Detox

First off, many thanks to whomever sent me The Player of Games along with a kind note wishing me well (I have no idea who you are, since there was no clue in the Amazon invoice).

My little incident caused me to completely forget about Books since last week's overwhelming response, and although I kept every suggestion in an IMAP folder, I haven't yet gone through all of them and put together an order for my upcoming vacation. Since I am positive I will take that vacation now and have little time to spare, I will probably bundle a few of them together and make sure I order books as soon as possible...

Anyway, today I put my 8707v in cold storage for a while. I am using a K610i now (a slate grey one, if you must know), and will steer clear of messaging phones for as much as I can.

Not only do I need the rest, being instantly available isn't all it's cracked up to be, and anyone who expects an immediate reply to e-mail clearly has nothing better to do.

The phone itself is great - it has the new Netfront-based browser, an RSS reader (which I won't use, since I prefer my newspipe front-end), and can be made to work with iSync just like all other SonyEricsson phones - and yes, I will get around to updating my HOWTO on that some time soon.

It also has a great IMAP client - which I won't be using, but which deserves mention because like all other SE phones based on the same platform, it supports "push e-mail" via the IMAP IDLE command - which is something Apple still hasn't been able to add to Mail.app, as far as I can tell. I leave the exercise of trying to compare codebase sizes and platform issues for decent IMAP implementations to my readership, whom are certain to be able to form their own opinions.

Anyway, my point was that SonyEricsson phones are probably the most standards-compliant devices out there right now - Bluetooth works fine, I can export my data in standard formats, use the thing as an USB disk, you name it.

The only thing that I find real annoying on it is the new, completely and utterly asinine proprietary port that SonyEricsson decided to adopt for both headsets and data (i.e., there's no mini-USB jack, which is something I only expect manufacturers to adopt when they're hit over the head with a baseball bat).

The thing is, I'll have to figure out a way to at least have my appointments easily available on it, and since I rely on Citrix to work and don't want to run Outlook and the usual crappy sync software on my laptop, that entails either fiddling with SyncML (nasty, binary XML-encoded stuff that Exchange doesn't support natively) or going back to my IMAP/vCalendar hack - a Snakelets application that logs in to Exchange via IMAP, parses my Calendar folder, and, at the moment, barfs on recurring events due to a bug in the library I'm using.

Time will tell how things go, but having a simpler phone is a nice way to ensure I relax a bit more at work and fiddle with interesting things at home.

When I'm not reading, that is. Again, many thanks.