I rather like it. Elizabeth doesn't think it's as good as the old phone, but it certainly takes better pictures (2MP camera instead of VGA) and gets better reception. The speaker phone doesn't seem to pick up as much, so one of us can talk and both of us can hear the phone call, but if you're not facing directly at the phone, the caller can't hear you.
It also has a built in Walkman music player. You have to buy an M2 flash chip to store anything more than 6MB or so. So for $50 I have something like an 8GB iPod. Actually that's not true, it cost me $90 because first I bought a MicroSD card for $40. It didn't work in the phone, so I figured it was dead memory. I sent it back and got another MicroSD card. This one didn't work either so I did some research and found out that M2 flash isn't MicroSD. Except now I'm embarrassed that I didn't know that so I'm not willing to send back the MicroSD again, so I'm just calling that a learning expense.
Today the M2 memory arrived. I put it in the phone and it's working like a champ. I can now store my photos there and not worry about running out of room. I've started loading music on it, and it's taking a rather long time. NiN's Ghosts I-IV is taking about a half hour to transfer via USB cable. I don't think my ipod loads that slowly, but since itunes doesn't tell you how long the transfer will take, I'm not sure.
I'm not sure I'm going to like having my music on my phone. I suspect I will have problems listening to it on the flight, but with the advent of the iphone, perhaps flight attendants will understand people can just listen to stuff on their phones and not ask me to turn it off. I also worry that after a long flight of listening to stuff on my phone, I won't have any battery left to call anyone once on the ground. This also might not be true, as having the phone parts of the unit turned off might significantly save on battery life.
My other big problem is that I've now bought a fair amount of stuff from itunes, and to convert all that music to mp3's will be a long process. This is how Apple locks you into their platform. Luckily I've started buying stuff from Amazon's MP3 service, and, most recently, I've grabbed NiN's last couple of albums directly from the artists. I have things to listen to, but I'm still taking my old ipod mini with me to listen to my audiobooks from audible (which I'm also not sure will work on the phone), and I've invested in the itunes+ non-DRM'd files for a couple of albums. They turn out to be .m4a files, which, again, I'm not sure will work (waiting for Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon to download now to try it).
The phone has also made it possible to send pictures directly here, and to twitter some stuff. I now have a USB connection with the computer to actually get in there and play with the files, and I really feel more in charge of the device.
Which makes me want to start hacking my old phone. It's also a Sony Ericsson, so it should work with the same USB cable. Hmmm... I think there's some fun to be had there.
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