Motorola A780

Continuing the theme of copying wholesale my forum posts and pasting them as blog posts, here is the third installment in my mobile phone saga. I have decided it finally deserves its own category, but that makes the post naming convention rather redundant. I will reconsider for the next part. Setting up the post, I should say that the phone comes with an email client, which some people had been having trouble with, so this is about my own experience. The title I used for this post on the forum was “Email settings (O2 UK)”.

Here’s the easy bit. After getting my phone, I joined the MotorolaFans forum to share my findings and request help, so I can now copy wholesale my comments from there as blog posts. That means simple content for my blog, as well as preservation and dissemination of my work (I’m all about Data Libre, and you should be too). Anyway, below is my first post to the forum, explaining how I got the phone, and my initial findings and advice. The moderators on the forums set it as sticky, to stop it falling off the bottom of the page, and I hope it has duly helped people. I called the post “Starting with the A780”:

Yes, 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 The more general principle, however, is that, when faced with accelerating change, with technology being out of date before you even get it home, the most sensible policy I have for making buying decisions is: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.”