One of the problems with my new Nokia 6630 is that it came without any games pre-installed. I was looking for games to download when I realised that the phone was probably powerful enough to run a ZX Spectrum emulator. I knew that one had been written in Java so I looked to see if anyone had adapted it to run on a phone. Instead, I found ZX Boy, which is designed for phones which use the Symbian operating system.

The emulator runs surprisingly well - slightly faster than a real spectrum (which makes playing arcade games a bit more of a challenge). The main problem of course is the lack of a proper keyboard. For games with only a few controls, it is possible to redefine the phones keypad, but a text adventure or anything which requires a lot of typing would be too awkward. There is an on-screen keyboard for typing in small amounts of text, but it would be nice to be able to type by using the phone's keypad in a similar manner to texting.

I intend to browse through some of the spectrum archives on the internet to find some more games to download. At the moment, I am playing Football Manager a lot, especially on the train while travelling to and from work.