It's the next step in my never-ending cellular drama. I've just bought a Nokia 9500 Communicator from eBay.

I still really like my Sidekick II I got just over three months ago but T-Mobile and/or Danger have been extremely crap about getting some SSH action going on here in the UK. The app is available for the US market, but they're unwilling to sell it here. As the Sidekick is a heavily closed architecture, users are left with no choices. So while the Sidekick is great for Web browsing, e-mail, IM, and taking pictures, it sucks if you want to do anything but those things. It's just a shame neither T-Mobile or Danger bother to document that the UK Sidekick II doesn't do anywhere near the amount of things as the US one..

The Nokia 9500, on the other hand, runs a closed source operating system, but the APIs are made public and anyone can develop software for the Symbian OS that it runs. I don't mind closed source systems (OS X) if they let you build upon them easily, but Danger's attitude with the Sidekick is stuck in the 1970s. The 9500 supports GPRS and EDGE as well as Wi-Fi, which should be interesting. It also comes with Opera for a Web browser. The real meat of this, however, is that there are several SSH applications for Symbian, so I should finally be able to get the single feature I wanted, even if I'm a couple hundred quid lighter.

I'll post an update when/if it arrives..