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I've had a Nokia 6102 for probably close to a year now. It's only Nokia's second flip phone. Here's a rundown of features:
- Phone calls: Great audio quality, a little quiet sometimes. There is an "Automatic volume leveling" function that you need to turn on. (Most of the horror stories about "The audio is waaaaaay too quiet" are because people didn't turn this on.)
- Reception: Absolutely amazing, at least compared to my Sony Ericsson T226. In most places, I get 3 or 4 bars out of 4. I've had almost no choppy audio, it's all very smooth and relatively natural-sounding. I live in Boston, and normally when we (my family) are driving through Brookline, our phones completely lose signal. The other day, however, they actually clung to the signal and managed a crappy call instead of none. (There are few cell towers in Brookline because nobody wants the ugliness. Getting a signal at all is quite a feat.)
- Battery life: Excellent, as far as I can tell. Only constant re-downloading of Java apps has brought my battery under 4 bars. Even as the phone is approaching 1 year old, it still gets close to a week of standby time.
- Appearance: Very nice-looking phone. I would recommend a case, as the shiny black plastic on the outside is very soft and scratches easily. Scratches often aren't visible unless you tilt the phone into the light, but still... Some people don't like the external antenna. I say, screw them, I'd prefer the better reception.
- Screen(s): Inside screen is 128x160 (vertical), 64k colors, TFT. Very pretty, very wide horizontal viewing angle, decent vertical viewing angle. Can fit quite a lot of text on it in the browser. Outside screen is 96x64 (horizontal), 4k colors, CSTN. Obviously not as good as the internal screen, but still good enough for caller ID and status. Rendering of caller ID pictures is pretty bad (colors aren't as accurate or vivid, image is small). Can be used as viewfinder for self-portraits, but I recommend the inside one if possible.
- Keypad: Very nice, I like it for text messaging. Better than the RAZR (I tried a friend's). Soft keys, send, and end are molded as one piece of plastic, which looks confusing, but each key is labelled. Unfortunately, the labels are just generic red, green, and blue blobs, which all turn blue under the backlight, so you just have to know which key is which.
- Interface: It's a Nokia Series 40, and a beautiful one at that. The menus are logically laid out, everything works as you expect. There is ample room for customization (you can choose functions for all four arrows and the right soft key in standby mode). It's a tiny bit laggy at times, but not annoyingly slow.
- Messaging: Surprisingly fast (probably due to good reception), good text entry. I don't use MMS, so I can't comment on its network behavior, but the MMS editor seems good, if a bit clunky (most are).
- Java (a.k.a. "Games and apps"): Slow. Most included games are demos, except for "Canal Control" (standard pipelayer game). JVM is a bit unstable. Usable, but get a better phone if you plan to spend lots of time using Java. Opera Mini runs decently.
- Internet: EDGE is great, if you live in a city with service (I do). I imagine GPRS is still quite fast. Browser is pretty good. As with most aspiring phone browsers, it supports fragments of XHTML/CSS, while leaving out some important parts of WAP (the ANCHOR and DO tags). None of this probably matters in reality, however; it browsed all the sites I used fine.
- IM: I haven't used it heavily, but the built-in IM client is a pretty full-featured implementation of AIM, ICQ, and Yahoo! as a Java app. It's fast enough, but you should know it does use text messages, so it comes with the delays and costs of them. (A real network connection would be faster.)
- Gallery: Easy to navigate, rich filesystem commands, nested user-defined folders are allowed.
- Phonebook (a.k.a. "Address book"): Very well done, supports 5 types of phone numbers, street addresses, web addresses, email addresses, pictures, and notes. Very "rich" and useful compared to most phonebooks. As usual, entries on the SIM card don't keep any of this useful data--multiple numbers per name are simply numbered, like "John Smith", "John Smith2", "John Smith3".
- Settings: Really cool, you can create your own network settings, but Cingular defaults are embedded in the phone in case you mess stuff up. Settings are a little scattered, but still easily findable.
- Organizer (a.k.a. "Applications"): Usual pseudo-PIM tools. Calendar is nicer than many, but not Palm-quality. To-do list, calculator, and notes are run-of-the-mill.
- Radio: Can't comment, don't have a headset. (It needs a headset to use as an antenna.)
- Camera: It's okay. Don't buy the phone just for the camera, it's not that great. Fine for phonebook or MMS shots, passable for moblog shots, crappy for anything else. Video quality is laughable but good enough for playing around.
I would recommend this as a really good middle-of-the-road phone. If you're looking for Bluetooth, fast Java performance, or a high-quality camera, look elsewhere. Otherwise, the 6102 seems like a good phone so far.
