My birthday is still 20 days away but that didn't stop hubby from spoiling me. We went out Saturday in search of a Flip camera for me and instead, ended up with a brand spanking new cellphone. Say hello to my very own Nokia N95 8GB:

This baby is amazing. The mother of all cell phones (though I'll admit I haven't played around with an iPhone). Tons of functionality including built in Wifi, built in speakers, mp3 player, video player functionality, TV out and the list goes on. The primary reason for the upgrade is the camera. The built-in 5 mega pixel camera takes fabulous pictures and with the wifi/Rogers data plan, I can pretty much update Flickr and Twitter on the go.


Because I have the Rogers data plan, I unbranded my phone from Rogers, removing the Vision menu and a bunch of other nonfunctional functionality pre-installed by Rogers. I used these steps from the fantastic N95 Users Board, and so you don't have to search for it, the new product code for unbranding from Rogers is 0561948. My understanding is that you can seriously mess up the phone if you use the wrong code so ONLY use this IF YOU HAVE THE N95 8GB (AKA N95-4)! Basically - this step lets you upgrade the firmware to V20.0.016 giving you a bunch of new functionality and removing the Rogers BS.

I didn't play around with the phone too much before I unlocked it so I'm not quite sure what some of the other differences are but the key one that I noticed almost immediately is that whenever you access the internet, the phone now prompts you to select the connection method (RogersGo or Wifi). When the phone was locked to Rogers, the default was ALWAYS RogersGo unless specified otherwise. This makes it much more convenient to make use of the free Wifi!

Also worth noting that Rogers is currently offering a $100 rebate if upgrade to the handset and add the $15 Vision Plan. The Vision plan includes unlimited Mobile Internet. Confused about this? So were we. The black and white of it: the vision plan lets you surf the web with no limitations, as long as the websites are accessed via the Rogers Vision browser. Because hubby doesn't want to get the a data plan and he's locked into that vision plan for 36 months, to make use of the web browsing outside of Wifi, he needs to use the ugly Rogers browser. Bummer. This is something to keep in mind before deciding to unlock your phone.

I've already installed a couple of must have apps but I'll do another post on that later. Likely, I'll be posting a whole lot more about the phone and my various experiences/hacks!