Two New Toys

I got a couple new gadgets this week, the Nokia 6030 and the Samsung YP-U2J and have had a little time to play with them a bit, so here's my initial thoughts:

Nokia 6030
Needed a "quick fix" of a phone recently, and picked up the T-Mobile prepaid 6030 phone just for the situation I was in at the time. I've set up a few T-Mobile prepaid phones before, and so I decided it would be the quickest to get going for my purposes. The phone is a simple candy bar style with no noticeable extra features, but enough software functionality to keep things together if using it as a simple organizer. More sleek and stylish (also smaller) than the old Nokia 3595 I used a while back, the 6030 does the job of the most basic of basic mobiles and a little bit more. Along with all the goodies you'd expect in most low end Nokia phones, there's instant messaging (which works surprisingly well), FM radio (using headset), and a speaker phone feature (that works with the radio too). Not much more to say about this simple but stylish phone. It just works like expected.

Pros: Compact stylish design, useful IM feature, responsive buttons and navigation pad.
Cons: FM radio quality is not that good, not much storage for saving data.

Samsung YP-U2J [1GB]
This little mp3 player has a lot going on for such a small package. Although it took a slightly tricky firmware upgrade for it to work with my Ubuntu system, it was well worth the little bit of setup time. Now I can drop mp3s in with no problem, and the audio quality is very good through the earbuds that come with the player. It serves well for other data storage quite well, and as a neat little voice recorder. The FM radio function works quite well, but I don't see myself using it that much quite yet. The little display is really cool, and the navigation controls are well thought out. Haven't used it long enough to say how well the battery time is. I'd buy it again without hesitation. Oh yeah, the LED lights are pretty cool too. :)

Pros: Good sound, many useful features, small size, nice menu navigation, radio sounds better than the Nokia 6030's.
Cons: Poor headphone jack placement, tricky firmware update required for use with Ubuntu [Linux], little bit of a learning curve for non-geeks.