Yes, Virginia, ANOTHER cell phone.
Jun. 24th, 2009 08:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
grrgoylI have a new phone. Don't judge me. For someone who hates talking on the phone, I sure go through a lot of handsets.
It's stupid T-Mobile. The reason I buy unlocked phones from other carriers is because T-Mobile offers a line of singularly boring phones. Any exciting, sleek, sexy, state-of-the-art pocket-sized communication technology you see advertised, you can bet your bottom dollar it's for someone not T-Mobile. Sucky.
But when Tery and I recently had some trouble with our lines and I called for service, not only did they fix it in about 24 hours, they also helpfully pointed out that we had both been eligible for an upgrade for about 8 months now. Upgrade meaning sexy new phone at new customer rebate prices.
Tery was all about another phone, given the state of her 2-year-old RAZR (worked fine but the screen was exhibiting a peculiar corrosion at the edges). She wanted a Samsung Gravity after seeing Tabby's at work. I've wanted a slider since the first time I'd heard of such a thing, but all the slider phones offered by TMo seemed to be universally hated by everyone, and none of them were capable of playing movies (which had transformed from luxury to necessity with the Motorola).
In particular I had previously checked out the Sidekick, a sliding QWERTY phone that seemed born to play movies, having as it does an enormous (by phone standards) 16:9 ratio widescreen, but moronically no, it did not have video playback.
Hang on a minute though -- the new Sidekick LX DID support video it seemed. The LX 2009 was new enough that there would be no steals on eBay with the frenetic bidding going on, but it seemed there was a Tony Hawk Limited Edition LX. I have no love of Tony Hawk, and "his" design meant the phone was covered in obnoxious skateboard graphics, but TMo had it for only $99.99. Not bad.
Calling around to local stores however revealed that no one carried it in stock. Whether through them or over the internet, there would be shipping involved. I was nervous that TMo's shipping would be way too slow. I returned to eBay, where I thought I had found a nice compromise -- a navy blue LX with accessories for only $179 shipped (oh, the money I waste in service to my towering impatience).
I went for it, and only THEN found all the websites explaining that the blue incarnation of the LX STILL didn't support video. GODDAMMIT. T-MOBILE, WHY IS IT SO HARD TO THINK OF DIFFERENT NAMES FOR DIFFERENT MODELS??
I frantically emailed the seller verifying the video issue, and if so would it be possible to retract my winning bid. He was uncharacteristically cool about it and even sent me a full refund within 5 minutes of my request, so no saga there.
So it was off to a TMo store to see the Sidekick in person and try to order it through them.
As I said they didn't have Tony's, but they did have the 2009 on display. $249 smackaroos (with rebate). Ouch. The saleswoman (Lindsey. Trust me, I spent enough time there to be comfortable on a first-name basis) said they could order the Tony Hawk, but after playing with the floor model for awhile I had my doubts.
Sure, the screen was gorgeously bright, practically HD. And that was about all I liked about it. Access to the keyboard was gained by nudging the screen's corner, whereby it would flip violently in a 90-degree arc. Even worse was all primary operations were carried out by four buttons on all the corners of the phone, with no indication at all of what did what, like a Nintendo joystick, so I found myself returning again and again to the home screen in frustration.
Although I hadn't been considering it originally, I found myself slowly drawn to the G1, the so-called "Google phone." This is TMo's answer to the iPhone. I remember when it first came out - about 12 hours after I made that disastrous decision to buy the iClone, because I wanted an iPhone so badly but it just wasn't going to happen. I remember thinking, "DAMMIT T-MOBILE" but getting over it quickly, because being brand new it was selling for $500 and I wasn't getting an upgrade then.
But here it was, sitting so pretty right at the front of the store, costing only $179 with upgrade. That's right, the exact same price I had almost blown on the eBay auction. Too coincidental to be an accident, I naturally thought.
