I gather that increasing numbers of people these days use their cell phone to tell the time, and don’t bother with a watch.
However, the watch is fighting back. Behold, the quad band GSM phone in a wristwatch, with Bluetooth (so you can pair it with a headset for phone use) and OLED display showing analog hands. Plus 1.3MP camera, kinetic battery recharge, and MP3 player.
At 13mm thick it’s still pretty bulky, but not much worse than my Casio G-Shock.
When I moved to the USA, one of the first things I did was get a cell phone. I was going to be living in a big city, rothko was working in a different part of town, we needed to coordinate things–it seemed to make sense. We went to Omnipoint, got a couple of phones, everything was good.
A few years later, Omnipoint were purchased by Voicestream. We got a phone upgrade. Still no trouble. Later still, Voicestream were purchased by T-Mobile. Another phone upgrade came and went.
Finally, we moved to Austin. I started looking for new phones, as ours were a couple of years old. The requirements were simple enough–quad band, Bluetooth for the car and for sync with the Mac, iSync support.
T-Mobile had zero quad band Bluetooth phones. None at all. On the other hand, IBM had a discount deal with Cingular, who offered some good phones. So, we were seduced to switch providers after 7 years with T-Mobile and its ancestors. This time a contract was involved. And before long, Cingular was purchased by AT&T.
Our contract finally expired last week, and we decided that on balance, we preferred T-Mobile. For starters, AT&T’s bills are utterly incomprehensible. You’ve probably read stories about iPhone users getting 200 page bills. Well, ours aren’t quite that long, but they’re just as impossible to decipher.
Then there’s the pricing. With discount, AT&T isn’t ludicrously expensive; but they really, really overcharge for SMS, web and e-mail. Plus, rothko has perpetual problems with dropped calls.
I saw a good deal at Amazon.com on the BlackBerry Curve. It meant a 2 year contract with T-Mobile, but I was willing to take that risk to get a good deal. I ordered two phones, 2 years of family plan service, 2 years of unlimited e-mail and web. I wasn’t expecting any problems.
A while later, I got an e-mail from Amazon saying that I needed to call T-Mobile to confirm my information. I did so, and was told that I needed to fax them a copy of my Social Security card, driver’s license, and a recent utility bill.
Fax? In 2007? Apparently, yes, a company that sells e-mail and Internet access doesn’t actually have e-mail itself. I scanned the requested documents, found an online fax service, and sent everything off.
A few hours later, I got another call. The woman on the other end of the line explained that I had been misinformed. What I actually needed to do was travel to the nearest T-Mobile store and have them fax in the information.
Annoying, but no big deal. I figured they were just being extra careful. So that evening, I drove to the nearest store and had them fax everything in. I took the transmission receipt home with me. The next day, I called back to check the status of my order. After a few minutes on hold, I was told that I had been misinformed yet again. A fax wasn’t enough; I actually had to go to the store and have them confirm the information in person.
By now, I was starting to get annoyed, but I decided to humor them. I drove to the store again, and explained the situation. The store called T-Mobile, who told them to fax the information. So they faxed it again, and confirmed that the fax had been sent.
An hour later I called to check on my order. After a few minutes on hold, I was told no. They were refusing my order. If I wanted service with T-Mobile I would have to pay full retail price up front for the phones, and then pre-pay for service.
So basically, all that jumping through hoops had been a total waste of my time, as they had never been going to give me contract service in the first place.
I explained that I had been a T-Mobile customer for 7 years, and could prove it. (I still have copies of old paid bills, because I’m that kind of person.) No dice.
So, I’m still with AT&T, and I’m wondering what to do next. Part of me still wants to switch, but part of me wonders if I should, given the amount of dicking around I’ve received trying to become a T-Mobile customer again.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a third option. Thanks to industry consolidation, the US only has two GSM providers. So I can’t say “Screw you, I’ll go with the good guys”, as there aren’t any good guys.
I wrote a letter to T-Mobile customer service, but I haven’t sent it yet. I don’t honestly know if I want a 2 year contract at this point. Maybe the best thing to do is to buy a couple of unlocked phones from somewhere else entirely, then go to T-Mobile and just get a couple of SIMs and sign up for service with no contract.
I’m an iPhone skeptic. While I appreciate good UI design considerably more than the average person, a good UI alone is not enough to make me accept a crippled and overpriced product.
At WWDC today, Steve Jobs has announced that the third party SDK for the iPhone is…make all your applications web applications, and access them from the Safari browser. Which means the user has to pay network bandwidth charges to run the application, and can’t make or receive any calls while it’s running. And of course, no service means your applications all stop working.
