As part of my planning for next week, I recorded all the sessions I am thinking of attending in my Outlook calendar. Well, that’s fine, but my laptop won’t always be available during the week, especially given the rumoured power shortage down there.

Recently I switched mobile phone providers. I did this mainly because in my recent visits to Europe, I really missed having a phone. Luckily one of the major providers here in Canada has switched to GSM, so now I have a phone that should work over there, too.

I picked up one of the latest phones. I won’t say brand names, but let’s say CDT committer Ken Ryall would be proud ;). I wasn’t really looking at features, I just wanted a phone that was really inexpensive, but not cheap, on a three year contract, and this was on the top of the list on my provider’s web site.

The more I get into this thing, the less I am thinking of it as a phone. First of all, I learned that I qualified for a free 1 GB MicroSD stick (which unfortunately hasn’t arrived yet for my EclipseCon trip). What would I use that for? Well, this thing is also an MP3 player. So that’s kind of cool, I’ve been wanting one recently but didn’t want to fork out $100+ for one (yes, call me cheap). And from my last blog entry, you can see it has the now standard camera feature, which I will probably use a lot next week. Playing with it, I see it is also a video camera too (now I see why I need a 1 GB stick). And of course, it does all the latest games, apps, what have you that run on mobile devices these days.

Now back to my original problem of accessing my calendar during EclipseCon, I was playing with the PC software that does various things with the phone over my laptop’s Bluetooth connection, and I noticed a Synchronize app. I fired it up, and found out I can synchronize my Outlook calendar to my phone. (It just beeped with a reminder for a meeting I have in 5 minutes, I’d better wrap this up). So this thing is a PIM, too.

I’m not sure if I’ll be come a mobile phone power user. I still hate that the screen is so tiny. But I have the chance now to give it a try, I guess…