Nokia N78

So

1. because Singtel had a kickass deal at only $288 with contract (listed as $658 on mobilesquare for phone wihtout contract - normally its only a $200 markup ) for a Nonka Nseries phone

2. the old contract had just reached eligibility for upgrade

3. my previous k750i was pretty close to being on its knees now (and despite that, I traded it in for a cool $60)

4. the wifi web browsing and GPS capabilities would come in useful when I head to Melbourne tomorrow

I ended up with a Nokia N78, despite all the fears of horrible service centres and laggy user interfaces.



Classy eh.



Rather slick. It comes in black with a choice of 2 backplate colours (puke-inducing blue or classy dark brown). Included is a generous 2GB microSD card.



It's a fingerprint magnet.



They keys are thin little strips, but they're still bigger than those on the N82 and they definitely feel alot better and easier to type with. The multidirectional navigation key sometimes registers a press as a downstroke if you don't press it right in the middle, which is frustrating. The metallic rim around it acts like an iPod's clickwheel - run your finger around it in circles to navigate through songs quickly.



No camera lens cover - a travesty of a camera! And a LED flash that lights up every time you take a photo (an anti-voyeur feature?) that requires duct tape to make it less distracting - a double travesty!



With a 3 megapixel autofocus camera, image quality's decent though, but the white balance could be improved.



Whoa. GPS. With maps from around the world you can preload onto the phone. Doesn't work well in my estate due to the tall buildings though...



Wireless LAN! With better than decent signal reception.



This little thing is actually a charger. Wow.

Sound quality, as expected for a phone, is nasty compared to my iPod nano. FM radio audio is pretty sweet though.

Syncing to the computer is a pain. The Nseries PC Suite had a very un-intuitive system and I went to install the plain vanilla PC Suite instead.

I'm satisfied - so far, that is!