You know, for the editor of a technology website I use comparatively little tech in the day-to-day struggle to keep my head above water. Very little of the stuff I use on a daily basis is under a year old, much to the dismay of marketing and PR types who think we should all upgrade to "The Next Big Thing" every financial quarter.

The mobile (cell, if you prefer) phone I use is, borrowing the words from Carlsberg beer advertisers everywhere, "Probably The Best Phone In The World," as anyone who has ever owned (and, several years later, probably still does own) the Nokia 6310i will attest. It certainly can't be used like a Blackberry or fancy MP3 playing phone. What it does have is the ability to send and receive calls and text messages, mark things in the calendar and go on for days and days without once needing a recharge.

The 6310i idealizes what I want from a piece of technology: I want it to do the job and keep doing it, be it in terms of battery life or surviving the odd drunken fumble onto the floor.

A colleague of mine, on the other hand, is a very tech-savvy businessman and really into playing with the new toys. He recently upgraded from the same 6310i as I use. He sold it on eBay, where demand for the phone is so high that Nokia had to stop making them. His new device is a Blackberry and he loves it. The BB has all the features of a phone, plus more including the ability to check and write emails on the fly.

It's more of a pain to maintain than anything else, if you ask me. I tried having a PDA at one stage, and all it did was become another dead weight in my pocket. I'd flip open the laptop, check everything there, update stuff, call people, update it again. By the time the day was over the PDA was so out of synch with my laptop and I'd have to spend fifteen minutes organizing everything again to get it ready for the odd occasion when I'd actually need it for something... at which point, of course, the back-lit LCD screen had had its way with the battery and the whole thing died.

The problem for many is that it can be so easy to get caught up in productivity for productivity's sake. If the good old marketing hacks are to be believed then the PDA I have will make my life better; until six months down the line they release a new version and suddenly I need a PDA Smart Phone in order to be at the zenith of my abilities.

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