Speaking of which, it's a bit of a curate's egg. My wife misses the simplicity and obviousness of the icons on her T630. She finds it hilarious that the top-end smartphone competed with our PC in boot and shutdown time. The navigation pad isn't up to the same ease as the Sony Ericsson joystick. Text entry isn't quite as intuitive, particularly dealing with dictionary words (you even need to turn the feature on). She misses being able to re-order the address book. There's a slight sluggishness to a smartphone. The standby screen without the backlight is almost illegible with tiny writing, making it a poor convergence substitute for a watch. The latch to undo the back and access the battery and SIM will require 3 weeks of intensive emergency manicure therapy to recover from the trauma. The contacts application doesn't seem to work well with multiple numbers for one person -- it's impossible to work out which entry is which without digging down a menu level. The 'on' button's a bit picky.

The Series 60 UI has a number of peculiarities. Text notes are treated differently from all other media, for some unknown reason. Recording a quick voice note requires too many key presses. Some of the network config is split between different places for no real gain.

That said, there's promise that she'll actually take some pictures with it. The results with the traditional VGA camera phone are just too awful to contemplate bothering. It's still a tour-de-force of design and technology. Just needs to go on a cost and size diet before the girlies will be getting them.

My conclusion: Smartphones aren't ready to break out into mass market yet, but some of the form factors, screens and imaging sensors are so damn good you'll buy one anyway and ignore the "smart" and get on with the "phone".

One thing I noticed sat in the park at the weekend was several teenage girls co-listening to iPods, one earbud each. I've seen it before. Sounds like music players are screaming to become social. Now imagine Bluetooth was built more like Sun's Jini technology, and it was easy to discover new devices and services over a generic packet transport. We'd all be downloading little Bluetooth adapters to broadcast personal radio from our mobile music players, the operators would be making good cash from vending them, lots of new services would be created, and I'm sure some billable network traffic would result from the ecosystem. Plus the record industry lawyers would be out in force -- you know you're reached the future when a lawyer is the only barrier to progress. Ah, dream on...

I also saw one girl who didn't have her earphones lying on the grass, head to one size, phone balanced on ear, presumably listening to music. Maybe Tomi's right on this one! (although I still think he's a year-or-so off. But that comes with his being an optimist.)

Oh, and a few last disjointed smartphone thoughts.

I've found Bluetooth becoming utterly central to the use of a smartphone. Just plonk it next to my laptop, do nothing, everything syncs automatically. It's not that reliable, though -- I sometimes need to reboot the phone to get the laptop to talk to it. Life's to short to go debugging Bluetooth stacks, so I'm not too upset. I also tried sending the whole address book from my wife's old phone to the new one. Got one contact card over, and that's it. Perhaps the transfer of an address book is rather too ambitous a use case...

PS - Nokia's Lifeblog 2.0 is fab. Digital imaging takes away the "click anxiety", and Lifeblog's removed the fear of filing.

Recapture your click anxiety at Martin's telepocalypse.