I bought another phone. Those of you who are my Facebook friends may have followed my updates on the search. It was tedious. Or maybe it's me who made it tedious. Looked through www.gsmarena.com, went to the shops, saw some phones, tried to memorise ther model numbers, back to a cyber to check the specs, back to shops, saw more phones, back to cyber... I eventually narrowed down to a few phones I liked. One of them was the Nokia 6500 Slide.

I saw one of the phone-selling stalls indicating that it was going for about 8,500/= bob. I decided to go look at FoneExpress (a leading(?) phone selling business found in Nakumatt - one of our main supermarket chains). They did not have it. I went to Ebrahim Electronics and they had it. Price? About 26,000/= bob. Eh! I crossed the road to Bright Technologies. About 25,000/=. Wow! I went back to where i had seen 8,500/=. There were some other customers there so I could not immediately talk to the seller. The lady in the opposite stall (a separate business also selling phones), said "Yes, customer?" Do you have the Nokia 6500 that slides? She fished it out. The phone is a beauty. How much? 21,000/= negotiable. Thanks. I turned to the lady opposite. Can I see this phone? I said, pointing. She pulled it out. The top was written 6500, (No Nokia), and Nokia was written on the back cover. I decided this must be an imitation. There is no way the lady 3 feet away can be selling at 21,000/= and this one is selling the same thing at 8,500/=.

That's how the Samsung M-620 won. I like it so far. Thought it's length makes one-hand texting a bit difficult. Naturally I wanted to browse the Net using the phone, so I called safaricom for the settings. The customer care guy I found was called Ben, and he said he would send them to me. i waited about 45 minutes, nothing. I called again and interestingly found Ben again. He said he had tried sending the settings but was unable, so he offered to read them to me. There were quite a number of settings and I later found that some of them did not exist on my phone. I put the settings, tried to browse, nothing. Called Safaricom again. Found a Tony. Tony asked me to read to him what ben gave me. I did. He said those were the settings they have for Samsung. He said I could try texting the word data to some 4-digit number, so have the settings automatically sent to me, or I could go with the phone to a Safaricom Care Centre and they could set it for me. I sent the text to the number given and got a message that my phone was not able to use GPRS. I was meeting a friend that evening, and she has a Samsung that she uses to browse the Net, so I decided to wait for her and check her settings. I did, and found that a certain number I had been given by Ben was different from hers. I changed mine to match hers and Voila! I was in! Finally! I joined the leagues of those that have "Sent via Facebook Mobile" next to their FB updates :)

I bought a USB Bluetooth adapter and set it up on my OwenTech PC. It was marvellous to see that I could transfer files from my PC to the phone. I can probably do much more, but that was my primary interest at that point.