2006-02-19 00:46My (new) phone - Part IYes, I have a new mobile phone. The word “new” is redundant, however, as it is the only mobile phone I own, or have ever owned. To give a full record, I should mention the times I borrowed an old family mobile while away at university, but as I didn’t use it between terms, and didn’t pay the bill on it, and didn’t carry it around with me, I don’t think that counts. I suppose this raises the obvious question of “Why not earlier?” or “Why now?”. Well, to some extent, the longer you go without a mobile, the easier it is, but those occasional moments where owning a phone would prevent one from having to wait around somewhere, or would enable one to do the polite thing of passing on useful information, start to add up. The more general principle, however, is that, when faced with accelerating change, with technology being out of date before you even get it home, the most sensible policy I have for making buying decisions is: “Decide what the perfect form of this product is, then wait for it to exist.” Optionally one can add: “Then wait for the price to go down.” which is an almost inevitable occurence. There is also a corollary to this: “Then when you get it, keep telling yourself you don’t need anything else.” This is the policy I applied to buying my computer, and 6 years on it still feels as powerful as the 3 GHz Pentium 4 machines at work. Having said that, I have just done a reinstall, I do have at least as much RAM on my own machine as the Pentium 4s, and I may be thinking of the machines at work when they are running Windows, not when running Linux. Remember: Linux runs on everything from a wrist watch to a supercomputing cluster … and the corollary: … and Linux on a wristwatch is probably more powerful than a supercomputing cluster of Windows machines. I do have benchmarks to prove that corollary, but they are all made up. It’s easy to joke about Windows, but I am prepared to put my money behind what I believe in, which is why one of my requirements for my phone is that it runs Linux. After using the phone for a bit, my view is reinforced even more, and I do know what to compare it against. I have a fair amount of experience with Windows Mobile from fighting with it on various iPAQ models, in a technical support role, and its hotchpotch of third party applications fail to address the shortfalls in the operating system. In particular, I know someone with a Windows “Smart”phone, the iPAQ hw6515, which they had to force themselves to use because of its bad design. They still don’t use it as a phone, leaving it as an underpowered, oversized PDA. Then there are the people who favour the Symbian option, which has the third party support for niche interests, but I feel I am helping Linux and making the decision which will be right in the long run. But there are other Linux phones out there (even if most aren’t available in this country), so what else makes a perfect phone? Well, it really has to free me from ever having to carry around another device. I’ve been thinking about getting a digital camera (for photoblogging one day), so a megapixel one built into the phone is worthwhile. I don’t have a portable digital music player, so having a phone which can play MP3s is useful, and a phone which can play MP4 video is a dream come true. I know some people with PDAs, and a phone should really be able to do the same things. Finally, everybody seems to be interested in GPS nowadays, and it would be a shame to buy a separate unit when I can get one built into a phone. That already limits me to just one device, the Motorola A780, but my harsh criteria would not let me buy it if it didn’t have certain other qualities. Obviously the phone should be able to access the Internet (using GPRS), supporting standards like XHTML, IMAP and POP3. Then add in a few things like USB connection at the computer and phone end, 3.5 mm miniature jack for headphones, Bluetooth, and a TransFlash (microSD) memory card slot (with support for at least 512 MB, and possibly 2 GB) to cover the hardware side of my standards requirements. Quad-band support, games, MP3 ringtones, clam shell design, and touch screen then clinch the deal. In fact, short of Wi-Fi (with a SIP client), this is the ultimate convergent device which technologists have been predicting for years, and I’d be a fool not to get one. Want to know how I got it, and what I did with it? You’ll have to read the next installment. Trackbacks
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Yet, do you use this as a means of contacting those mobile-reliant siblings who are away from home? [A rhetorical question that I would like to punctuate to show this, and yet do not have the knowledge; please advise.] Shockingly no, or at least you do not allow them the priveledge of owning your number. I would therefore suggest a renaming of the 'phone' part of your article, and perhaps advise the said article (that is the thing you carry around as well as the document above) to be termed 'a portable life support, with optional telephone facilities' or 'entertainment handi' as the Germans would have it. What d'you say?
[...] For a start, I should explain that the reason my previous post was filed under “Standards” and “Lemmas” is because it listed the standards that phones are capable of supporting nowadays and my view about buying technology, respectively. [...]
As for mobile-reliance, perhaps you should seek other ways of expressing yourself, such as instant messaging, or even blogging. I'm sure you could ask a kind, non-mobile-reliant -- or should one say, 'multimedia'(?) -- sibling to avail you of a portal for this blogging. Understanding the difficulties faced by penniless, homeless relatives, it would be callous of me to expect you to make over-priced mobile phone calls, for which one is charged by the minute, prematurely cutting short what would otherwise, no doubt, be a most involving and satisfying conversation. I do hope my reasoning has struck a chord, and we will remain in contact without resorting to leaving comments under blog posts, or using the optional telephone facilities of my portable life support. I bid you good day.
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