I'd been thinking about whether I should get a new cellphone lately (to replace my ageing Nokia), and finally took the plunge last week. I had my eye on the Motorola RAZR V3, but that's way too expensive! I'd recently read about the new Motorola A630, and found a great deal on Amazon: $49 after rebate, with a one-year T-mobile plan. For an extra 5 bucks a month, I added on the unlimited t-zones access which allows access to the internet, downloadable content, etc.

The phone arrived on Thursday, and I'm most impressed. It's much smaller than I imagined, and looks like a standard 'candybar' phone (ala Nokia), but it flips open to reveal a colour screen and a small keyboard. It also has a camera (still pictures only, no video unlike the V600), MP3 ringtones, Java app download, email client, etc. I'd previously arranged to port my old cellphone number to the new phone, and that worked seamlessly: first thing Friday morning I was up and running with my previous number :)

From my limited testing so far, I've noted the sound quality is quite good, as-is the coverage. I'm still waiting on the full t-zones access to come into effect, but meanwhile I've been able to browse some WAP pages, including Google and my journal. It brought back memories of the text-based Lynx browser I used in the mid-90s :) Other pages have small graphics on them, but it'll be nice once Opera ports their mobile browser to T-Mobile to allow HTML browsing, rather than just WAP.

It certainly beats the crap out of my early 2001 model Nokia (as does probably every other phone on the market today!). That thing cost me a decent sum when I bought it, too. Who knows what these things will do in 10 years time? I imagine they'll be including them in cereal boxes by then....

2004 Stats:

2004 Word count:	22,016
Stories written:	8
Total submissions:	28
Total acceptances:	0
Total rejections:	29
Waiting for response:	1
Books read:	10
Fiction Mags/Chapbooks read:	20