RSS 
So after a year and a few months, my old cell, a Sony Ericsson k510a was dying. It wasn't the greatest phone but it wasn't bad, but now the keys were sinking and becoming unresponsive. Time for a new phone. So I ordered one last week.
And today, my brand new Nokia 5200 showed up! I'm reasonably impressed with it. Right off the bat it does a few things right. It has an adapter so you can plug any good 3.5mm headphone you spent money on into the phone to listen to your music, so you aren't stuck with their proprietary and bad headphones. This is awesome. Second, it comes a USB cable and when plugged in has the option to be a mass data storage device which is perfect.
The interface though is a bit weird. The addressbook uses such a large font only two entries can ever fit on the screen, which makes it feel cramped, even though there is no reason for this.
Next, even though this phone is well set up as an mp3 player, you cannot use your mp3s as ringtones. It's some DRM "issue". What a waste. Anyways, I picked a song I like, loaded it into audacity, turned it to mono, selected 10 seconds, and exported it as a .wav and that seemed to work. It will accept any wav, but it has to be with in a certain range. <300Kb is ok and around 800Kb is not, (my two tests) so somewhere in there is the magic number.
Now all my contacts were imported from my SIM card, but they came in a little messed up and not grouped, so I've been going through and cleaning them. Not optimal, but I think at least part of that is the fault of my last phone too. Better than not having the numbers at all but a pain, becase I have 123 contacts.
As I alluded to earlier, this phone, equipped with a 1GB mini SD card, might just replace my mp3 player. The pros are that it has a reasonable interface for it and volume buttons on the case and accepts and headphones I want to use. The con is that it doesn't do ogg. But to carry around one less device I might be able to put up with that. I'll give it a try and see how it does. Again though, they use way too large a font and most of the filenames in the browser are cut off.
So all in all, some nice hardware, and some good low level choices. I'm pretty impressed. The biggest problem for me is that the interface really could stand to use a smaller font so a reasonable amount of information could fit on the screen. It feels cramped.
