The One About Smartphones

Okay.

I use a Palm Treo 680. I absolutely loved this phone. It has served me admirably, doing virtually everything I needed for some time. Wanna write a blog, a poem or a chapter on your book? No problem. Wanna surf the web and email your wife? Got it. Interested in transferring or checking out music and video files transferred from computers? All over it. Need to look up something from the decade worth of Palm data you have created, from phone records to memos to schedules and birthdays? Is now soon enough? From the second I laid my hands on it, I loved this phone.

Unfortunately for this phone, I live in the future. So while it immediately served all the needs I had when I bought it almost two years ago, my needs have grown while its ability to serve them has not. Not something it did wrong, just life, really, and few technological loves can last forever.⁽¹⁾ So I started thinking about a new smartphone. Before I get into my "what I want" list, let's knock down the common things people tell me ...


"So you're going right into the waiting arms of a Palm Pre, right?" No, not so much. Aside from the fact that despite multitasking and some great features, users are less than delighted and out of the box it lacked video capture⁽²⁾, the ability to forward text messages, smileys, removable media expansion or even a flash on its camera. Anecdotal evidence indicates that the hinge on the keyboard is suspect. There's a reason why it used to be said that one should never go for the "1.0" version of anything. This phone -- like the iPod, honestly -- is an iteration or two away from being ready for prime time.

"Well, you being an Apple fanatic, you'll get an iPhone then?" Wrong. In the unironic words of the illustrious and praiseworthy Mark Morford,⁽³⁾ "Where's the microSD? Where's the enterprise capabilities? What about multi-codecs? Background processing? What, still no real-time aGPS? You call this a camera? The sync is wicked slow and the video upload is pathetic and single-core processors are so five minutes ago ..." The lack of removable media means far too claustrophobic a data experience for me, its word processing is an embarrassment (and an extra cost) and I like to hack my own ringtones without the help of iTunes, thank you very much (although I have used Garageband for that). Also, fun fact, the unlimited everything plan for the iPhone runs about $150 a month, which is about $56 more than I pay on T-Mobile for the same joys. Plus there's Apple's gatekeeping the web and apps -- as much as I love everything the company has done for me,⁽⁴⁾ it's freedom or nothing for me in a mobile wireless domain, and I'm used to freedom. No thanks.

"Blackberry is very popular, and they have a new touchscreen phone, why don't you try that?" Despite even the likes of brilliant minds like The Truth Sayer rocking them, I got time to play with one and it's annoying. The UI on BlackBerry has never been up to snuff, perfectly shown by the annoying just-too-long lag in switching from portrait to landscape mode. As well, given how many Blackberry outage stories I got used to seeing, I just have a mental image of the company as being made of fail. Show me a Blackberry that proves me wrong on overly kludgy UI (and this is from a guy considering Symbian OS at this point) and we can talk.⁽⁵⁾

So. What exactly do I want? It goes a little something like this ...

• 3G speeds


• A web browser robust enough to handle YouTube if not Sci Fi Channel


• Word processing from jump street


• Removable media


• Data security (which means no Sidekicks of Android phones, synching my contacts or data through outside servers, screw that)


• The ability to port my Palm data over without too much hassle


• No Windows Mobile


• A calling/data plan that won't bankrupt me


• A calling/data plan that actually has service in places I go (like, say, my house -- suck it, AT&T)


• Wi-fi


• Some semblance of aesthetics that will please me (least important of all)

"So, what about Symbian phones, then?" Glad you asked. I've been dancing around the Nokia E71x, which has almost everything I need in a slightly kludgy OS. Problem? AT&T service sucks in most of Los Angeles, or so the anecdotal evidence I have indicates. If you're south of Wilshire -- and short of driving to Pasadena to work, where else would I be? -- good luck. Many blame the overwhelming data demands of the iPhone, saying AT&T just doesn't have the steel to support a phone that popular that sucks down that kind of bandwidth. I don't know, and I don't care.

