This weekend I upgraded my mobile phone to the least worst free option that O2 would allow. I was considering the Motorola RAZR V3 but a few people have complained about little ui annoyances it has. So I went for the Sony Ericsson K700i. I have a long history with Ericssons, I did have a brief affair with Nokias in the early 2000s, but I’ve been back home the last couple of years. My first one was the T18 that everyone had around 1999, before flip phones were trendy, it was really simple but it worked. I had the blue one. If it wasn’t for the aerial or the tiny black and white screen it wouldn’t seem so out of date now.

I was going to get the K750i, which has a higher res camera (2MP), but to get as an upgrade I would have had to pay about £60. The K700i seems pretty good, though I wasn’t too keen on the default theme, it made the menu options hard to read, but it’s easy to change that.

The problem with all phones seems to be how hard it is to transfer your address book from one to the other. The simplest option is to copy your contacts to the SIM card and then put the SIM in the new phone. It doesn’t work very well though as I don’t think the SIM can cope with having multiple numbers for one person, so it stores them all as separate people. One person one phone number which is just messy. Another option is to synchronise via an address book on your PC, but the free software never works with Notes. It’s not trivial to import a Notes address book into Outlook, especially as Outlook can’t cope with multiple vCards at the same file. I was thinking of writing a little app to do it myself, but I always end up doing that.

The only option left was to do the Bluetooth transfer from my old phone to the new one. The problem here is that if you start the phone up without a SIM card in, it wont let you do anything. As I’d upgraded I didn’t have a new SIM. In the end I had to borrow the SIM from my Blackberry just to allow the old phone to start up, once I’d done that, the transfer was fairly smooth. Lots of people wont have two SIM cards lying around though. Even less will pay for some extra software to transfer their contacts, or code their own. It doesn’t really seem to be a very complicated task. I think the problem is that there are just too many ways to do it and none are that simple. At least the Blackberry will let you synch over the air to your server-side Notes address book, without even thinking about it. Things like that just make the Blackberry a pleasure to use, but how many consumers can do that?