I was looking for a new phone because my Nokia 6600 is a little long in the tooth and I needed a new phone with more up to date features. I needed a 3G phone, 3.5G would be better,it must have BT and most importantly be able to be used as a modem with my Macbook. Friends familiar with Mac tell me to go SE because it's connects with a Mac without much trouble. Hmmm I am a Nokia guy and know that their PC suite works seamlessly and I have Parallels. All the other features like megapixels camera, GPS and Wifi initially was secondary features that is good to have but I'd rather prefer a nice big screen. I narrowed down to the Nokia 6233,6110 and SE810i. The 6233 was cheap and got everything I wanted, the 6110 had 3.5G plus GPS while the SE got 3.2mp cybershot camera! Finally I decided to get the 6110 but it has to be black. Unfortunately when you want one it's out of stock, so what the heck, I don't really the GPS. Then I saw the SE990i, initially was dismissed from my list due to the form factor but when it's in my hand it's not actually much bigger than my 6600. It's a smart phone, got almost everything except the kitchen sink. Hmm interesting,what attracted me was that it's got WiFi , it's a music player with limited PDA functionality and super sharp 240x320 screen. Between Wi-Fi and GPS, I reckoned I will use the Wi-Fi more often and still could get a better standalone GPS transceiver. However the best feature was it's price! It's 60% off the original price and I feel getting acquainted with it would be fun,boy was I wrong! The SE990i is not for someone not willing to learn how to use properly and that's why the price has dropped much! it's almost like a mini computer and you have to scour the forums to make it working properly and it took me almost a week to do so. After reinstalling the firmware,upgraded to 2GB memory I can connect it to the Mac either wirelessly or through USB, have tried wifi on it, played music and radio and even downloaded movies to it. Picture turn out great too and I am beginning to warm up to it. For the price I paid I cannot complain and actually it's the cheapest wiFi 3G smartphone around at the moment!Friday 17, Finally managed to update to the latest firmware R6E28. It was like doing brain surgery, you foul up you end up with a brick of a phone. Thanks to fellow blogger and other forums,making the 990i much more stable and useable.
