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Stuck with an Orange mobile...

Friday 10th April 2009

with the Apple blues again

As my Twitterers will know, I'm on something of the horns of a mobile phone dilemma;  my little Sony Ericsson is, I fear, in a decline. It's started to switch itself off at random intervals, for no immediately discernible reason and at least once with disastrous timing.  It's patently not long for my pocket and I'll need another one shortly.

The recent demise of my old Palm LifeDrive leads me to wish to replace my ailing phone with some sort of smartphone/PDA thingy rather than just a phone phone-type phone. Right now I'm using my iPod's calendar function as my diary which is a bit dodgy as I can only read it; I can't amend it until I get home and make the necessary alterations on my iMac's calendar and then back up the iPod, if you follow (and I understand if you don't, or choose not to).

The thing is, being an iMac user I've decided I would like to suck it up and finally go for the iPhone if only because I KNOW it'll sync up with the Mac.  I know other smart-phones and Palm-tops can be made to sync up with Macs, like my old Palm LifeDrive, but it's generally by means of some shonky bit of shareware which never works properly and gums up your hard drive for ever, like my old Palm LifeDrive.

However...  I appear to be signed up to Orange for the rest of my life and thus far, one can only (strictly legitimately) use an iPhone on O2. I know I can always bail on Orange and switch networks, but possibly not for free and probably not without changing my mobile number which I'd be very reluctant to do - I've had the same mobile number for 12 years, during which time I've had six different addresses and six different landline numbers - it's the main way people in the "business" know how to get in touch with me and changing it now would be a major hassle.

I'm fairly sure I can persaude Orange to give me a Blackberry, and I'd be perfectly happy with a Blackberry, were it not for this connectivity issue.  I've found conflicting accounts on the net and had conflicting advice on Twitter, so here I am asking for yet more conflicting advice; does anybody out there know - really KNOW - how well you can sync up a Blackberry with a Mac?  And do they REALLY sync up, or is it just a botch compromise using some shonky bit of shareware which never works properly and etc. etc. etc.

Mind you, my old pal and comrade Emma Kennedy informs me by Tweet than come July there will be Orange-friendly iPhones available.  Can anyone confirm this?  If true it may be worth my while hanging on till then.

Thoughts?

Thanks.

 

 

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