I finally gave in and purchased a new phone, coming to the conclusion that I would be forever waiting for the iPhone and paying a lot more money for not a great deal more in terms of features. Nexus one would have been nice, but with a £360 price tag or wait until Vodafone gets it and hope the plans are cheap, that was never a definite options.

So, looking through my options on Vodafones upgrade site I could have a free (albeit old) blackberry, HTC Tattoo, and verious other non-smart phones. At £60 the Magic seemed a pretty good deal, so I went with it and was about to hit order to be told that it could only be delivered to my home address, which isn’t ideal as I am currently at uni in Lancaster, so went to ring up to see if the address could be changed and ended up getting the phone for just £30, due to them knocking 300 minutes from my allowance, which I don’t use anyway.

It arrived on Friday, quite impressive considering I had only ordered the day before. I couldn’t get over how small this thing was, making my Nokie E63 look like the brick that it truly is, it has a far sleeker design and feels like it has a far superior build quality (I never thought I would say that about a Nokia).

Due to the awful reception in my room, at first I thought I’d received a broken unit, even to the extent that I was about to return it, but a quick walk around campus brought up excellent 3G reception and all the features working in an instant. The Android OS really does shine when you have a solid internet connection, with Google services being synced instantaneously, and new mail being pushed directly towards you, it is what I imagine Exchange would be like in a business environment.

This is a new toy for me, so obviously I’m playing with it and wearing the battery down at a constant rate! But I can honestly say that I’m not dissapointed or regretting the fact that I didn’t hold out for an iPhone, it is the best phone I have had by a long way.

Just one niggle, why is it not possible to enter a proxy server for WLAN connections? Making it useless for use on the univesrities network, and I can’t get 3rd party apps to work either. Ahh well, so long as I have 3G all is good.

So, I decided that charging my iPod via Laptop’s USB port was beginning to be a pain, and the firewire charger from my iPod mini just needed replacing. For a start it had the old “clips” on the dock connector to stop it from coming unplugged. The result of these “troubles” is quite simple really, a brand new replacement

Naturally, this came in a nice appley box. Admittedly £20 for a charger is a bit on the steep side, but I had an Argos voucher which needed using, bringing the price to around a tenner. Much more reasonable. To my surprise I found that it came with a brand new USB cable, a nice little bonus which will make a handy spare, but I suppose it is justified given the price.

One of the most amazing things about these chargers is the size, compared to my MacBook charger it’s tiny, compared to my old iPod charger it’s tiny, simply brilliant!

I’ve just ordered some new speakers.

Hopefully these will be a great improvement over my current 2.1 system, that doesn’t like to be switched on.

The only problem is that I am going to now have even more cables, but the surround-soundness of it should be worth it!

They’ll be coming by wednesday hopefully, so I’ll judge them then, although they do seem to be rated quite well around the web.