Slumming with an older phone
Yesterday morning, my shipment of two Nokia 6340i came in. It reminds me of the Nokia 6360 I had a couple of years back, which is an updated design of the old Nokia 6160. I actually gave my Nokia 6360 to a friend of mine on AT&T Wireless who was still on TDMA. He then went GSM shortly thereafter.
I had blogged recently aboutcoveting a Nokia 6340i. Someone I had helped out recently over at Voxilla saw my blog entry and said “hey, I’ve got several of these phones. Want a couple?” A couple of weeks later (snafus with shipping, etc), the two he promised arrived yesterday. Has to be one of the nicest things anyone’s done for me.
After having used demure Nokia candybar phones with color screens, bluetooth, cameras, radios, polyphonic ringtones, and GPRS/EDGE for a couple of years now, it’s kind of “different” using a phone that has none of those things. It’s a phone that’s basically just that–a phone. It’s got a black and white screen, it does have the ability to browse the web, albeit with WAP and at 9600bps, you can play a few games on it, it has infrared, and it plays monophonic ringtones. It’s a phone, it works, it’s a little big and it’s built like a tank.
The other important feature the Nokia 6340i has is the field test screens, otherwise known as NetMonitor. This can be activated by typing *3001#12345# and power cycling the phone. This allows me to see, among other things, what towers my phone sees, what their relative signal strengths are, approximately how far I am from the tower, what tower I am connected to (with appropriate details) and a lot of other technical things that don’t matter to me. This isn’t the first phone I’ve had with NetMonitor (my Mokia 6190 also has it), but it’s the first phone I’ve had with NetMonitor that is GSM 850 capable.
Meanwhile, I think I am going to be slumming with my Nokia 6340i for a while.
