With Christmas being delightfully merry and cold, I made a resolution in the new year. Well, I didn’t really, I just decided to do something and it happened to be the new year, so lets call it a resolution. I decided to take out a phone contract.

I’ve not had one of these for a while, preferring to use my work phone and just itemize out the personal stuff. However, I was quite tempted by the new Blackberry Storm thing given that it did lots of nice fancy things. However, given that Blackberry seem to have released it at the tail end of 2008 without actually putting it through any sort of QA process, there were numerous reports of software bugs.

Still, in mid-December they were rolling out software updates and the feeling on the interweb was that these were certainly better. Thinking that there was no time like the present, I subsequently agreed to give a large wad of cash to Vodafone each month, in return for which they’d let me talk to other people. Thankfully, Quidco were doing a £90 cashback offer for Vodafone contracts, so I made something back at least.

Anyway, it arrived. It’s a nice bit of kit, confirming other users reports that the hardware was great, but the software less so. I checked that it had the latest version on it and found that it wasn’t too bad. It’s a little sluggish sometimes when it’s got a lot to figure out (a bit like me at times) but it’s far from unusable. GPS is very quick to pick up, watching videos on the screen is much better than on the old blackberries (8310), the camera’s rather good and, best of all, it’s a java-based platform so there’s a good amount of software out there. I like it. I just have to like it for the next 18 months now.

In other news, I’m working on a fabulous new graph thingie which is all about spam. Should be good when I’m done testing (yes! Testing!!!) it.