It had quite a siren song. Smooth touchscreen with swiping action like the iPhone, that slid up in a sedate horizontal plane to reveal a full QWERTY if you preferred. Much more compact than the Sidekick, sleeker and more serious looking. And let's not forget the bonus of walking out of the store with it in hand, no shipping of any kind necessary. That idea was too compelling to walk away from.
What probably clinched the sale for me was when the younger saleswoman chatted with me about the two phones and mentioned that the G1 has an app store just like the iPhone. I felt my eyes literally light up. I took one last longing look at the Sidekick screen, turned away, bought the G1 and never looked back.
I haven't regretted it since. The phone isn't perfect, I don't think any phone can be, but I'll get into that later. The first app I downloaded is called "Shazam," and it lets you put your phone up to the radio and it displays the artist and album -- including links at the bottom to buy the mp3 from Amazon or search YouTube for a video (YouTube is Google-owned, which I didn't realize, so YT access is built in). This makes the phone worth the purchase price alone. You know whose phone can't use this app? Poor![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kavieshana's dinosaur of an iPhone (it was originally an iPhone app, but not supported on older models. Lame, Apple).
The second app I got was "Shop Savvy," that lets you scan barcodes in stores and pull up competitors' prices and internet reviews. So I won't just assume I can get it cheaper online, I'll know for sure. And believe me, contemplating buying the G1 without my bevy of review sites to help me was a very nerve-wracking proposition. I don't buy anything if it has less than 4 Amazon stars.
Of course the great sales prices at the store were only applicable if we added a data plan, which I easily talked Tery into. Yes, I only leave the house twice a week. Don't judge me. If nothing else, now that I have access to the internet round-the-clock I might catch up on the HUGE backlog of Snarry I've got bookmarked that's too much of a pain to download onto my PDA. More on that later.
So, without further ado, the phone:
The good thing apparently about not buying new technology on launch day is that 6 months later a lot of the things "early adopters" bitch about seem to be fixed.
Besides the full QWERTY slider keyboard, double tapping a search field brings up a virtual on-screen version for quick typing. Smart. The swiping screen action is kind of addictive. The GPS with Google Maps is cool, I've had to use it once already. It sure would have come in handy back in my inventory days. Video watching, YouTube watching, eBaying, Amazoning, all work well. It has a cool windows system that lets you open more than one web page at once (like Internet Explorer 8's tabbing), and bookmarking is equally simple.
Little things show that thought went into some designs, like the SIM card slot is open-ended -- meaning you can push it through rather than scrabbling uselessly at the tiny edge trying to pull it out. Also the hands-free earbuds aren't one unit, just the USB part that plugs into the phone with a 3.5mm headphone jack, meaning any headphones can be plugged into it for hands-free use or just audio enjoyment. Smart. They also thoughtfully provided flashing LED lights to alert me to a new email or text, because they know otherwise I'd be compulsively turning on the phone and checking every 5 minutes.
Oh, and the USB port looked like yet another proprietary style, so I was pleasantly surprised to realize that it also fit a standard mini-USB, and I have so many of those lying around I could have one for every room in the house. And the phone ships with a 1gb microSD card. Not too shabby.
The writers of the user manual have a sense of humor too. In the section on car use, they warn if someone calls you and your G1 has sllid into the backseat, do NOT crawl over the seat while driving to get to it (at least I hope this instruction was tongue-in-cheek). Funnier still is the section on avoiding water damage -- lots of things can hurt the phone, like condensation, melting snowflakes and tears of joy. Yes, it actually says "tears of joy" in the user's manual.
However, it isn't all lollipops and unicorn kisses. Hands down the biggest complaint with the phone is the horrifically abysmal battery life. Pack it full of features to complement a busy, on-the-go lifestyle, then power it with a battery that lasts about 10 hours if you're very careful. It's nuts.
It helped when I turned the screen brightness down to 0 (which doesn't actually turn it off entirely, and after awhile you don't notice how dim it is), and if I remember to put the phone to "sleep" every single time I finish what I'm doing. Even if I didn't the screen lock comes on automatically every 30 seconds, which I suppose is useful to prevent me from ass-dialing Beijing but it gets a BIT annoying having to constantly unlock it.
