Puan Mama Sarah's New Toy

On the same day I received my Wacom graphics tablet, Puan Mama Sarah also had a package delivered to her.

It's from Vodafone. Before I continue, I would first like to write about how having a mobile phone in the UK is different from other countries like Malaysia. In the UK, mobile phones are actually provided either FREE or with a heavily subsidised fee, with a mobile contract. As an example: with Puan Mama Sarah's phone, I had to pay a one off £20 for the phone and a monthly contract of £20 for 12 months. However, the monthly £20 comes with free 1000 minutes of phonecalls free during evening and weekends. Also free are 100 text messages per month. If Puan Mama Sarah makes less than 1000 minutes per month, the remaining minutes will be carried forward to the next month. Imagine that!

And our tariff is actually considered expensive. Some other providers would charge around £15 for around 500 minutes free phonecalls per month - any network and any time with hundreds of text messages.

What happens once the 12 months contract is up? Yup, we upgrade to a new phone - and that goes on and on and on.

Overall, it's a GREAT business model and I feel it really benefits the customers. I've also heard that such a business model does not exist in Malaysia where one has to buy their own mobile phone on top of paying monthly subscriptions to the service provider (boo!).

Opening the contents: It's a Sony Ericsson W810i
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For some reason, Puan Mama Sarah and I are very big fans of Sony Ericsson mobile phones. (That "some reason" being: we feel Sony Ericsson comes with most of the latest and greatest features, with neat styling to boot).

The package comes with:

• The phone, battery, charger and SIM card (of course!)
• A disc for software interconnection between the phone and a PC.
• A USB cable, for data connection with a PC, also the phone is able to charge via the USB cable.
• A 512mb Memory Stick Duo complete with adapter - for pictures, video and music.
• A hands free kit
• A pair of headphones - the "W" in the W810i means it's a walkman-type phone, with enhanced multimedia capabilites.
  

The W810i
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Although it's Puan Mama Sarah's mobile, personally I LOVE the styling of this phone VERY much. I really like the black finish, with orange accents. In fact, there are many things to love about this phone:

1. Features:
It has bluetooth, a 2 mega-pixel nice quality camera complete with LED flash and macro functions, video capture and playback capabilities, radio complete with Radio Data System and auto-tuner, voice recognition, excellent interconnectivity with a PC and it's an MP3 player.

2. It's an MP3 player, complete with 521Mb of memory (upgrade-able). The jukebox software controlling the music playback is not bad (i.e: I've seen better) and together with the software provided, one is able to rip audio CDs onto the phone: complete with the text data. Personally, I use the software provided very little. Sound quality though, still could be improved.

3. The improved joystick interface.
Compared to the W800i, the joystick has shortcut buttons for pause-play, forwards, backwards, and stop. Also, the bright orange button on the left is to go straight into walkman mode.

Yup, gone are the times when a phone is (a) wired (b) large in size (c) used to only make phonecalls (*I pause to look at Pycno & DITH*)

I think Puan Mama Sarah likes the phone very much (she became quiet: which signals "much satisfied").

Reviews of the W810i (most sites review the phone very highly):

1. mobile-review
2. mobileburn
3. mobilereview.org
4. mobile 9

Related Link

• Unofficial Club Sony Ericsson w810i
• The HBH DS970 (Bluetooth stereo headsets)

PS
At first I wanted to title this post "Puan Mama Sarah's New Toy - complete with vibration functions" but I'd probably get a "cubit dia nisak!" from DITH.