So basically, the iPhone is a closed platform, a very pretty but underpowered cellphone. It’s not a smartphone. It lacks even the capabilities of many low-end handsets offered by GSM networks, but it’s going to be sold at a premium price.
Let’s see how it compares with my current 2-year-old phone, for example:
| Feature | iPhone | My phone |
|---|---|---|
| Address book | Yes | Yes |
| Calendar | Yes | Yes |
| Sync with Mac | Yes | Yes |
| Camera | Yes | Yes |
| Web browser | Yes | Yes |
| Google maps | Yes | Yes |
| Yes | Yes | |
| Weather | Yes | Yes |
| Photos of incoming callers | Yes | Yes |
| Instant messaging | Yes | Yes |
| Play MP3, AAC audio | Yes | Yes |
| Play MP4 movie | Yes | Yes |
| Familiar telephone keypad | No | Yes |
| 3rd party applications | No | Yes |
| Java | No | Yes |
| Fits in jeans pocket | No | Yes |
| Price | $599 | $99 |
To me, that’s a hell of a tough sell.
You may point out that my tiny phone’s screen isn’t great for browsing the web, but that’s just tradeoff I made because I like a phone that’s truly pocketable. If you prefer a big screen, you can get a Blackberry or Treo for $150 or less. Right now, Cingular has refurb 8525 devices for $99.
I prefer the hybrid solution: pair a small phone with my Nokia N800, and browse the web at triple the resolution of the iPhone. You can get an N800 plus a small Bluetooth phone and you’ve still saved $200 over buying an iPhone.
In addition, most of today’s phones take SD cards for memory expansion. I can dump movies onto a 4GB SD card and stick it in the Nokia. If I need more space, I’ve got a couple of extra 1GB cards floating around. What happens when you use up all the memory in your iPhone? You’re stuck, there’s no expansion option.
If the iPhone was $99, or even $199 at the most, I might be interested. At $599, it ought to sell like the similarly-priced PlayStation 3. It’s the most overpriced Apple product since the Mac Cube. (Which I loved the design of, but didn’t buy because it was overpriced.) It’s the most overhyped since the first Newton.
Oh, I’m sure Apple will sell some. I mean, the Motorola RAZR sucked, but plenty of people had to have it because it looked so cool. But then, the RAZR wasn’t $600…
I bought a Nokia N800. It’s an Internet tablet, about the size of a large PDA or a small thin paperback book; almost exactly the same size as a Nintendo DS Lite, in fact. It runs Linux. It connects via WiFi or Bluetooth.
I bought it because I spend a lot of time reading web pages, PDFs and other electronic documents. In particular, my “killer app” was to be able to read the electronic edition of The Guardian with my morning coffee—ideally, in bed.
Yes, there are laptops. However, if you’ve ever tried to casually read the newspaper in bed using a laptop, you’ll probably agree with me that a kilo or so of hardware gets tiring on the arms, and trackpads aren’t conveniently located for use when the computer is propped up.
The N800 is the first portable device I’ve used that has a decent web browser. It’s Opera, in fact. The Guardian’s web site works on it. So do Google Mail, Flickr, Slashdot, Google Maps, and Wikipedia. While the text starts off small in order to squeeze a whole web page on the screen, it’s crisp and readable, and buttons on the top of the device make it easy to zoom in and out. For web browsing it easily beats a Palm handheld, Sony Ericsson P9xx Smartphone, Windows Mobile device, or Blackberry. (I’ve tried ‘em all.)
Note that the N800 is’s not a phone. The assumption is that you already have a mobile phone with Bluetooth; if you want to use expensive mobile data plans, you just pair your phone with the N800. This is an assumption I agree with; in general I want my mobile phone to be small enough to fit in the pocket of a pair of jeans, which precludes giving it a screen big enough to browse the web on.
Here are some other high points:
And in the interest of balance, the low points:
So the executive summary is: if you want something you can keep in your satchel and use to browse the web at the café, this is currently your best bet. If you like the idea of the iPhone but don’t fancy paying about $2k and being locked out of running your choice of applications, the N800 plus a tiny GSM phone in your pocket is a good alternative, and has more than double the pixels.
(And yes, LiveJournal works on it. If you must.)
Never let it be said that I’m not doing my bit to try and prevent a recession. This weekend it was time for a new mobile phone.
My old phone is a Bosch World 718. It’s a lovely phone; reliable, good sound, excellent build quality, adequate battery life, and works pretty much anywhere in Europe or the USA because it’s dual-band GSM. The only problem is, it’s 1996 technology, which means it’s the size and weight of a brick compared to today’s phones. Which in turn meant that I was less likely to carry it everywhere.
