On Thursday afternoon DotNetDan came around to the desk I was camping out on and dropped off a whitebox. Inside that whitebox was a brand spanking new i-mate Smartphone2 sent via courier. I think the phone, charger and cradle were out of the box in about fifteen seconds. Five seconds later it was synchronising my contacts, e-mail and calendar and I was copying across my GPRS settings from my crusty old Nokia (I never really got the hang of J2ME development). My wife has one too so now she has a spare one when hers finally dies.

I left the phone for a few hours to properly charge up before letting calls come through. Its always unnerving when you get a new phone and it rings for the first time. Hands up who has sat in an office complex muttering under their breath about how someone wasn't answering their phone only to discover that its yours? No, not me either, that was just a for instance.

Because I have been on the road quite a bit recently I've been relying on my mobile to wake me up, so I was keen to give this feature a bit of a test drive. It didn't wake me up on the first morning, but maybe that was because I had three (or was it four) glasses of cab. sav. the night before. I am pleased to report however that it did succeed in waking me up at 6am yesterday morning AND this morning (Sunday - ANZAC Day - oh, I had better ring my brother, its his birthday - we have a parades in his honor all over the country you know).

One of the features that I have taken to straight away is MSN Messenger ( - don't worry, the spammers have it already). I can now be contacted most times on MSN Messenger via my mobile. The neat thing about messenger is that according to the "Department of Pulling Statistics Out of Thin Air" its much cheaper than using SMS. I was out visiting one of our clients last night and I used it to let my wife (who is always on messenger) that I was on my way home.

My next goal is to get MMS working, heck, I might even indulge in a game of Ming Mong with a few of the lads and lasses at Microsoft! I'm not quite sure how MMS messages are transmitted, do they go via GPRS? If so I'll need to watch out for those data charges - Telstra really needs to lower their prices.

Anyway, I had better sign off, its taken me a long time to bash this out on my phone (just kidding - I'm not insane). I want to send out a big thanks to the folks involved in getting this smartphone to me - you know who you are! I'd been faking for such a long time with my Nokia 6310i (complete with a .NET operator logo that I got from a chap at a VTR User Group Open Day in Melbourne are year or so ago).

So - now that I have a true geek phone, what cool stuff can I put on it that I will want to use everyday. Jawbreaker has already become indispensible whilst waiting to board at airports!