It was also helpful when I turned off the background processes that were constantly auto-synching with Google accounts (contacts, calendar, mail) that I hadn't actually set up; I could be mistaken, but the seamless integration with Google accounts seems to be a big selling point of the unit. Turn it off if you hope to get the phone to last to the end of the work day.
No 3G unless I'm planning an extended browsing session, no GPS unless I'm actually lost, for the love of god no wi-fi EVER, forget the mp3 player and boy am I glad I never really climbed on the Bluetooth bandwagon. There's a whole host of apps that have been created specifically to put toggles for all these things in one place (I have one), that's how crazy it is.
So the only way to prolong the battery life to "acceptable" is to basically never touch the phone. People are understandably miffed, and TMo is denying any knowledge of the problem despite their renowned customer service otherwise. I realized that actually I am the phone's demographic -- watch a few minutes of a movie, make a few calls/texts, cruise over to LJ or IMDb or YT whenever the mood strikes me, none of that high tech, 7-different-ways-to-reach-me business, and no selling my soul to Google to an extent that requires constant updating.
I guess we shouldn't complain --kavieshana says she charges her iPhone twice a day. THAT is off the hook.
There are other smaller complaints. Like no predictive text (look, just because we've got the full QWERTY doesn't mean I wouldn't like a way to not have to type every single letter of every single word -- haters in the forums think this is a silly gripe). Also no "delete all" option with email, which I had assumed was a fairly standard feature.
Like my sister pointed out -- she loved the GPS navigator on her old phone, never thought to research it, and hates it on her new phone. We just assume once a bit of technology is perfected, we can expect that level or higher on future models, but there's no paying it forward in a competitive market. And who suffers for it? The consumers.
I'm also now in the market for a 16 (or 32)gb card, because the SD slot was designed for gerbil paws. TINY. And twice as tricky now that I got my hard rubber case from eBay, which clamps so securely onto the phone that it's impossible now to remove. I think it's made of the same stuff as the Venom suit, Spidey's nemesis.
Tery made me laugh twice regarding the new phone. I put my SIM card back into the Motorola to get my contacts that hadn't imported automatically to the G1 (bizarrely, Tery, my sister Amy, and Ryan, the three people I call the most) and made sure I removed everything from it in preparation for selling it (and good thing I checked, because there were some stray Snarries saved to the phone that I wasn't even aware of). Tery pretended the Motorola was an ex-girlfriend and the G1 was jealous: "Aww, baby, I just had to go pick up some stuff. It's over between us baby, now don't be like that...."
Then as I sat and read my latest Snarry online (luxury!), my old PDA gathering dust in my bag, Tery sang a few lines of "When Somebody Loved Me," the Sarah McLachlan song from Toy Story 2 that instantly breaks the heart of all who hear it. I laughed through my tears, because it still destroys me even when taken out of context. Damn you, Sarah.
Other quibbles. The camera ain't so great. The external speaker is worse. I can't figure out a way to keep the phone from retrieving mail I've already read on my PC, making the "new mail" notification a bit anticlimactic (not as much as the iPhone, that receives spam as cheerfully as email, according tokavieshana). Sometimes the touchscreen has variable responsiveness, and if I leave the phone on while charging, the screen gets jittery and icons are repelled from my finger, but react if I keep my finger an inch away from the glass. Strange. I can't entirely rule out dark magic.
But hey, at least I can send pictures over the phone, which the new new iPhone STILL can't do. What the hell is wrong with Apple? People like to send each other pictures. It's the whole reason camera phones were invented. Jerks.
Overall the phone can do more stuff than it can't, and I think people bitching everywhere on the forums (and pissily declaring they're going back to their old phone because it was just INTOLERABLE, as if losing them as a user would be a crippling blow to the other forum readers) have irrationally high standards (although the phone is regularly priced at $500. If you pay that much, then perhaps you might have a reason to bitch). I myself am suitably impressed, so perhaps I shouldn't change my dream job to phone reviewer (from film reviewer) since I'm still wowed by things like a swiping touchscreen.
