ROKR Killer?

Ventured into the local Carphone Warehouse at the weekend with my brother who was on the lookout for an upgrade. Despite having made him squander his last upgrade on a Siemens SX-1, (worst. keypad. ever.) and the fact that barely a week has past since in which he lets me forget it, all seemed forgiven.

Perusing the selection we were jointly draw to the shiny allure of the Nokia N91. It’s quite big, but is it very, very shiny and also expensive, so when the sales assistant said he could have it for free it was a done deal. The brother got it home and spent a goodly few hours playing about with the WiFi the video files of Live8 and the like and was generally impressed. So far so good.

However he brought it around to my house last night and whilst I was browsing through the free media I got a couple of random errors about the phone being unable to read the files/disk. Restarted the phone and these went away, but it was still a bit worrying. Then I tried to transfer some MP3s from my laptop, first the software tried to convert my MP3s to AAC or some such. Ok I thought, lets give that a go. I selected 10 files and off it went, or rather it didn't. The conversion was going soooo slowly that I gave up and quit after it had only done 2 files within 5minutes. Then I went for the transfer, which similarly produced a progress bar which seemed reticent to move. After another couple of minutes I gave up. The iPod it experience, it ain't.

Despite the issues, as a phone in general I do quite like the N91. It’s got a nice weight to it, some pretty good features and did I mention how Shiny it is? However I still think the phone manufacturers have a way to go until the get these things as usable as consumer electronics devices...