Phoning Home

Yesterday, I finally arrived back home in Ireland. I've been away since the end of May, it's great to be back. When I arrived in Dublin Airport, after a long wait in Schiphol and a short flight, the sky was completely blue and the sun was beaming down. The weather was fantastic. A couple of short bus journeys later and I was home.

A few things are a little jarring after being away in Holland for so long. Getting on the bus and paying in cash is one of them. Definitely miss the smart travel card, being able to swipe on and of the bus and paying for your exact journey was nice. Also seeing lone cyclists in high visibility gear and helmets, precariously cycling down the road or in narrow cycling lanes. A massive shift from the constant traffic of cyclists up and down the cycling roads in Holland.

I finally got my new phone. It's great. I've installed a few apps on it and I quite like it. It's only running Android 1.6, so it's missing a few features you would expect to come as standard with most phones, but I'm not too bothered by that. It only took me a moment to get used to the slide out keyboard, and the data synchronisation services are pretty great. Not sure I'm a fan of the way it handles text messages, but I suppose I can get a replacement App for that.

It doesn't seem to handle media like podcasts and music as well as my Walkman did, but the beauty of it being a smartphone means I can just find an alternate music player. Or better yet, write one myself. I've also started using all those cool social web things all the iPhone people use like foursquare, which is fun in a strange privacy destroying way. It's a good phone, I like it.

I also got a free hands free kit. Plantronics and Altec Lansing make it, who apparently do good headphones and the like. It seems to be great, as hands free kits go. I'm not sure how often I'll use it, but I can see it being very useful when on long telephone calls. After a while the phone always starts burning my ear, so a handsfree kit that I can turn on and start using during a call sounds useful.