My barely-18-month-old Sony Ericsson T610 developed an LCD leak a couple of months ago, and I got fed up with it last weekend.

Today I got a new phone, a Nokia 6670, which runs Symbian S60, 2nd edition. I would have loved a phone with the 3rd edition since it could run Nokia's WebCore-based browser, but they're not available/affordable in North America yet nor will they be for quite a while. I was lucky I bought the extended warranty for the Sony because I managed to swap/upgrade to the 6670 pretty cheaply.

The main reason I picked this phone (the other choice I had for affordable Bluetooth phones was the Moto Razr, $50 less) was how accessible the Symbian platform is to developers, even people like me who've never coded for a cell phone before. Not surprisingly, one of the first things I'm going to do with this phone once I get the time is to install Python and start hacking. Then I want to try out Java and whatever else is available for me. I'll have access to Bluetooth, native widgets, GPRS, audio, camera, SMS and many other APIs from Python and that's very exciting. I'll be brainstorming until the end of term. :-)

Nokia's Developer Forum: Python for Series 60

Nokia's Open Source site: Python for S60

If you have any good bookmarks for S60 software please let me know. Thanks!