My new Nokia 3620 phone

Several of us in Computing & Communications are starting to experiment with the latest generation of wireless devices, in an effort to try to understand both the applicability of these devices for use with our current campus infrastructure and to get some notions about how that infrastructure might have to evolve as the state of the art of mobile devices grows into the future.

I received my gizmo of choice for this experiment a couple of days ago - a new Nokia 3620 phone with service from AT&T Wireless. This phone features Bluetooth, a camera, and a built-in IMAP email client (along with all the usual telephone features).

So far I think I like it.

The screen is large enough and bright enough to be easily readable for things like contact information and calendar items.

I was fairly easily able to configure bluetooth to talk to my iMac and to download and sync contacts from the Mac address book (it even downloads the pictures and puts them into the contact list on the phone) and calendar items with iCal. The calendar application on the phone is lots (LOTS!) better than on my Motorola.

So far I've been able to configure the IMAP client to fetch email off of our campus servers, using secure SSL authentication with no problem.

I've been able to send email using the phone talking to our campus SMTP server with secure authentication, but it seems like it takes an awful long time for the email to arrive from AT&T - like 12 hours! Will have to do some more testing on that to see what's up.

The first night I had the phone I received a spam SMS message - sheesh.

The camera is no great shakes, but it's sort of fun to be able to take pictures with the phone, and its slowness and low resolution might make it a good device for its own kind of art, like in this picture of my son moving at his usual speed: