March 2009 – Page 2

Nokia E51

By Jay Lagare on Friday, March 13, 2009

My Nokia 5310 XpressMusic bit the dust after a horizontal fall. I went back to my trusty old Sony Ericsson K700i while searching for the perfect replacement phone.

The perfect replacement phone has to be small, slim, and most importantly black. My first choice, the Nokia 8800 Sirocco Edition fits the bill and is the coolest but is a bit too expensive. My second choice is still the Nokia 5310 which is the second coolest. Reason why I got one in the first place.

But lately, I was thinking of going back to my geeky roots and get a gadget phone. You know, those phones with everything but the kitchen sink. So what would that phone need to have? Bluetooth, GPRS (2.5G), EDGE (3G), HSDPA (3.5G), VoIP, WiFi, etc. aside from voice, SMS, and other phone things.

The Nokia E51 is all that (okay, less the GPS) and more. It comes from a line of business-oriented smartphones and so it has everything you need to remain connected wherever you may go. It’s so business-oriented it doesn’t even have Snake!!! But hey, all those three-letter acronyms is really where the fun is. So who cares, right? So I got it and so far I’m not disappointed.

UPDATE: Very good phone overall but after just over a year of use, ALL the rubber buttons along the sides have disintegrated. Talk about planned obsolescence. Makes me want to boycott Nokia.

General

Retrenchment Galore

By Jay Lagare on Tuesday, March 10, 2009

The global recession is surely taking its toll. Accenture, Branders, Lawson… everybody’s been hit. This morning, I got to the office and Joyce told me another wave of retrenchments, the third in the company so far, have hit. Needless to say, it is very demoralizing. The first time it happened, they said they’re letting go of people whose skills were no longer aligned with the strategic direction of the company. The second time it happened, they said they’re letting go of people with redundant skills. The sad thing was that it happened just as a project wrapped up and a lot of the people who toiled in the project were let go. That sucked even more since it was just before Christmas. Now the third time, almost everyone not involved in any project were let go. And each time,the severance package becomes less and less consoling. When will this end?