Well, the hate affair is finally over. I've been "using" a Nokia N70 for the last few years. I can honestly say that it has been an utterly hateful experience. The N70 is my "worst phone ever". It weighs a tonne, takes an epoch to boot, has woeful reception, is laggy as hell, the camera would turn the landscape of eden into a turd, the list is endless. I swear, this phone turned me into a phone abuser.

My hatred of the N70 also turned me (even more) antisocial. I hated to carry it, hated to answer it, just plain hated it. At the end, battery life on standby was around 5 hours. If you managed to get me on my mobile, you were lucky. Something had to change.

I remember reading something that DHH posted about getting a "simple phone" (article now gone but not forgotten). He went for a pebl jobbie. Simple, phone and texts done well - that's all.

This all suddenly rang true - MP3's? I have an iPod. Camera? I have a digital camera. PDA? Who the hell actually uses a PDA for more than a week? The N70 tried to be all those things and failed miserably. In the process it also forgot to be a decent phone.

Salvation!

After reading a tonne of reviews, I decided to roll the dice on another Nokia. This time a 3110 Classic. "Another Nokia?!?" I hear you cry - But wait! Nokia are the only company to create a phone UI which I enjoyed - way back around 2000 before color screens and fancy GUI's they were kicking ass with their text based menus. There are also read a fair number of reviews on the 3110 being pretty good.

I'm happy to report that this phone is brilliant.

• Fast boot up
• Extremely quick UI, no lag
• Thoughtful shortcuts on the central rocker button
• Brilliant button size
• Standby battery life of over 2 weeks
• Quick text message creation and read
• Light weight and small size
• Actually kinda cool mp3 player that can stream music over bluetooth to A2DP headphones (but I'll never use it)
• A USB port - so I can use the same wire as my camera! No more crappy proprietary interfaces please!
• Oversize text on the display

Basically it is the perfect mobile phone. Unobtrusive and good at what it's supposed to do. Thank god.

P.S. I realise that this is more of a rant on the N70 than a review of the 3110, but I had to let it all out!

A couple of weekends ago we went on a fantastic ride out around the south downs. Starting at the geeky sounding Dorking, we discovered an amazing slice of england with some great climbs providing enough of a challenge to get the legs working again.

It was really easy to do - London's Victoria station, and then head south. Excellent day out.



Obligatory photo of a beautiful forest. It had to be done.

Finally a hot sunny weekend hits! As Ross mentioned today, it’s weird how seasonal the UK is. In the sun it’s a fantastic place.