Since my cellular contract expired at the beginning of the month, I’ve been contemplating a new phone.  The one I have now is two years old and I’ve abused it quite a bit in that time.  Since it appears that cellular number portability isn’t going to be implemented any time soon (and I didn’t find any other carriers that I liked enough to hassle with getting a new number), I went to the Cingular kiosk in the local mall to renew my contract so I could get a new phone and a new rate plan.  Cingular doesn’t have a very large selection of phones available, but after a bit of consideration I decided on the Nokia 6340i.

One of the things I was glad to see among the phones that were available is that the race to build the smallest phone is finally over.  My previous phone was a Nokia 8260, which was technically a good phone.  But after spending two years with it, I learned that something that small isn’t really practical in everyday use.  My fingers were too big for the buttons, causing me to misdial numbers or make mistakes entering passcodes.

But what really inspired this post is the fact that the new phone has an IR feature that allows it to exchange information with computers and handhelds.  I usually dread having to enter all those numbers from my old phone into the new phone using the cumbersome alphabetic entry method that is required on cell phones (since they only have a numeric keypad).  However, with this one I just turned on the IR receive feature in the phone, pointed it at my Palm Vx and selected the “Beam address” option in the Palm for each person I wanted to add to the phone.  Further, the people at Nokia got their act together and created true address book entries for the phone directory.  This means that I can have several different numbers for the same person and they’ll all be subentries under their name.  In the past I was forced to create separate entries for each number for a person.

It’s the small things that make really make a difference in my experience of a product.  So far, this has been fairly pleasant.  If I get really adventurous I may enable internet access on this phone just to see if it lives up to all the hype I’ve been hearing about it (it’s only $3.99 per month).