This is a post bound to interest other bloggers. So my beloved Nokia N70 was recently lost/stolen/who cares etc. and I was faced with a very tough decision – one of those decisions you prefer having to make only once a year. What new phone to get.

The N70 was on contract and cost a ridiculous amount to buy new so I was forced to look at alternatives. Although it’s not a 3G Smartphone, I ended up going for the Sony Ericsson W810i. Many years ago I swore I would never deviate from Nokia after some bad experiences with the other manufacturers, but after conducting some intensive online research, the jury’s verdict was out on the W810i and it said go go go!

I managed to get the W810i on a really good package and it was delivered to my door a few days later. So far my impression is that it’s the best phone I’ve ever had. It really does have it all – sexy design that will appeal to a large target audience, breathtaking camera (see pic quality here), mp3 walkman with expandable memory slots, nice size and weight (99g with battery), great user interface and excellent reception and battery life.

Anyway, this was not supposed to be all about the phone necessarily, but also a free java application that it came with called Shozu, which you should be able to download for your own phone here. Shozu is a free service which synchronizes with your Flickr, YouTube, Buzznet, Webshots accounts and allows you to post pictures and video straight from your mobile phone using GPRS, which is great for older phones that don’t support email as it also allows you to email from within the application. What’s really nice about Shozu, however, is that it allows you to specify what content you want to upload from your phone, title it, describe it and tag it seamlessly. You can even rotate pictures before you upload them.

Right now I am using it on my phone to send pictures to Flickr and video clips to YouTube. I can also see this becoming very useful for journalists, who can literally produce and upload multimedia straight from the field with their mobile phones. Perfect for all this conflict going around or mayhem on Friday nights…