My new phone went live last Thursday, and I didn’t really have a chance to play with 3G until now, traveling to a friend’s place yesterday and currently heading home on the train. Without changing any configuration on my laptop except making rfcomm0 point to the new phone’s MAC, I was able to “dial up” with 3G instead of crappy old GPRS. All of the problems I spoke about before are gone – it really must’ve been some combination of buggy firmware on the Nokia 6230, and O2 being crap. With this Nokia 6630 and Vodafone 3G, I get a noticeably faster and very resilient connection – Symbian on the phone does the right magic to keep the connection between the laptop and phone up when passing through brief areas with no connectivity, or passing between 3G and GSM coverage. I’m really impressed, I’m able to surf, IRC, chat on Jabber and download the odd package or two from wherever I am – the only downside I’ve hit upon so far is that in order to visit apparently dubious sites like the IRC channel search engine I need to use a credit card and pay £1.50 (in exchange for £4 call credit) to disable Vodafone’s adult content filter. Shame I don’t have one…