7 posts tagged “cell phones”

DISCLAIMER:  My living for the last 10 years has been based around Apple products, and AAPL stock paid for my last round of property tax, and I have been banking my OT for 6 months to buy this thing with.  So maybe I am totally in the bag, maybe not.  Take it all with a grain of salt.

Right.  I have owned almost twenty cellphones in the last 5 years - I would do the math but I don't want to depress myself.  However, the last phone I paid for was almost 2 years ago, for a V635 - since then I have been struggling through with various free phones and watching the feature creep in the low-end segment.  Two years ago, the free Nokia was a wee candybar with a tiny passive-matrix screen and no features more advanced than speakerphone; now the free Nokia is a flip with a 320x240 display, high-speed data, Bluetooth, a megapixel camera, and a switchblade button that flips it open if you're too lazy to actually get a thumb under the lid.

I say all this to say that I owned the iPhone of its day, its day being summer 2003: the SonyEricsson P800.  This was an amazing thing:  touch screen, handwriting recognition, tri-band, camera, Bluetooth AND speaker phone, syncs with a Mac, and a huge 320x208 display.  I laid out $500 for the thing, down in the Bowery in NYC, with the aim of switching to T-Mobile so I would be able to exploit unlimited GPRS data.

However, there were some problems.  For one, the thing was a brick.  For another, despite the big display, I had a WAP browser and an early version of Opera, neither of which was exactly a whiz for cruising the Internet.  The camera was VGA only and didn't do video capture, the handwriting recognition was a bit of a show (especially in moving from Grafitti to Jot), GPRS speed was comparable to an old modem from 1994 or so, and - the capper - the phone only got a signal when you touched it directly to a cell tower.  Sony Ericsson was a byword for poor antenna performance until just a couple of years ago, but this was rock bottom.

As it happens, I did switch to T-Mobile for a year...but relied almost exclusively on the V300 I got with my contract.  My introduction to the misery of the Moto UI, but that's another story.

So...why should I expect the iPhone to be any better?

Well, for starters, the thing is literally less than half the thickness of the P800.  It's actually the same weight, width and thickness as a 30 GB iPod, but the iPhone is a half-inch longer.  All in all, a slimmer device, which can only be good.  The display is MUCH nicer - larger, brighter, more color depth - and Safari beats the hell out of the old style of faking the Internet on a phone.  The camera is 2 megapixel, which is a decided improvement, though I don't know if video is on the cards (I'm thinking not, especially given the absence of MMS).  No handwriting - instead, we have the onscreen keyboard.  Jury's still out.  EDGE is better than GPRS, albeit not by much, but the upside of Silicon Valley is that you can find pervasive free Wi-Fi just about anywhere.  So the big question is: antenna performance.  How easily will the iPhone pick up a signal, and how tightly will it hold on?

As the big questions go, I'm not as concerned about the keyboard - it's got to be better than T9, and I am unlikely to send a lot of e-mail from the phone anyway (I have generally had mail clients on most phones I've owned since 2003, but until I gave up data service in 2006 I was unlikely to send mail, only read).  I don't use the video camera very often, but I would be annoyed by knowing I don't have one.  I tend to more or less trust the battery metrics on the website, especially vis-a-vis music playback, although I don't know that it will last much longer than a laptop with continuous Wi-Fi use.  So the real dagger question:  how's the antenna?  No way of knowing until it ships.

Also, I find it a bit worrisome that we've had leaks from AT&T on just about everything, from employee leave scheduled around the launch to preparations for security and crowd control if people camp out - yet not one word has leaked about pricing plans.  That scares me.  I don't mind splashing out for the device - after all, two years ago people were paying $500 for a RAZR and that wasn't even the most powerful phone that Moto made at the time.  But if I'm going to have to put down appreciably more than people are paying monthly on a Pearl or a Sidekick (the only two "consumer smartphones" out there right now), I will be displeased.  So...

OmniWeb has gone pear-shaped.  Camino is still prone to hang onto the cache like Ed Scissum trying to run the ball back in the 1997 Iron Bowl (look it up, Yankee).  And I find myself returning to Flock - which I know is a "Web 2.0 browser" and laden down with all kinds of felgercarb about blogging and Flickr and RSS and etc...but here's the thing:  Flock 0.7.13 is THE FASTEST BROWSER I'VE EVER SEEN.  Seriously.  The render speed is easily double Camino, it's faster than even Webkit (which seems to choke on anything Web 2.0-ish, whether it's GTalk or Vox or Gawker Media or what have you).  The only thing I really don't like about Flock is that the bookmark system is optimized for the use of del.icio.us or something similar, and you can't frickin' just have folders of bookmarks in your toolbar.  But ever since I've gone to RSS and NetNewsWire for my regular-read sites, I don't actually need that much in the bar up top.  And the tabbed browsing isn't on the SIDE, either.

