry and Palm to mention the main ones). And the Mac version runs fine under Leopard, so before Christmas we had already migrated our data to SplashID.
The other program which we used a lot on the Palms and on our Macs is Ultralingua – they have dictionaries and grammar checkers for German and Spanish and a long list of other languages which we don’t need at the moment. We’ve always been very satisfied with them, despite an unfortunate mistranslation in their Spanish/English dictionary which resulted in me telling the reception desk at our hotel in Salamanca that “the bomb in our room is broken” when I really wanted to say the light bulb was broken! Fortunately they also support the Symbian operating system of the Nokia phones, so I will be downloading the Spanish dictionary for our phones soon.