When I returned from my deployment last year, my beloved Nokia 6120 cell phone could not be resurrected. As I went out the door in May, I turned it off and laid it on the bookshelf in the office. When I returned in September, I plugged it in, but it would not charge, turn on, or indicate in any way its electrons were anything other than inert. Sadly, I called ATT and ordered a new phone, which arrived in a couple days. A Nokia 3560, it had a color screen, but it just wasn’t my 6120. I’m now preparing to switch from TDMA to GSM, which requires a new phone (yes, I should have made THAT switch last fall–I just wasn’t thinking coherently). That may be more backstory than you care about, but since September, I’ve discovered a few neat things this 3560 can do.

Almost immediately, I discovered the stopwatch feature. I no longer needed a sports watch–the phone keeps lap or split timing (not waterproof, though, so I don’t recommend it for aquatic sports). And I have the cell phone with me–an added safety feature. The phone will store my times as well. It has other organizer functions, which I use from time to time, but the stopwatch has been the most usable for me.

Want to see the month at a glance? The calendar will do that–very handy if you don’t have a paper calendar handy and need to see what day of the week a particular date falls on (for instance).

This week, I discovered it can record voice messages–like a tape recorder, not the voicemail kind. It’s a really cool way to capture the name of that recording artist or song I just heard on the radio while driving without becoming too dangerous on the road.

And, of course, auto date/time set is a dream. Drive or fly into a new time zone? No problem. The phone offers to reset the date and time (you can program it not to ask permission if you like, but I like my electronic devices to at least pretend I’m in charge) for you.

Of course, talk time and battery life are critical. I don’t talk on the phone that much, but I don’t want to always be looking for an outlet either. 6.5 hours talk time and 17 days standby are hard to beat. (Same reason I like a 5 gallon tank on the motorcycle I can’t ride more than 50 miles on without turning numb–I hate stopping at gas stations, too.)

It does a host of other things I haven’t gotten around to using yet, either. I could teach it voice commands, but I usually only dial two numbers. One is on speed dial and the other is the first one in the contacts scroll, so why bother?

Another feature I haven’t used yet is profile scheduling. I can schedule my profile to expire at a predetermined time. This might be a good way to avoid forgetting changing it from Meeting to Normal.

It seems harder to find a complete feature list for prospective cell phones than it was a few years ago. I’ve discovered these “lesser” features are becoming more valuable to me. I’d hate to get a new phone and lose some of these features. Seemingly simple tasks just aren’t as simple as they should be.

The Sony 710 appears to have all these things. Now if I can just hold out until the StarWars promo is over…I don’t do Star Wars. And maybe the price will drop. Like a bunch.