Coming up, because this entry has already bloated out of control: I review the worst movie I've ever seen!
It's stupid T-Mobile. The reason I buy unlocked phones from other carriers is because T-Mobile offers a line of singularly boring phones. Any exciting, sleek, sexy, state-of-the-art pocket-sized communication technology you see advertised, you can bet your bottom dollar it's for someone not T-Mobile. Sucky.
But when Tery and I recently had some trouble with our lines and I called for service, not only did they fix it in about 24 hours, they also helpfully pointed out that we had both been eligible for an upgrade for about 8 months now. Upgrade meaning sexy new phone at new customer rebate prices.
Tery was all about another phone, given the state of her 2-year-old RAZR (worked fine but the screen was exhibiting a peculiar corrosion at the edges). She wanted a Samsung Gravity after seeing Tabby's at work. I've wanted a slider since the first time I'd heard of such a thing, but all the slider phones offered by TMo seemed to be universally hated by everyone, and none of them were capable of playing movies (which had transformed from luxury to necessity with the Motorola).
In particular I had previously checked out the Sidekick, a sliding QWERTY phone that seemed born to play movies, having as it does an enormous (by phone standards) 16:9 ratio widescreen, but moronically no, it did not have video playback.
Hang on a minute though -- the new Sidekick LX DID support video it seemed. The LX 2009 was new enough that there would be no steals on eBay with the frenetic bidding going on, but it seemed there was a Tony Hawk Limited Edition LX. I have no love of Tony Hawk, and "his" design meant the phone was covered in obnoxious skateboard graphics, but TMo had it for only $99.99. Not bad.
Calling around to local stores however revealed that no one carried it in stock. Whether through them or over the internet, there would be shipping involved. I was nervous that TMo's shipping would be way too slow. I returned to eBay, where I thought I had found a nice compromise -- a navy blue LX with accessories for only $179 shipped (oh, the money I waste in service to my towering impatience).
I went for it, and only THEN found all the websites explaining that the blue incarnation of the LX STILL didn't support video. GODDAMMIT. T-MOBILE, WHY IS IT SO HARD TO THINK OF DIFFERENT NAMES FOR DIFFERENT MODELS??
I frantically emailed the seller verifying the video issue, and if so would it be possible to retract my winning bid. He was uncharacteristically cool about it and even sent me a full refund within 5 minutes of my request, so no saga there.
So it was off to a TMo store to see the Sidekick in person and try to order it through them.
As I said they didn't have Tony's, but they did have the 2009 on display. $249 smackaroos (with rebate). Ouch. The saleswoman (Lindsey. Trust me, I spent enough time there to be comfortable on a first-name basis) said they could order the Tony Hawk, but after playing with the floor model for awhile I had my doubts.
Sure, the screen was gorgeously bright, practically HD. And that was about all I liked about it. Access to the keyboard was gained by nudging the screen's corner, whereby it would flip violently in a 90-degree arc. Even worse was all primary operations were carried out by four buttons on all the corners of the phone, with no indication at all of what did what, like a Nintendo joystick, so I found myself returning again and again to the home screen in frustration.
Although I hadn't been considering it originally, I found myself slowly drawn to the G1, the so-called "Google phone." This is TMo's answer to the iPhone. I remember when it first came out - about 12 hours after I made that disastrous decision to buy the iClone, because I wanted an iPhone so badly but it just wasn't going to happen. I remember thinking, "DAMMIT T-MOBILE" but getting over it quickly, because being brand new it was selling for $500 and I wasn't getting an upgrade then.
But here it was, sitting so pretty right at the front of the store, costing only $179 with upgrade. That's right, the exact same price I had almost blown on the eBay auction. Too coincidental to be an accident, I naturally thought.
