So I knew I could upgrade my phone this month I just needed to know when. One call to Orange customer support to check the date and cost and I managed to get an upgrade free, one nice new C500 arrives. I was quoted 3 days for delivery but it arrived today, in less than 24 hours. I had problems with my original Microsoft smartphone but frankly once you have easy synchronisation with Outlook it's addictive, I didn't want to give it up. So time to try again, despite Scoble's raving about it.

So lets see after the e200 problems is the c500 better? Call quality is perfect to my ears, the battery life is reported as much improved, the Bluetooth implementation is no longer crippled (I can even get the Toshiba Bluetooth stack to connect) and voice tags work with headsets. However ringtones still don't play off the mini-SD card and the new rocker key instead of a joystick makes games painful. The new version of solitaire is butt ugly and fuzzy. Finally cleartype is off by default and Orange hide that option, so it time to hunt around for Shell Orange which allows you to tweak cleartype as well as giving prettier folder icons for the standard folders. Now to wait for the Windows Media 10 update and try to work out how to get the Orange homescreens to use Power Tasks and Power Calendar.

By the way, if you want to trigger voice dialing without a headset the Orange manual doesn't tell you how. Just hold the volume down button. The phone keyboard must be unlocked though.