It's been an interesting week for me and my mobile. It started about a week ago when the battery life of the thing plummeted. Usually the battery lasts about a week, but literally overnight the battery started lasting only about a day, which needless to say sucks serious amounts of acidic battery discharge.

Acidic discharge would have explained the shorter life, but there wasn't anything that obvious as for a reason for the sudden change. I even updated the phone firmware from Nokia to see if that would fix the issue, but for about three days nothing seemed to rectify it.

As the phone was out of warranty and not really worth too much, the next step for me was trying out another battery just in case something in the existing one had gone funny (maybe internal acidic battery discharge? ;)). So I got on eBay and ordered a genuine Nokia battery from a store for a very cheap $25 delivered.

And of course not long after i transferred my money to pay for that and following three days of chronically short battery lives, the damn thing starts working as normal again. C'est la vie, so i've now got a spare battery with nothing much for it to do. Here's hoping the issue doesn't come back.

As a result of messing around with the phone with updates etc for the better part of three days, I also got involved in setting up mobile internet on it. I've previously only used the awesome Gmail mobile application to check my email, but not much more beyond that.

So i went and installed Opera Mini, and after screwing around with the Optus internet settings I eventually got it to work reliably.

Opera Mini is such a revelation compared to the built-in Nokia browser. Not just in terms of speed, but mostly usability and responsiveness. I am a little concerned that all traffic is essentially routed through an Opera proxy, but that's really how they make it so darn fast with optimised compression which means much smaller data transfers, and because i'm only on a GPRS phone (not 3G) it does make quite a bit of difference.

I can now check Google Reader, football scores, news and other sites quickly and painlessly on my mobile. So now i've got to keep an eye on my data access charges for my mobile plan, but in previous months my data usage has surprisingly been included as part of my capped calls, which is quite exceptional as usually data usage is charged and billed separately to normal calls and call caps. Nevertheless i'm definitely not complaining!

All in all you've really got to hand it to Opera for developing a product like this and also the web-browser for the Wii. I'm not quite converting my PC browser of choice though; i'm still very much a Firefox user ;).