My old (hand-me-down) Sony Ericsson P900 has been dieing for a while. The screen was scratched to death, the stylus missing, and the keypad cracked. (The Top row of buttons didn’t work, and the rest occasionally returned the wrong number). Oh, and the phone was crashing a lot.

I don’t do spending money on cellphones (because the ones I’d like cost a fortune, and I would never buy something that I don’t want), I’ve upgraded to a “new” hand-me-down SE P910i from my brother :-). It came Orange-branded, and after I firmware-updated it, it Orange-locked, grr.

I wish there was a free way to sort this out, but I couldn’t find one, so I paid my £16, and used Total Multi Server. It doesn’t require any cables beyond the docking station, and most importantly it worked.

Overall, the P910i is much like the P900, but better. The keypad is sturdier, the phone has more RAM, more applications, and it seems to get better reception.

I “bluetoothed” all my contacts across (because if you do it the syncing route, you loose information when a contact has more than one cell phone number, etc.).

I’ve installed a few apps, that I like:

• Opera Mini - the best web browser for a phone
• GMail - this may come in handy (all my incoming mail gets CCed to GMail)
• Handy Day 2004 - It makes the phone much more usable as a PIM, and I had a copy lying around.
• MGMaps - I’ve tried using maps in opera on my P900, and it was a pain.
• MidpSSH - Never needed it, but just in case, and anyway, it’s cool :-)
• Mxit - I rarely use it, but it’s jabber-peering makes it occasionally nice to have.
• quirc - Who ever wants to be stuck without IRC?

Finally I got it to synchronise with Google Calendar. The phone only does proprietary (windows) syncs or SyncML over GPRS. But Google Calendar doesn’t do SyncML. The OpenSource SyncML server is a Java monster which I wasn’t going to install on any of my servers, So I opted for ScheduleWorld as an intermediary. (don’t you love their shameless google-style website? :-) ) It works really nicely.

There is also a midp Java program for syncing to Google calendar, gcalsync, but it requires “JSR 75: PDA Optional Packages for the J2ME Platform”, which the P910i doesn’t have :-(