If you don't want the camera, the Nokia 6061 appears to be the same phone without the camera.
Disclaimer: I did pick up the Nokia 6102 on sale for $40 instead of $90, so I may be biased by that. If I were willing to spend $90, I would consider it a good deal for $90. However, it was a steal at $40.
UPDATE: Cingular currently carries the Nokia 6102i, which appears to be an update of this phone with Bluetooth and more internal memory.
I got a Logitech MX310 for my birthday last year. I had planned on getting the MX510, but it was too expensive. The MX310 is a decent mouse. It's a USB mouse, and of course came with the increasingly-unnecessary USB-to-PS2 adapter.
As most of Logitech's mice do, the MX310 has extra buttons beyond the usual two plus scroll wheel. It's got a "Quick Switch" button beneath the scroll wheel, and Back and Forward buttons on the left and right sides on the mouse. They are a bit awkward to use; the Quick Switch button is too far back (towards you)--it requires bending your middle finger a lot. It would be better if it were in front of the scroll wheel instead. The side buttons are too far up; my thumb and pinky finger tend to rest in the indented sides of the mouse rather than on the ridge near the top where the buttons are placed. They would be better placed lower down on the side. The Forward button (activated with the pinky finger, for righties) is also a little too far back on the mouse, like the Quick Switch button. It is probably a non-issue on the higher-end mice, where the Back and Forward buttons are larger and placed beside each other on the same side of the mouse.
As far as I can tell, the resolution of the mouse is nice. With a bit of fiddling (specifying a USB product ID) with lmctl, I can change the DPI of the mouse to 800 rather than 400. It's very sensitive, and I haven't yet found a material on which it has trouble tracking. (I haven't tried anything absurd like a transparent glass desk yet.)
All in all, the MX310 is a decent mouse, but you'd probably be happier with one of the higher-end ones, since they're more ergonomic and covered with a more comfortable rubber coating instead of the plastic that coats the MX310.
I've had an hp LaserJet 1320 for a while at home. My dad bought it after we got tired of our Lexmark 5700 coughing up ink cartridges after they were only half empty.
Physically, the 1320 looks like most laser printers, with only a slightly "curvier" look than most. We also looked at the hp LaserJet 1012, which is their cheapest model, but decided to get the 1320 instead because the 1012's chassis is shaped more like an ink jet, which is ugly, and leaves it underendowed in the paper tray department. (It has a very small tray, and unlike most laser printers, the tray isn't enclosed inside the printer; it just sticks out.) The 1320 also has a few more indicators and two buttons, which makes it easier to operate.
Since it's an hp printer, it is compatible with Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. (Seriously. See my experience with Linux and hp tech support. They actually fixed my problem.) It's usually plugged in to our Mac, but I'm considering plugging it into my server instead, because the Mac has trouble sharing printers.
The first thing that I noticed when using this printer is the insane speed. It runs at 22 pages per minute, which is amazing when you first see it. Granted, I've come from an ink jet, and the speed isn't that great compared to hp's business models (our LaserJet 2420dn at school does 30 pages per minute), but 22 pages a minute is less than 3 seconds between pages, and the startup time is less than 8 seconds. In short, if you're used to printing text documents on an ink jet, you will be blown away.
The text quality is, as far as I can tell without running formal tests, crisp and pretty. The image quality is fairly good, for a laser printer. Since it's black and white, you won't be using it to print photos, but it won't make a mess of pictures or diagrams in documents you print.
I can't comment yet on the price of toner cartridges for this printer, since we haven't had to buy a single cartridge yet. It's almost two years old, and we've only used two thirds of the first cartridge, which is a normal one, not a high-capacity one (which would last 2.5x longer).
The only flaw with this printer is the manual feed. Essentially, the distance between the manual feed roller and the sensor that triggers the printer to pull the paper in is too large, and the rollers only spin a small distance. You have to quickly and correctly insert the paper, or it will either feed crookedly or not grab the paper. Even with this flaw, it's still pretty easy to feed envelopes and such.
Since I don't have the networked model, I can't directly comment on the networking abilities of this printer, but if our LaserJet 2420dn at school is similar in any way, the networking will probably be quite good. The 2420dn even has the ability to send status messages to a syslog server on the network, so you could (theoretically) have the computer read the log message and email someone when a paper jam goes unfixed for too long.
As far as I can say, this is a great, reasonably priced printer that prints high quality text output at a brisk pace, and does a decent job with graphics too.
Update: After 2 years, I finally replaced the toner cartridge! Hopefully I won't need another for a few more years. ;-)
