OMFG … how did I go this long without it? No, not that … the other thing … like the first thing, only smaller and you can use this anywhere. I am speaking, of course, of my newest toy – not top of the range, I know, but bloody hell – I am well impressed with the advances made in mobile communication and even more so with the variety and accessibility of clients for mobile devices.

I recently bought a Nokia 6234 after much shopping around on the interwebs for advice on buying a functional phone that was at the same time good value for money – all this bearing in mind that I am on a Vodacom prepaid (have been for years), so there’s no free upgrade. In fact, every time I “upgrade”, I am forced to buy a new starter pack. Suffice it to say that I have a price collection of starter packs. The only fact that I did not pay enough attention to, is whether the phone is supported by fring (which, sadly it doesn’t) and, had I known that it wasn’t, I would have opted for another model – I really like what they have to offer.

The phone itself has more features than an American flight deck ship and probably more brains than all of its crew combined:

• Colour screen
• Stereo music player/Radio
• Calendar/organiser
• Camera (sadly no flash)

…so that’s not so hot you say, but wait … there’s more. The main reason why I opted for a handset in this niche had more to do with connectivity than anything else:

• GSM (obviously)
• Infrared
• Bluetooth
• GPRS
• Edge
• HSDPA
• 3G

…well, admittedly, even those are not that uncommon and wireless would have been a nice extra, but bear in mind that the handset only cost R1300 and you have to admit it’s bloody good value for money. You can send e-mail directly from the phone – although I am still having trouble retrieving mail from Gmail, using their POP settings (something that my service provider will help with once I swallow my pride and ask someone, I’m sure). It sports an xHTML browser and that really performs well and supports Javascript (for real). Couple that with Nokia’s impeccable service and performance record and also their reputation for sleek, user friendly navigation and menus and we have ourselves a winner.

The list of upgrades is also fairly impressive. It supports a host of well-designed mobile games, ringtones and themes. I have loaded mine with the Facebook application, the Gmail application (not to be confused with logging into your Gmail account via the phone’s regular browser) which allows you all the regular features you’d have access to when logging into your Gmail account as usual including searches, starring, archiving, spam filtering and access to your contacts – all packed into a lightweight application.

The cherry on the cake for me though was Opera Mini 4. WOW. It really blew my mind. Unbelievable. Opera Mini is lightning fast (which in itself makes it worth using I suppose) – I have not used the mini version before, so I cannot really say which of its multitude of features are standard by now and which are upgrades from the previous version, but I think I lost my heart to a mobile device with sexy software (I should have been a bloody chick, I know). The browser looks sleek and sexy, features full page view with a “mouse” used to zoom in on sections of the site viewed and snaps to clickable links as you “mouse-over”. One of the coolest features for me though, is the fact that you can change the screen orientation to landscape, which means that you can turn your phone on it’s side and be offered a view similar to your regular surfing experience. All this happens at speed too. It includes a search bar (Yahoo, Amazon, Wikipedia and eBay), RSS/Atom Feeds and history … suffice it to say that I am much impressed.

OK, admittedly, I’d still rather own an iPhone, but until the hype passes and prices come down, I am much happy to be driving a Nokia again – solid job!!!

Edit: cherry on top of the cherry on top of the cake is the fact that I can now log into my Evo account from my mobile and never miss a launch again. YAAAY .. go Opera.