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I got myself a new phone yesterday - a Sony Ericsson P910i. It seems to be quite an upgrade from my P800, even though they have a fair amount of common hardware (including the CPU). The screen is much better - 256K colours instead of 4096 and the “GameBoy” effect of the P800 display is gone. Yay! There seem to be minor improvements everywhere, including T9 predictive text support and the ability to create folders for SMSs. How the P800 could have been released without T9 I have no idea. I’m still busy moving my applications, ebooks, etc across and configuring the P910i to my liking, a slow and painful process.

As much as I like the Px00 series phones, they have a few “features” that some find too annoying to work around. I agree that they aren’t perfect, but I think they’re the best family of smartphones current available.

One thing that’s pretty cool - I managed to get a R1,000 ($170) discount on the phone after moaning that the amount I’d have to pay in was too high. Thanks Vodacom Service Provider Company.

More comments in a few weeks once I’ve used the phone more.

I’m sure this is old news, but I spotted something interesting in a Samsung brochure I received in the mail last week - quite a few of their newer DVD players support DivX. I’m pretty surprised that a major manufacturer of consumer electronics is supporting a format that has such a chequered history, but kudos to them. For more info, check out the Samsung site. If you are a Samsung DVD player owner, they are offering a firmware upgrade for some of their DVD players which adds DivX support.

On a related note, I see a few of their portable music players (like the Yepp) support Ogg Vorbis.