See someone carrying two phones around and you’ll probably think one of three things about them – “busy business person”, “stupid poser” or “definitely up to something dodgy”.  I’m none of those things and yet I’ve just bought a second phone, a Nokia N82, to go with my iPhone 3G.  Why would I do that?  It’s all down to what I want to get out of my mobile experience.

You may remember that when I bought an iPhone 3G back in July I knew that it wasn’t my ideal phone.  The thing is, the perfect phone doesn’t exist.  Unless you just want something to make calls, handle texts and maybe take the occasional photo you’re not likely to find the phone that does exactly everything as well as you want it to.

As a blogger with a busy life, my ideal phone would be one that would allow me to keep in contact with, report from and keep a record of the world around me and high speed and in high quality.  There’s just nothing that fits the bill entirely at the moment.  That’s why last week I decided to take the plunge and get the N82 to pick up the slack where the iPhone lets me down.

At the moment I’m swapping between the two phones depending on what I have to do that day.  A day at work, rushing around between appointments?  That’ll be the iPhone then.  Its interface helps me get the information I need as quickly as possible.  A day out with friends? Maybe doing an interview for the 14sandwiches podcast? Maybe wanting to do some live video streaming of an event?  That’ll be an N82 day.

While it may be more frustrating to navigate, the N82’s 5 megapixel camera with xenon flash (much better than the flash on most other phones and certainly better than the iPhone’s completely non-existent one!) and much more open operating system (allowing open access to developers without the worry of their apps being arbitrarily banned) the N82 is a fantastic phone for those who want to capture the world around them. The videos and photos you take can be uploaded straight to the internet at full quality.  The iPhone allows uploading from the phone but photos are shrunk to a smaller size and in many cases extra data like geotags are removed.

Of course, you can’t predict what will happen in any particular day.  What if I’m at work and then some amazing event occurs I want to capture on video?  I’m stuffed with the iPhone and its lack of any kind of video recording.  One option would be to selotape the two phones together to create an all-in-one uberphone.  That would be pretty silly though.  It looks like I’ll just have to wait for that perfect phone.

So, what would my perfect phone consist of?  Well, it would have to…

• Have the user interface of the iPhone.  It’s so fast and easy to do everything as quickly .
• Allow background processes.  Here’s where the iPhone seriously falls down.   I want to be able to multitask with my phone – leaving one thing running while I do somthing else but the iPhone doesn’t let me.  The N82 trusts me to know what I’m doing to leaving apps running.  I can just close them if the phone starts to slow down.
• Have a good quality email client.  The Email client on the iPhone is pretty much perfect.  It’ll display HTML emails properly (the N82 just shows the raw HTML code), it doesn’t annoy me with too many settings regarding message headers, it just gives me my email.
• Have a physical QWERTY keyboard.  I mis-spell words on the iPhone every day thanks to the lack of physical feedback for button presses.  The N82 is better in that respect, but my last few phones have had QWERTY keyboards so it’s a drag to writing texts and emails on a T9 keypad.  When will Nokia release a QWERTY N-series phone?  Their E71 looks great (I used to use its predecessor, the E61i) but its multimedia capabilities let it down.  A full keyboard on a multimedia powerhouse of a phone would be fantastic.
• Have a great camera.  The N82’s camera and flash take great quality pictures I couldn’t go back to anything less now.
• Allow live video streaming.  I’ve talked about apps like Qik and Flixwagon before and they really are giving a whole new dimension to the mobile phone experience.  Until now, Qik on the iPhone has been only for those brave enough to cut loose from the Apple party line and jailbreak their phone.  It looks like that may be changing in the very near future but for now the N82 is where it’s at for my live video.  The iPhone’s 2 megapixel camera won’t be that good at video, I’d imagine, so I’ll probably stick to the N82 even after Apple green-light Qik.

For now I’m proudly a two-phone man.  Hopefully by the time I’m looking for my next phone all my demands above will have been met and I’ll be able to go back to just the one, perfect, phone.  I won’t hold my breath!