It had quite a siren song. Smooth touchscreen with swiping action like the iPhone, that slid up in a sedate horizontal plane to reveal a full QWERTY if you preferred. Much more compact than the Sidekick, sleeker and more serious looking. And let's not forget the bonus of walking out of the store with it in hand, no shipping of any kind necessary. That idea was too compelling to walk away from.
What probably clinched the sale for me was when the younger saleswoman chatted with me about the two phones and mentioned that the G1 has an app store just like the iPhone. I felt my eyes literally light up. I took one last longing look at the Sidekick screen, turned away, bought the G1 and never looked back.
I haven't regretted it since. The phone isn't perfect, I don't think any phone can be, but I'll get into that later. The first app I downloaded is called "Shazam," and it lets you put your phone up to the radio and it displays the artist and album -- including links at the bottom to buy the mp3 from Amazon or search YouTube for a video (YouTube is Google-owned, which I didn't realize, so YT access is built in). This makes the phone worth the purchase price alone. You know whose phone can't use this app? Poor
kavieshana's dinosaur of an iPhone (it was originally an iPhone app, but not supported on older models. Lame, Apple).The second app I got was "Shop Savvy," that lets you scan barcodes in stores and pull up competitors' prices and internet reviews. So I won't just assume I can get it cheaper online, I'll know for sure. And believe me, contemplating buying the G1 without my bevy of review sites to help me was a very nerve-wracking proposition. I don't buy anything if it has less than 4 Amazon stars.
Of course the great sales prices at the store were only applicable if we added a data plan, which I easily talked Tery into. Yes, I only leave the house twice a week. Don't judge me. If nothing else, now that I have access to the internet round-the-clock I might catch up on the HUGE backlog of Snarry I've got bookmarked that's too much of a pain to download onto my PDA. More on that later.
So, without further ado, the phone:
The good thing apparently about not buying new technology on launch day is that 6 months later a lot of the things "early adopters" bitch about seem to be fixed.
Besides the full QWERTY slider keyboard, double tapping a search field brings up a virtual on-screen version for quick typing. Smart. The swiping screen action is kind of addictive. The GPS with Google Maps is cool, I've had to use it once already. It sure would have come in handy back in my inventory days. Video watching, YouTube watching, eBaying, Amazoning, all work well. It has a cool windows system that lets you open more than one web page at once (like Internet Explorer 8's tabbing), and bookmarking is equally simple.
Little things show that thought went into some designs, like the SIM card slot is open-ended -- meaning you can push it through rather than scrabbling uselessly at the tiny edge trying to pull it out. Also the hands-free earbuds aren't one unit, just the USB part that plugs into the phone with a 3.5mm headphone jack, meaning any headphones can be plugged into it for hands-free use or just audio enjoyment. Smart. They also thoughtfully provided flashing LED lights to alert me to a new email or text, because they know otherwise I'd be compulsively turning on the phone and checking every 5 minutes.
Oh, and the USB port looked like yet another proprietary style, so I was pleasantly surprised to realize that it also fit a standard mini-USB, and I have so many of those lying around I could have one for every room in the house. And the phone ships with a 1gb microSD card. Not too shabby.
The writers of the user manual have a sense of humor too. In the section on car use, they warn if someone calls you and your G1 has sllid into the backseat, do NOT crawl over the seat while driving to get to it (at least I hope this instruction was tongue-in-cheek). Funnier still is the section on avoiding water damage -- lots of things can hurt the phone, like condensation, melting snowflakes and tears of joy. Yes, it actually says "tears of joy" in the user's manual.
However, it isn't all lollipops and unicorn kisses. Hands down the biggest complaint with the phone is the horrifically abysmal battery life. Pack it full of features to complement a busy, on-the-go lifestyle, then power it with a battery that lasts about 10 hours if you're very careful. It's nuts.
