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Has no one at Sony Ericsson never met anyone that likes to be able to keep his work contacts handy, browse web sites on the move quickly and easily, listen to music on-the-go, take high quality pictures for work and play and finally, make video calls to his family? Is it impossible that this could be the same person?

I appreciate that there are factors such as cost and complexity and details such as battery life that might prevent all these functions from being combined into one unit, but what I object to most of all is that we’re being compartmentalised into neat little categories and marketed at accordingly. So corporates don’t want cameras on their phones – well make a corporate version for them but don’t spoil it for me.

Actually, there is a Sony Ericsson phone that does seem to cover all the bases that I’m looking for - the forthcoming P990i. The thing is, it doesn’t have the K800i’s 3.2-megapixel camera, which leaves it short of the compact camera replacement I was talking about. It’s also a bit ugly – and it’s too big. I had the original P800 just because it was touted as being able to do everything I wanted and I loved it for a while, but eventually I got fed up with not having something I could put into a jeans pocket.

Perhaps then the Nokia N80 is what I’m looking for. – it’s spec is amazing! It has a 352 x 416 resolution screen that can display up to 262,144 colours, a three megapixel camera, Bluetooth and even Wi-Fi! It runs Symbian too so you can put applications on it – like the P990i.

However, I wanted to move to 02, as they don’t charge for non-geographic numbers such as 0800 and 0845, while all other networks do – another bugbear of mine, and the N80 is not free on any 02 contract. The other issue is that it’s a Nokia. I’ve just never been a fan of the Nokia look, feel and general way of doing things and I’ve never owned one (that makes two of us - Gordon). I’ve had Ericsson, Samsung, NEC and Sony Ericsson, and nothing else.

I must admit then to actually being rather pleased to read about numerous problems and issues with the N80 - notably a far too short battery life. With all its abilities this is akin to having 24Mb/s broadband but with a 512Kb cap. Pointless.

I also had the rather more mundance issue of not being able to get my PAC codes from Carphone Warehouse, due to a farcical set of events that proved to me that Carphone Warehouse are the biggest bunch of incompetents this side of Incompetantsville.

Though I was on Vodafone I irritatingly was billed by Carphone Warehouse. Having been fed up with having to pay to get through to ‘Customer Services’ as it was amusingly called, and then ignored as I hung on forever, I decided to leave. However, when I tried to get my PAC code I discovered that my details had been mixed up with somebody elses. It turns out that when performing an upgrade for someone else, some muppet had accidentally used my number. Therefore I was in contract and therefore I couldn’t get a PAC code. I was trapped. With someone else’s contract.

I was vaguely tempted to leave it in case in meant someone else would be paying my bills but I quickly decided that I had to do anything to get away. It took umpteem phone calls and repeating of my details to various people before I got to speak to someone that had been allowed to bring their brain cell with them into the building, and then only by going through the press office to the complaints department. God knows what would have happened if I was a ‘civilian’.

So despite Carphone Warehouse offering the best deals I’m with 02 direct and paying nearly £10 a more not to be with them.

My K800i is arriving any day now and I’m hoping then that we’ll be happy together even though it’s not quite the all encompassing, pocketable smartphone I want it to be. Maybe by next year even smaller phones such as the K800i will be powerful enough to be properly ‘Smart’ and then maybe the handset manufacturers will be less inclined to divide us up into facile user ‘types’.

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