So, it was time for an update. I looked at the Ericsson T28w, another dual-band phone, but I must admit that I was put off by the fact that it has the highest radiation levels of any phone on the market.
As a skeptical scientific type, I know that there is zero evidence that cell phones cause cancer. In fact, there’s a scientist at MIT who regularly exposes herself to insane quantities of microwave radiation. During WW2, sailors would stand in front of the emitters on cold nights to keep warm. If EM radiation caused cancer, we’d have seen some pretty horrific cases by now.
Nevertheless…
I also wasn’t entirely convinced by the T28 flip mechanism. Especially when I saw that the one in the store had broken off. In the end I settled on a Nokia 8290—about the same size, but a quarter of the radiation, and it has a bunch of features which are nice to have, albeit not essential.
First off, the 8290 has no external antenna. This helps when keeping it in a pocket. It’s actually small enough to just stuff into the pocket of my jeans, which is amazing.
Secondly, the 8290 has IR support. You can beam phone numbers, SMS messages and other data between a PalmOS handheld and the phone. If I wanted to pay more, I could even get wireless web and e-mail access.
And finally, the 8290 has replaceable faceplates. That seems frivolous, but it means that when the front of the phone gets scratched up from being in your jeans pocket all the time, you can just get a new plastic faceplate.
I also like the fact that I can now set access control for incoming calls, and have predefined settings for different places. So I can put the phone in a pre-defined “meeting” mode, where only certain people are allowed to disturb me, and the phone vibrates without ringing. I also got a handsfree headset for free, but I haven’t tried it yet…
I’m still keeping the Bosch for when I travel to the EU. But for the 99% of the time that I’m in the USA, the Nokia’s a much better solution.
When I first read about Iridium, the global satellite-based mobile phone system, I thought it was a cool idea. When I read more about it, and discovered how the service actually worked, I knew it would never sell.
The thing about Iridium was:
The phones didn’t work indoors, or in cars, buses or trains.
The sound quality was worse than a conventional digital mobile phone.
The USA was divided into five vertical stripes or ‘zones’, and you could only have your service activated in three zones at once. If you wanted to travel from New York to LA, you had to call twice on the way and have your service modified, to keep your phone working and make sure you didn’t miss any calls.
If someone sent you a pager message or voicemail notification while you were indoors, in your car, or in the wrong zone, it was silently discarded.
The phones needed a thick 20cm antenna.
The phones were about $1000 each.
The Iridium satellites were placed in very low orbits, to work around signal strength problems. This meant that the orbits inevitably decayed, which meant that if the company had managed to stay afloat for more than a few years, it would have been faced with the problem of launching a whole new fleet of satellites, at a cost of (more) billions of dollars.
Regular land-based GSM phones are available for $99 which work in most major US cities, and all around the world. (I’ve got one. It’s great.)
So as you can see, it didn’t take genius-level intelligence to work out that Iridium would fail. The real mystery is how anyone ever thought it might be a success.
I’m starting to feel the same way about so-called 3G digital mobile phones. The 3G digital standards will supposedly allow high-speed wireless Internet access worldwide, enabling applications like mobile videophone, high quality audio, and proper web browsing while mobile.
This time, the problems are financial rather than technical. The European telecom companies went absolutely crazy last year while they were bidding for the spectrum licenses. Like trailer park women in an eBay frenzy, they kept outbidding each other for something that’s really not worth that much.
The result, as reported by the Electronic Telegraph, is pretty grim. When you take the license fees, add the cost of upgrading the network hardware, and then divide by the projected number of digital mobile phone customers, you find that upgrading to 3G will cost an average of $1000 per customer. And that’s assuming everyone wants to upgrade. What were they thinking?
The other day I was in a store, and a sales assistant asked me if I was interested in wireless web access. I explained that I already had wireless e-mail from my phone, and that I could get web access for an extra $5 a month—but that it wasn’t worth it for me. The chances of my signing up with a whole new service, like Palm’s ridiculously expensive (and metered) palm.net, are zero.
Obviously there are a few people who’d pay big bucks for 3G and/or wireless Internet; but I suspect my reaction is pretty typical of most consumers. I don’t even have DSL or cable modem—it’s available, but I don’t think it’s worth $40 a month. I’d pay about $40 a month for high-speed wireless Internet access, if it was unmetered and I could replace my existing dialup at home with it too; but at that price, they’d need to keep me as a 3G customer for about three years just to break even. So I can’t see 3G ever catching on, which is a pity.