It helped when I turned the screen brightness down to 0 (which doesn't actually turn it off entirely, and after awhile you don't notice how dim it is), and if I remember to put the phone to "sleep" every single time I finish what I'm doing. Even if I didn't the screen lock comes on automatically every 30 seconds, which I suppose is useful to prevent me from ass-dialing Beijing but it gets a BIT annoying having to constantly unlock it.
It was also helpful when I turned off the background processes that were constantly auto-synching with Google accounts (contacts, calendar, mail) that I hadn't actually set up; I could be mistaken, but the seamless integration with Google accounts seems to be a big selling point of the unit. Turn it off if you hope to get the phone to last to the end of the work day.
No 3G unless I'm planning an extended browsing session, no GPS unless I'm actually lost, for the love of god no wi-fi EVER, forget the mp3 player and boy am I glad I never really climbed on the Bluetooth bandwagon. There's a whole host of apps that have been created specifically to put toggles for all these things in one place (I have one), that's how crazy it is.
So the only way to prolong the battery life to "acceptable" is to basically never touch the phone. People are understandably miffed, and TMo is denying any knowledge of the problem despite their renowned customer service otherwise. I realized that actually I am the phone's demographic -- watch a few minutes of a movie, make a few calls/texts, cruise over to LJ or IMDb or YT whenever the mood strikes me, none of that high tech, 7-different-ways-to-reach-me business, and no selling my soul to Google to an extent that requires constant updating.
I guess we shouldn't complain --
kavieshana says she charges her iPhone twice a day. THAT is off the hook.There are other smaller complaints. Like no predictive text (look, just because we've got the full QWERTY doesn't mean I wouldn't like a way to not have to type every single letter of every single word -- haters in the forums think this is a silly gripe). Also no "delete all" option with email, which I had assumed was a fairly standard feature.
Like my sister pointed out -- she loved the GPS navigator on her old phone, never thought to research it, and hates it on her new phone. We just assume once a bit of technology is perfected, we can expect that level or higher on future models, but there's no paying it forward in a competitive market. And who suffers for it? The consumers.
I'm also now in the market for a 16 (or 32)gb card, because the SD slot was designed for gerbil paws. TINY. And twice as tricky now that I got my hard rubber case from eBay, which clamps so securely onto the phone that it's impossible now to remove. I think it's made of the same stuff as the Venom suit, Spidey's nemesis.
Tery made me laugh twice regarding the new phone. I put my SIM card back into the Motorola to get my contacts that hadn't imported automatically to the G1 (bizarrely, Tery, my sister Amy, and Ryan, the three people I call the most) and made sure I removed everything from it in preparation for selling it (and good thing I checked, because there were some stray Snarries saved to the phone that I wasn't even aware of). Tery pretended the Motorola was an ex-girlfriend and the G1 was jealous: "Aww, baby, I just had to go pick up some stuff. It's over between us baby, now don't be like that...."
Then as I sat and read my latest Snarry online (luxury!), my old PDA gathering dust in my bag, Tery sang a few lines of "When Somebody Loved Me," the Sarah McLachlan song from Toy Story 2 that instantly breaks the heart of all who hear it. I laughed through my tears, because it still destroys me even when taken out of context. Damn you, Sarah.
Other quibbles. The camera ain't so great. The external speaker is worse. I can't figure out a way to keep the phone from retrieving mail I've already read on my PC, making the "new mail" notification a bit anticlimactic (not as much as the iPhone, that receives spam as cheerfully as email, according to
kavieshana). Sometimes the touchscreen has variable responsiveness, and if I leave the phone on while charging, the screen gets jittery and icons are repelled from my finger, but react if I keep my finger an inch away from the glass. Strange. I can't entirely rule out dark magic.But hey, at least I can send pictures over the phone, which the new new iPhone STILL can't do. What the hell is wrong with Apple? People like to send each other pictures. It's the whole reason camera phones were invented. Jerks.
