The contract on Jayne’s Vodafone finally came to an end, so I dumped them and got her a BlackBerry from Virgin because it was a bout the cheapest deal when factoring in the discount for being a Virgin Media customer.   It could have been even cheaper but I went for the new 3G version instead of the Curve 8520.

It gave me a chance to have a play to see if it would help me make up my mind about whether to go for BlackBerry or Android, and so far I am quite impressed with it.  The only bit of bad planning was getting it on a Friday.  Although I had the PAC from Vodafone they only change the numbers over on working days so we had to wait three days before getting Jayne’s old number on the new phone.

I found it really easy to get the phone to hook up to Jayne’ s email account on my mail server and to get it to connect to our home router.  The screen is not huge so browsing normal websites isn’t going to be brilliant, but that’s not really what we expect to do – there are apps for Facebook, Twitter, and other sites like that and mobile versions of sites like Wikipedia.  I’m sure it will be fine for checking news, weather, football scores and so on, and brilliant for mail of course.

I thought I had almost made my mind up and then I took her phone into work to see what sort of signal it gets there, which turned out to be absolutely none.  I suppose its my fault for working in a building made of material which effectively tempest the whole place.  The only network that works reliably is Orange because we have our own repeaters to enable all the company phones to work.

I was faced with a choice between a phone I could use for email (through a corporate wifi) but not receive calls or texts on, or go to Orange which would cost a bit more and give less mobile internet megabytes just so it would work as a phone.   Then I found out that we can get a discount on Orange because the company has a deal with them and suddenly all the equations changed.

It turns out that Orange works out cheaper for me than Virgin.  They have a wider range of phones and options too, so loads more choice.  I found myselfy looking at stuff like the Motorola Atrix before reminding myself that it is a bit OTT for the minimal use I will make of it.  The inner nerd likes the idea of a dual core processor, fingerprint reader and huge touch screen but I have to keep telling him to be realistic.

I’m already annoyed with Orange’s silly animal names for their call plans and headbangingly frustrated by their bloody awful website.  I’ll probably go for the same sort of Blackberry as Jayne in the end but for now I’ll just indulge in a little more of the geekporn of looking at all the other machines until next month when I my own Vodafone contract runs out and I can ditch the tax-dodgers and save myself a few pennies too.

I know Blackberries are boring compared to the Atrix but at least I know where I am with them.