Had to pick up a mobile phone quickly yesterday afternoon, as my daughter decided that my mobile should go into a mug of hot coffee.

I was pretty much set on a SE clamshell, one of the z series and settled on the z558i which is now the same price as my old razr v3i.

Main reason to get SE was that  Motorolas's business card import is severely limited. You can't get phone numbers from others. This is lame, and it's obvious that people don't use this function much. Both Nokias and SE phones can exchange them without any issues. This is even more important for me because my main storage for addresses is my Palm TX. It's so much easier now to keep phone numbers in sync, not to mention me being able to send cards directly via sms from my Palm which is so much easier than using the phone interface. I didn't check if the new Linux based V8 fixed this problem as it was way over my budget.

Bluetooth pairing was simple, but I needed to tweak the script a bit on the Palm the dial up code is *99***1# and you need to add a delay of a second or two to be able to get a proper connection.

This is also possible reason that bluetooth dialup from my notebook no longer works. This phone is also standard GPRS not EDGE.

Most of the mobile phone sellers are idiots. Some dude even was waving his hands and clapping to make a point saying that if I wanted EDGE, I should get a PDA phone even while I was holding my Palm. As was discussed on #myoss, people who buy PDA phones seem to not use the functions anyway. What's the big deal with 2MP camera anyway? So the sale went to a dealer who tried to help me look for what I wanted. Except for one, all the dealers got it wrong by saying that the z558i has EDGE, it doesn't it's just Class 10 GPRS.

Overall I'm happy with the phone, it works well as a phone and it works well as a complement to my PDA. It will do until Digi rolls out their 3G service in mid 2008. Looking forward to that, cheap unlimited data plans here we come!

If anybody has got GPRS going with FreeBSD and SE phone in Malaysia, leave a comment. There are some overseas articles which I think may work, and I'll try it out on the weekend.

MYOSS Basketball

That was a fun game of 2 on 2 and 2 on 3 with geekool, spoonfork, yky turning up. The very blur chflags turned up much later via YMCA Brickfields. Ejat showed up to check things out towards the end.

The location is quite accessible and the indoor courts were nice. It is expensive though for just 4-6 people. We really need at least 10-12. More affordable is UM, but we can't have that on weekdays as it closes at 7pm. The registration counter did say though that to shoot around without all the lights was RM6 per person. That's not a bad option for me to get some indoor shooting practice.

MyOSS futsal maybe a better option, judging by the fact that at the centre we were outnumbered like 50 to 4 in terms of bbal players to futsal. :)

Have a nice weekend folks and don't forget that there is a meetup next week.