A work do and a new phone

It was the ICT Christmas do last night. It was held at a nearby hotel and was a 70's/80's themed 'Boogie Night'. It was actually quite good. Fancy dress was the order of the day and I was one of only two scrooges not dressed up. However fortunately I did have my Superman T-shirt on so that was enough to redeem me. The meal was a sort of Chinese buffet thing, but there was salad as well, so people ended up with random plates full of fried rice and sweet and sour pork, along with beetroot, potato salad and BBQ sauce. Odd but interesting. It was a good evening and the secret Santa presents were a big success. Perhaps the oddest was a piece of toffee which contained an apparently edible real scorpion. Two guys bravely ate it but lost their appetite when they actually reached the scorpion.

New phone time. My faithful Nokia 7610 has well and truly earned it's retirement. In the two and a half years I've owned it, it's been dropped quite often, covered in wine, kicked across a concrete floor into a wall, covered in mud and various items of food, and not a single thing has ever gone wrong. It had a new shell earlier this year but other than that, never needed anything. It is the most solid, reliable phone I have ever encountered. If the keypad hadn't finally started to fail, I'd have simply bought a new battery for it.

However instead I got a new phone. As can be seen in the image above, compared to the 7610, it's huge and complex. It's a Nokia N93, the device where Nokia went mad and included absolutely everything in a single device. It has a fast CPU, a 3mp camera with 3x optical zoom, a VGA camera in the lid, a 320x240 display, wi-fi, TV output and a weird folding, twisting shell design. Compared to the 7610 it feels flimsy and plasticky, but we'll see how it holds up. It's amazing how fast these things depreciate - 18 months ago, this was the absolute high-end of Nokia's line-up, but I got it for a fraction of the original off-contract price.