Picking a mobile

I've just had to go through the traumatic experience of picking out a suitable replacement mobile phone for my mother. Her old one, which was mine originally needed replacing because the screen kept getting corrupted. I think the phone got a bit wet while she was out in a rain storm and it never fully recovered. It has good days and bad days though so it's all a bit odd.

The thing is, my parents seem to assume that I'm an expert in all things gadget and whenever they have any problems I'm always their first port of call. Now in most cases they are perfectly right to ask me, but on mobile phones I don't really have a clue!

I upgrade my phone every 12-18 months on a contract and usually just opt for the latest Nokia at the time. My old phone, the one my mother has now is an N70, at the moment I'm on the N73 and I will probably go to the N96 when it's released in a couple of months. So other than that I have no idea what's what in the world of mobile phone technology.

I did a bit of browsing on the O2 website to see what was out there but really they all seem pretty similar to me these days. The problem I have is that I tend to end up looking for phones that I would like, but of course this usually isn't suitable for her. I eventually settled on the Samsung U600 as the phone of choice, it seemed like a good balance between simplicity and features.

Before committing to a purchase I looked for a review and found that it isn't the greatest phone. Lots of complaints about the poor keypad and the camera not being too hot. One of the reviews recommended the G600 instead, so I went back to O2 and looked it up. It was available but quite a bit more expensive and she doesn't really need a 5 mega-pixel camera or a music player with 40MB storage. So, I decided the U600 was the best bet and handed over my recommendation so she could call up customer services and place the order. Of course the queue to actually speak to a human was endless and we waited on hold for ages, during this time I happened to mention the other phone. Immediately she wanted to know all about it and decided that she wasn't going to have second best, even if she would never use half the features it offered.

So decision made all that remained was to place the order, except that now she was given another choice. Black or Pink? What a dilemma! I had to do a quick Google image search to see the difference while she discussed the pros and cons of the different colours with the operator. Finally Black was decided on and now I await the arrival and inevitable call for help when nothing on the phone works because it's not the same as the Nokia. Except I won't have a clue either because I've never owned anything other than Nokia myself!

So did I make a good choice? Is the G600 a decent phone? Will I rue this day for years until it finally dies? I guess I'll find out soon enough.