I recently noticed that my trusty old Sony z530i phone battery was needing charging everythree days instead of once a week, so since my contract with O2 had run its full 18 months I thought I'd see if therewas a replacement as good.

I've got a perfectly good filofax for mobile office use, and a small laptop for email and calaendars (though only manual calendar sync with the filofax is available), and a good digital SLR with proper lenses for decent phots so I don't really need anything but a phone.

I like the clamshell design of the Z530 - easy to see who is calling on the small monochrome screen before answering, no accidental calls made or missed whilst it is bumping around in my pocket . Lets see what is available.

A bit of hunting around online and in shops showed only one possible replacement model - another Sony Ericson (they do make good phones) W800. Branded as some sort of Walkman (although it doesn't feature a cassette player ) because it has 8 megs of memory, but it does have a clamshell style design and seems reasonably small with usable buttons.Same charger and usb conector as the old one so can keep a second charger.

Quick call to O2 produced a free new phone (and a 30% reduction in price for the same number of minutes) so I was sorted....

...or at least I though I was until the thing turned up.  It just doesn't feel as nice. It has sharp angles which dig into you when it is in your pocket. The camera lens is cleverly positioned so that it is behind your finger when you try to take a photo (not that I normally want to take photo's using a phone, but Age of Stupid wanted a cameraphone picture from inside the Plymouth Vue premiere). Instead of two buttons each side of the navigation mousey type thingy there are now eight so you never know which to press if you don't peer at the screen. Getting music onto it via USB is a complete nightmare, and you don't seem to be able to do it by bluetooth - so I still have to carry an MP3 player for those rare occasions when I want some portable music (occasional train journeys). But worst of all the battery life is only 3 days - so I'm back to where I started.

This is a true example of Jevrons' paradox. Presumably the high res colour screen and the second colour screen when closed and the 8meg of memory are all sucking so much power that the efficiency improvements are totally wiped out and I might as well have carried on using the old phone - which is in fact what I've done, at least until the battery finally dies.

See also i-dont-phone for explanation of why I hung onto my Z530 eighteen months ago. It must be coming up to 3 years old by now