Yep, so I searched around for a phone for a while and eventually settled on the Nokia e63. It was free on the $19 cap with Three mobile (24 month contract) which was insanely cheap.

My other option I was considering was the relatively unknown phone called the “iPhone”. It’s by a company called Apple who look like they’re going to do well. Rather than going for the iPhone, I worked out that I could get the E63 plus an iPod Touch for less than an iPhone would cost me, so I figured the E63 was definitely the better option. Upon getting the E63 and using it for about a week or two, I don’t even feel I need an iPod Touch now. My iPod mini (yes, the older ones which can’t play songs in colour) plays me music perfectly and has lasted for almost 5 years. The E63 plays videos relatively well and has plenty of other apps which do pretty much everything I was looking to do (Calendar, To Do list, Radio, Web browser, Video Player, WiFi and even a Tetris game called Global Bloxx). It’s also got a music player but I haven’t really used that yet. Sure, I don’t have the whole Apple App Store but I haven’t felt the need for any new apps. I’d love if the iPhone app which shows Cityrail train timetables was available as a Nokia App but I’ve gotten around that by downloading the pdf versions of the cityrail timetables and viewing them on the PDF reader that came with the phone (works pretty well!).

Overall, I’m even happier with my E63 than I was expecting to be. The radio on it has been brilliant. It works without needing a special set of headphones – any normal 3.5mm pair of headphones work without any issues (even on the train moving constantly). Past phones have struggled a little and have needed to readjust themselves occasionally, the E63′s radio hasn’t done that for me and has played without interruptions.

The QWERTY keypad looked quite small but it’s actually been pretty easy to use. It’s just taken me a little while to get used to where the enter key, backspace key, ! and ? keys are. Overall I’ve been able to type quicker than on my old number pad phones which has been great.

The wifi has been good too, I was able to set it up to access my home wifi connection and download stuff pretty easily. It’s been great for quickly checking things on the net without having to turn on my PC and wait for it to load.

The Email on 3 offer which provides free email for three months didn’t work for me at first but that was because I had set up using the email program on the phone rather than downloading the Email on 3 application (could have sworn it said “Email on 3″ in the option I clicked but apparently not). I haven’t used the Email on 3 application much yet as I only got it working today after calling 3′s customer service. It seemed a bit dull though and I wish that I could just use Gmail.com for free instead.

While it’s nothing major, the phone even has an option to say a caller’s name while the phone rings. So say Bob rings me, my ringtone goes off as usual but it also says “Rob” twice. I find it pretty funny to hear it try to say names in my contact list.

Anyway, overall my Nokia E63 gets a 9/10 from me already after only about two weeks. It’s got so many features and uses which I haven’t mentioned and is just so amazingly cheap! If anyone is considering getting the phone, have a look at some YouTube video reviews of the phone and see if it looks like your kind of phone. I’d recommend it to anyone looking for something relatively cheap but still with a range of capabilities a PDA type phone provides.