More phone thoughts, Emerald Hill

I’m so indecisive.

I took a look at the Nokia N73 last night, and it just… doesn’t speak to me, if you know what I mean. I know, it’s only a phone, but still: if I’m going to spend a fair lump of cash on something that will be with me for most of the day, I want it to be something I like having around.

Also on my mind are the new toys from Apple. I was taking a look at Preetam’s iPod Touch the day before yesterday, and I was pretty impressed. Then last night,after I’d seen the Nokia, I went to meet up with a friend, a Singaporean, who I know from Beijing. She’s back for a few days, along with a number of other Beijing-based foreigners. One of them, a Norwegian games developer and entrepreneur, had an iPhone that he’d bought, unlocked, in Beijing for RMB 5000, or thereabouts. It had a number of applications installed on it, including SSH, which he was using to connect to his servers. Cool.

Now the iPod Touch has far fewer 3rd-party applications available than the iPhone, and Apple seems to be doing the best it can to keep them both crippled (shame!). A bit of searching shows that there are a lotof people working on opening them both up, which raises the possibility that in the not-too-distant future, an iPod Touch might be able to run SSH, Skype, and lots of very useful software. And given that Singapore has an increasing number of places with free wifi, a wifi-enabled iPod would certainly be a better option than changing my current, very cheap, phone plan in order to get expensive internet access. I can still keep using my old Nokia 6108 to make calls…

…until I go to China again, probably early next year. By then, the Meizu MiniOne will be on the market, and the latest specs do actually make it look very attractive – more than the iPhone, if I’m honest. Of course, by then, the Asian launch of the iPhone will be closer, and maybe Apple will have improved it – but according to what I read now, they’ll enable Japanese and Korean input, but not Chinese. WTF???? Unless that changes, I will definitely get the Meizu! Of course, by then there may even be a new Apple PDA in the works…

Anyway, back to Emerald Hill… The reason there were so many Beijing residents there was that China is really tightening up its administration of foreign residents. It seems that anyone who has been living there for five years or more has to leave for at least a month. Next year, the Public Security Bureau will be enforcing the rules on registration much more closely, while it will be harder to get visa changes or renewals through the slightly dodgy companies that advertise all over the place… All natural as China modernises, of course, but it does mean that some of the edginess and bohemian ways (in Haidian, at least) will vanish. Oh well.