I am now the (proud?) owner of a brand new Samsung d500 phone. It makes the tea, drives the kids to school in the morning, goes to work for you and boasts a 1.3 megapixel camera and 90Mb of mp3 playing ability. Since I already own a nice digital camera and very nice mp3 player these are superfluous to requirements, which is good because it's only a phone. You know, one of those things you use to talk to people. Not a watch (anyone wear watches anymore?), pager, TV or filofax, p-h-o-n-e. I do like gadgets though and this is a pretty sweet bit of kit. As you can see I am able to instantly blog my photos to Skip the Budgie now and when I work out the best way to use the camera I'll be doing it all the time! On the bike, in the shops, on the loo...

Of course, the first thing you learn when you get something as shiney as this is how to hack it. Phones have secret codes, a lot of secret codes. For example, writing #*9999# will tell you the version number for the hardware. The full list can be found in many places on the interweb: The Mobile Gamer amongst others.

Why would you want to know these codes? They let you unlock your sim, the handset, change your java options so you can upload games that you're 'testing' before purchase, or just bugger it up completely. Personally, I will be 'testing' quite a few games and have found that these instructions are pretty useful: mobile review dot com .

A more scarey prospect is how to get rid of the nasty Orange branding I am being forced to put up with. They have given me a 'useful' white stripe that covers up a bit of the screen and looks ugly. The options therein aren't useful to me at all. If you want to get rid of this, the process is scarey: Flash guide for Dummies but it all depends on how annoying it becomes!

Naughty I know, but you have to do these things, it's technology, innit! The branding stuff is just evil and isn't at all useful. Anyway. Note to self... It's just a phone...