Overall the phone can do more stuff than it can't, and I think people bitching everywhere on the forums (and pissily declaring they're going back to their old phone because it was just INTOLERABLE, as if losing them as a user would be a crippling blow to the other forum readers) have irrationally high standards (although the phone is regularly priced at $500. If you pay that much, then perhaps you might have a reason to bitch). I myself am suitably impressed, so perhaps I shouldn't change my dream job to phone reviewer (from film reviewer) since I'm still wowed by things like a swiping touchscreen.
Coming up, because this entry has already bloated out of control: I review the worst movie I've ever seen!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-06-25 04:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-25 04:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-26 03:52 am (UTC)I do the same thing with professors too, when I'm signing up for classes. When my friends bitch about their terrible teachers, I say they should have taken the time to check the review sites. :p Scheduling takes longer, but it saves me tons of grief and wasted time for the rest of the semester!
no subject
Date: 2009-06-26 07:06 pm (UTC)Review sites for teachers? They didn't have that in "my day." Would have been helpful! I learned only when it was too late one semester that my new English prof had been dubbed the English department "antichrist" -- notorious for being the toughest grader in the whole university. I barely passed the class with a C. What a blow to my ego. : (
Then there's MyFriendDeb who takes it a bit too far and won't buy ANYTHING (I mean simple, everyday items) without comparing 5 review sites and 2 issues of Consumers Digest. And even then sits on it for at least 6 months before deciding. I don't know how she lives that way!
no subject
Date: 2009-06-28 10:50 am (UTC)But do you ever get into that situation where you've narrowed it down to two choices, and the reviews indicate that they both have an equal balance of pros and cons and you just stare at them forever, afraid of making a regretful decision? And then you just buy something else entirely? Hahaha, oh internet shopping. I mean on expensive things though, not regular stuff.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-29 04:54 am (UTC)Off Topic
Date: 2009-08-05 08:32 pm (UTC)Re: Off Topic
Date: 2009-08-06 05:27 pm (UTC)You PAY for your phones?!?
Date: 2009-06-28 11:09 pm (UTC)Oh and the reason that the iPhone didn't do picture messaging was that Apple didn't think that anyone would want to pay to message a shrunken version of their picture when they could email it, full size, from the phone for free (internet connection is free with the iPhone over here - I assume it is for you too, right?), but I was under the impression that the new iPhone does do picture messaging. And with the new one clocking in with an impressive 32Gb, I'm surprised you didn't seriously look at it (you've got an iPod, right?). I'm the last one to be recommending iTat, but it just seems to suit you so much...
Re: You PAY for your phones?!?
Date: 2009-06-29 05:06 am (UTC)We do get free phones, if you don't mind choosing from the most basic, most boring ones. Anything fancier costs money. As does the internet (we got a deal of $40 a month for unlimited internet and text messaging). And something tells me any reform in this area is pretty low on Obama's to-do list (as it should be, with the state of everything else).
Things are different here. Different phone manufacturers are contracted to different service providers, so for instance the iPhone is AT&T -- my T-Mobile SIM card wouldn't even work in it (unless I shelled out extra for an unlocked). Conversely my G1 would be useless to an AT&T customer. It's maddening, but I guess the price of a competitive market.
Thanks to my friend
And Tery's brother Jason lost his iPhone and had to get a new one -- even as an AT&T customer it cost him over $300. I guarantee an unlocked one would be twice as much. So that's one of the main reasons I'm not considering it (plus I don't like the idea of no physical keyboard -- I love that the G1 gives me the choice of both). The Samsung Behold is a full touchscreen T-Mobile option, but again, I don't trust it. I like having a physical QWERTY.
Plus my friend charges her iPhone twice a day mainly because it's also her iPod. I don't mind having two separate units, it's not like the Nano takes up that much space (plus I'm not worried about damaging it with sweat at the gym like I would an iPhone).
So yeah, there are several things in the "cons" column against the iPhone.
Re: You PAY for your phones?!?
Date: 2009-06-29 09:52 pm (UTC)At the end of a contract, you basically start telling your provider that you're going to be taking your business elsewhere and watch the offers come rolling in. Easy.