My old phone was giving me tons of trouble. Dropping calls regardless of the signal strength and other really annoying things. Unfortunately, we were part of the old AT&T Wireless group that never got completely absorbed by Cingular, so getting a new phone meant switching plans and providers and meant getting a new phone for Becky too.
Historically, I've done this kind of thing online, and invariably ended up with some problem that made me waste alot of time on the phone with customer support. So, I did my research and just went to a Cingular store. I walked out with my new phones. I was very pleased with how it went. I stuck with Cingular because most of my friends and family have Cingluar, which gives us unlimited talk time with them, so the plan minutes really don't mean anything.
I got a RAZR for Becky, and for the first time, I own a non-Motorola phone. It's the Cingular 8125. HTC makes it and Cingular rebrands it. After having it a few days, it is the perfect phone for me. It's a Microsoft Mobile "Smartphone". It's basically a fancy PDA and a phone merged together. I've owned countless PDAs in the past, and I finally had to promise myself that I wouldn't buy another one. After a few months or so, I would stop using it because it was "one more thing" to carry. And if I wasn't carrying it, I wasn't using it.
Smartphones are nothing new, but what's special about this one is the number of ways for it to connect. It has:
- GSM/GPRS/Edge - The mobile phone data protocols
- Bluetooth
- IR - I actually used this the other day
- USB
- The big one.... WiFi!
Also, in addition to the normal draw on the screen entry methods, It's got a slide out keyboard. So far, I've used the stylus mostly, but I can see falling back to the keyboard to write stuff longer than a textbox.
It also has a 1.3MPixel digital camera that acts like a camera when it's in camera mode. So, it'll be easy to snap shots or videos of Jenna when it would take to long to get out the "real" camera.
It also has a mini-SD slot so I can add capacity. I'd rather it have compact flash since I already have some big sticks of it for my real camera, but it'll have to do.
The only thing it's missing is built-in GPS. However, there appears to be a big market for Bluetooth GPS units, which would be fantastic since often you need the receiver in a different place than the map program.
So, it's my phone, so I'll carry it by default, and it's a wicked PDA, so I'll use that. And the best part is that cost-wise, I've paid more for cellphones without most of these features