I went and treated myself to a new phone last week. My previous phone was a Nokia 3510i which I believe was one the first phones to have a colour screen. It has served me well since the summer of 2003 and one of my friends continues to user hers today (although I don’t know when she got hers).

My new phone is the 02 Xda Orbit. Actually it’s not just a phone, it’s a PDA, phone and GPS receiver all squeezed into 58x108x16.8mm. That’s about the size of a Blackberry (depending on the model). Since my boss has a blackberry I was able to compare them side by side and they weigh about the same. My original plan was to get the 02 Xda Mini S but the O2 shop in York didn’t have one in stock when I went in, and the Orbit was £10 cheaper – plus the sales guy included a £40 bluetooth keyboard for free!

After a week of use and installing some extra applications I’m just about at the stage where I’m happy with it. Since I’m not on the top contact the GPS package is isn’t included, but there is plenty of other software that will work with the GPS reciever so I’m using them. This includes the TomTom software, just a pity that it’s so expensive.

Since the Orbit runs Windows Mobile 2005 getting it to work with Linux may prove to be a challenge. For now I’ve been using my work laptop to install application and sync it with a PC and for the most part this works quite well. At least I’m still able to charge it from a USB port in Linux even if I can’t do anything else with it.

I’ve another 6 days to decide if I want to keep it or go back and pay the extra £10 for the Mini S, at present I wont be using that option.

P.S. You don’t need to update your address book as I’m still keeping the same number .