The unlocked E71 is almost an upgrade of my Treo ... but its WCDMA 850/1900 MHz top speeds mean it won't work with T-Mobile's less effective 1700/2100 MHz network.⁽⁶⁾ So scratch true 3G speeds there. I could unlock it and go to, say, AT&T ... oh, but wait, same problem.⁽⁷⁾

The almost $700 Nokia N97 may be able to pull off things, hanging w/T-Mobile (and maybe Verizon and maybe Sprint) on the 2100 MHz band, but there's no telling, and that's an expensive gamble. Also, reviews of the "resistive touch screen" technology are less than kind (something Blackberry is hearing as well). But everybody can't have the smoothness of the iPhone ... or truthfully, the ease of my Treo. With any Symbian phone, there's rumors that I could port things over, via Missing Sync and what have you, but no hard facts I've been able to find, just encouraging hearsay.(8)

Argh!

So today I am vexed. So much so that I'm actually seriously looking at adopting a stopgap measure like the almost teeny-bopper-esque Samsung Comeback(9) which -- near as I can tell -- only has software integration for Windows. Which, in my mind, means that it hates America.(6)

Most products I've found are either "consumer grade plastic texting Facebooking phone" level machines that can't do any business with word processing or what have you, or they're like Verizon's selections and all use Windows Mobile. Palm had the middle locked down and let it go, abandoning droves of supporters who stuck with them through good times and bad to screw up WebOS and suck on Windows Mobile teat. Unacceptable!

I may, spirit help me, just have to have a split device paradigm again. I used to rock the phone, the iPod and the PDA, but cut down on my waist clutter by one (and if the iPhone wasn't so Draconian I could have really gone to one device). Now? I may be fully utility belted out again, looking like a ghetto Batman. Hanging on to the 680 as a pure PDA, having some new phone item and my iPod too (and I'm even debating getting an iPod Touch just so I can have a wi-fi machine with me at all times). That saddens me.(11)

As of today, I have no solution. I'm still researching. My dawg Jere keeps saying that the longer I wait, the better my chances something will come along that I want. As of today, everybody's got a list of reasons why not¹² and three have lengthy laundry lists. *sigh*

More on this story as it develops ...

Playing (Music): "When To Stand Up" featuring Jazzy Jeff by Eminem

Footnotes:

(1) = Although I could hop into a well maintained and/or refurbished 1986 Chevy Caprice Classic today and be cool with it. Real spit.

(2) = Allegedly, that's "coming soon." Uh huh. Just like my forty acres, my mule and the next issue of Battle Chasers.

(3) = If you're not reading the razor wit of Mark Morford twice a week, you're completely missing out. He's the real thing. I thought I wrote like that, but he can leave me in the dust with an opening paragraph when he's properly motivated. I can't wait to read his book.

(4) = Without any joking around, I can honestly say I owe my digital career to Apple, due to how easy it was for me to learn the computers and their operation in high school after being told for years that my math skills were too crappy to work with computers. Suck on that, you BASIC nerds!

(5) = I have a sickening feeling that in a few months I'll be typing a blog on a Blackberry while somebody brings me a tray of fresh crow.

(6) = You have no idea how frustrated I was to learn all this crap. Digital prospecting! How uncivilized! Anyhoo, I have VMWare Fusion on my MacBook Pro, so it's not like I don't have Windows at my disposal, I just don't want to use it. I've opened the Virtual Machine maybe once since I got the darned thing. Windows is so ... inelegant!

(7) = I really had a jones for this phone for a long time. Thought I'd plug my SIM card in and just go. Sad, really.

(8) = Still ... seven hundred bucks for a phone??? Sweet spirit singing ...

(9) = I'm pretty sure a straight guy could have this phone. I think.

(10) = Not like I'm wavin' a flag and voting or what have you, but I don't hate (immediately) most Americans I meet. I have been said to hate humanity, but there's a paradigm shift at work, so why quibble over things still in negotiation?

(11) = Not that much.

(12) = Like Emily. Was this the only TV show to ever get cancelled while airing its much-hyped pilot episode? Maybe.