I used a Nokia 9110i for almost 7 years as my mobile phone. It was a brick but there was reasoning behind the rhyme. I used to have a mobile and a Psion-5 PDA. I found that standing on railway platforms and in shops, etc, that one hand would be making a call and the other would be trying to open the lid, get information out and navigate around. Inevitably one or the other would be set down and the other used to do work for a bit till information could be relayed over the phone. I quickly discovered that I don’t want to have multiple devices - it’s a stupid way to make life more complicated (despite all the arguments for iPods, Palms and smart phones and dedicated devices that do what they do really well!) I want it all inside one case so I bought my Nokia brick. Eventually its late 1990’s shortcomings caught up with it (no wi-fi, no music player, no bluetooth) and it had to be replaced. I looked round for either a straight up replacement with an updated phone computer or, alternatively, if I had to have a normative mobile, the very smallest there was with a decent spec. Smartphones cost a fortune thus I decided on a small phone and there were hundreds to choose from. Cue the Virgin Lobster 544. It had MP3 player, hi-res camera and video recorder, was tiny, was a clamshell (vocals sound better), Virgin had a good price on it and calls and it seemed I couldn’t lose. Well so it seemed…

The build quality wasn’t great; it felt cheap. For example the travel on the handset buttons was different on different buttons (the surface felt the same) and it was always disconcerting to press the buttons along the right hand side as they felt more “plastic” and less ergonomic than the others. The lid of the original one I got was a bit loose as well. and didn;t feel as if it shut properly. On the plus side it came with a 64MB Micro-SD card and could take up to a 2GB card. Nice! i could fit a lot of music on that! And it featured a 2mp camera for photos and videos.

Due to not getting around to it I never uploaded much music to it. What I did was OK, but not spectacular. There was a button on the surface of the clamshell to turn on, or pause, music. Thing is it turned on quite often by brushing against something in my pocket running down the battery. There was a volume rocker on the outside left of the clamshell that was useful to turn sound up or down. The music player was an embedded form of windows media player and didn’t take kindly to music being put on the sd card without its know how so it was a bit of a faff to get it to recognise the tunes. Speaking of which, the phone ran on Windows MobileCE 5 or 6 which is an absolute battery hog. It never lasted more than about 48 hours at best and crashed dozens of times forcing me to restart the phone often. Rubbish and not fit for purpose in 2007!

Which brings up another point; the lobster phones are a brand invented by Virginmobile to resurrect the idea of Salvador Dali’s surreal Lobster phone as something unique and artistic. The Lobster phones are manufactured by HTC of Taiwan; the same HTC that was involved in an acrimonious scandal over Microsoft getting Sendo of the UK to develop MobileCE then taking it off to shop around for a cheaper, more compliant partner. The more compliant partner turned out to be HTC. Well, chickens have come home to roost as this cost Microsoft, but being the shill hasn’t done HTC or Windows Mobile any good as this phone testifies. I hadn’t realises this was the case until after having bought the phone (I mean how much due diligence do you have to do to buy a decent phone?!?) and will NEVER again buy a phone running a Microsoft operating system. In my opinion it’s a pile of shite and I feel I’m being generous and euphemistic about it.

Which leads to the fatal flaw that can only be laid at Windows Mobiles door. About two months after purchasing the phone I was speaking with a customer when I suddenly, in mid conversation, wasn’t being heard. I could hear them just fine, they couldn’t hear me. A follow up call to Virginmobile’s customer service centre yielded the same effect - I could hear them, they couldn’t hear me. I did find that shutting the phone off and restarting it (hmmm, now what does this sound an awful lot like?) tended to make it work, albeit sometimes only after restarting it multiple times. I couldn’t have a phone that only allowed me to speak at random and unpredictable times so I returned it. The Virginmobile customer service people were very good, I must say. A new phone was despatched and the old one collected within 24 hours each time. Nevertheless, this went on for two more phones. At random times I couldn’t speak on the phone. Phones have to fundamentally do one thing well, before they get the chance to show off any other features - phones have to be able to make phone calls and this one wasn’t up to that standard. three times with three different phones it didn’t make the minimum standard. I believe HTC and Microsoft have a lot of explaining to do as I can’t be the only one this has happened to. But as Malcolm X said: “Chickens come home to roost!” and for those two they sure have!

Sans the problems, it would be an OK phone and would still have perception problems beyond aesthetics. The camera is rubbish. Not mediocre; rubbish! I couldn’t take a non-fuzzy picture with it even leaning it against a fence or pillar something else to stabilise my hand. Every other camera I have used has been fine so it isn’t me, it’s the phone. The video recorder is even worse and was unusable. Taking it to a convention in Germany I returned to find the video and most pictures worthless. A huge disappointment to say the least! This phone gets a rating of 2, just above an utterly useless 1 only because it might be able to make phone calls for someone else and might make a decent music player for someone else. the rest of the features are, in my opinion, useless and it was a huge disappointment. Given the chronic build problems I can’t honestly recommend anyone waste money on it.