So...once more unto the breach, dear friends.

Incidentally, my working phone is now a Nokia 6126 until the iPhone drops.  Just in case you're keeping track of the whole "he wouldn't be satisfied with nothin'" scorecard.

Well, that didn't take long.  Last night at 8, I put a request in the procurement system at work to see if there was anything that could be done to get my MMS working again.  Within 12 hours, I had a reply saying that my account was not enabled for data, and to do so would require approval of my manager and two different people in Finance.  Long story short: the job is going to pay for voice and some indeterminate number of texts and NOTHING ELSE.

Which is fine, in the grand scheme of things, but it is trifling because doing my own cell again means I'm going to be essentially paying $60 a month just for MMS and data.  Which is only $10 to $20, depending on carrier, if you're adding it to voice service - but I can't add it and pay for it myself, so zippy chance I will ever be able to hook this up again unless the job stops paying for my phone altogether.

This is the part where you insert my standard rant about how the US is a third-world country when it comes to mobile phones, and how the most trifling nubbins prepaid phone in the UK beats the hell out of ours because YOU'RE NOT PAYING FOR ANY INCOMING CALLS OR MESSAGES.

(facepalm)

Anyway, I have shelved my little SonyEricsson flip in favor of the Nokia 3120 that I was first issued as a work phone.  It has no Bluetooth or IR, doesn't sync with my Mac, doesn't support multiple numbers per contact, no themes or exotic wallpaper, has no camera or MP3 playback or anything - its big feature is that it has speakerphone, which isn't that big a deal anymore.  The antenna performance is solid, it's loud, it's compact, and I actually have two batteries for it.  Basically it's like the little snub revolver everybody has in TV shows from 30 years ago: perfectly good enough, but not nearly as flashy as modernity would seem to require.

So what does everybody else do for phones?  Do you use the data service at all?  Do you get your e-mail on it?  Send pictures?  Rack up ridiculous minutes?  Use it as an all-purpose laptop substitute?  (If I ever manage to hook up the iPhone, that would probably do away with me ever using a laptop.)

EDIT: Well, that lasted about 12 hours.  SonyEricsson's default UI is just light-years better than Nokia Series 40.  Now the 3120 is sitting in a basket with my Virgin Mobile SIM in it for safe keeping - but don't think for a second I'm not taking the SE with me when I next go to Europe.

How do you pass the time during a flight?  What do you bring in your carry-on?

Couple of magazines - there's always an Economist or New Yorker I haven't gotten through.  The advantage there is that I can always toss them when I'm done.  After that, there's the iPod, because there's always a couple of podcasts I haven't finished.  So far, that's been more than enough - I wouldn't even bother bringing the laptop on board, except that there is NO WAY IN HELL that I will put it in the checked luggage.  So the goal is to get to the point where I don't need the laptop and can do everything I would use it for by some other instrumentality.  Enter the iPhone...I hope...

Starting tomorrow, AT&T will begin the process of rebranding Cingular as AT&T, or "Wireless by AT&T."

Two years ago, Cingular bought AT&T Wireless (a separate entity from AT&T) for $40 billion, and then spent $5 billion in two years to rebrand it as Cingular.

Now that SBC has bought the remnants of AT&T (a mere $16 billion) and coaxed Bellsouth into a merger, they are now going to spend one brazillian dollars to undo their last two years of marketing?

And THIS is the company Apple wants me to indenture myself to for the iPhone?  Sheesh...what would I give to have had Vodaphone buy the old ATTWS and still have 3 GSM carriers in this country?

What's something you bought, knowing it was a total waste of money?

What HAVEN'T I bought knowing it was a total waste of money?  Most every cigar I ever bought.  I would also say the last 3 cellphones I got, but they were all free with contract, so they don't count.

What's your cell phone's ringtone? What made you pick it?

I flip between two or three different things.  Right now, it's a clip from Channel 4's "The IT Crowd," because our IS&T group is screwing up in ways unimaginable and making my life complicated (when you have to come into work at 7 AM and babysit two developers in your office until 5:30, something has gone very wrong with your lifestyle).  When it's not that, it's a mash-up of 50 Cent's "In Da Club" mixed with "Yakkety Sax."  Yes, it's the Benny Hill theme.  Anything is funny with the Benny Hill theme under it.

And then of course there are specific ringtones for certain people - family down South rings to "Man of Constant Sorrow," while my old allies in DC get "Fields of Athenry."  HEY BABY LET YOUR FREEBIRDS FLY!!

I'm starting to get the odd twinge of Phone Glee (tm) again, but there's nothing out there that compels me.  Maybe the SonyEricsson K510a, just because it would be nice to have what I have now in a candybar form factor.  What I really REALLY need is UMA, because my office is RICH in Wi-Fi but has the worst cell phone reception of anywhere I've ever worked (and I worked underground for a year and a half once).