Yay! Kat’s back!
But that’s not really what I want to write about. Since Kat’s back in Vancouver, she needs to get a Canadian cell phone. My RAZR is starting to slowly degrade, so I’m thinking about replacing it before it falls apart totally. So, we’re both in the market for phones.
There are two issues here: the phone and the service plan. As much as the mobile industry would like to confound those two decisions, I’m going to treat them separately.
I would appreciate any thoughts people have on how to satisfy these requirements…
Phone
For the phone, our needs are relatively modest. It should be able to… (in approximate priority order)
- make calls.
- send/receive text messages with a decent interface.
- be small and easily back-pocketable.
- sync its addressbook and calendar with a computer with open/free/common technologies. For me, that means Google Calendar (or an iCalendar file) and Linux. For Kat, it’s Apple iCal and a Mac. This is a dealbreaker for me, possibly not for Kat.
- send/receive emails in some suitably rudimentary way.
- take pictures, I suppose.
- maybe access the web, but I don’t hold out a lot of hope for mobile browsers not sucking.
- things that might be nice, but I don’t really care: speaker phone, GPS, wi-fi.
I have been playing with a phone finder, but don’t have much to report.
Motorola phones are totally out for me: the RAZR was a nice enough phone, but the software sucks hard. The browser is unusable (e.g. no way that I can find to enter a URL: I had to email a link to Google to myself so I could get there), the calendar won’t sync with anything as far as I can tell, and it generally won’t talk to anything computer-wise.
The worst example of its usability are the outside buttons. On the left of the phone, there is a rocker switch, and a single pushbutton (which you can see in this picture). The rocker switch is used to toggle ring setting/do nothing modes, and the pushbutton is used to scroll through ring settings. Let me say that again: the up/down buttons are used to toggle, and the toggle button is used to scroll. Dead to me.
Also note that the iPhone is totally out for me: the cryptographic signing of the database to eliminate any software other than iTunes is totally unacceptable and I won’t have anything to do with it, or any other Apple products as long as it’s there.
Plan
We are fairly light users and have a Vonage line at home, so these aren’t main phones. Things I would like (and I think Kat is fairly similar):
- some reasonably small number of any-time minutes per month talk. (Rogers’ web site isn’t currently functional enough for me to check my recent usage.)
- unlimited text (because there’s simply no excuse to charge money to send or receive 160 byte messages, and I don’t want to deal with any company that would do so).
- no charge for call display (providers actually have to filter out call display information to not provide it if you don’t subscribe: I’m not paying them to turn off their antifeature).
- some trivial amount of data for email reading.
- A “family plan” for the two of us is a possibility.
- Now that I’m looking at the Rogers web site for my recent account activity, I realize that a web site that didn’t suck donkey balls would be a plus.
Any suggestions on these? I will post updates below as I have useful insights to share.
June 17th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
As for phone you’ve ruled out the only half decent phone on the market 🙂
So you’re down to whatever you think looks good. Nokia’s are generally thought to fairly decent at syncing and what not – I’d say just about anything you can get from them is a safe but ugly bet.
As for Carrier sounds like you might want to look into Koodo – they’ve been raving about their unlimited text and small minute plans (at least from what I read on their Skytrain ads)
June 17th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
As far as phones go, I just went through this. I looked at lots of options, since I was due to renew my 3-year plan with Fido, and also had $49 in “Fido Dollars”. This should allow me to get a killer phone.
In the end, I went with a Nokia 6126. Actually cheaper than what I had money for (now, I guess I have Fido bucks leftover), looks more rugged than the more expensive Nokia phone (which is a big deal for me), and does all the above (no GPS or Wi-Fi, though). It does sync with Address Book and iCal on the Mac. No idea about open-source options (I don’t have BlueTooth on my linux box).
As far as plans: Good luck. I can’t think of any that won’t charge for text messages and caller-ID and not charge a large amount. I went with the Fido-to-Fido Plus. Most people I know are on Fido or Rogers (including the missus, who is on Rogers, hence the Plus), and that allows me to talk to them for “free”. These plans *used* to have free text messaging as well, but don’t anymore, so I had to get a freakin’ bundle for the voice-mail/messaging/caller-ID/whatever else.
I’ve had no issues with their service, and their website is semi-non-sucky.
Phil
June 17th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
I’ve only ever owned two phones, and one of them could barely be called a phone (see: Blackberry)
My new cel-phone, the MotoROKR (like the RAZR, but with a slide-instead-of-a-flip) fills me with hatred and anger. The software is horrendous. My phone is currently exhibiting a bug whereby if I recieve a phone call and *open* the phone, it will -instead of answering the phone- start a reboot sequence. Wrong answer, MotoROKR.
While it has ‘neat features’, like a 2-3 MP camera and a mp3 player, the camera delivers shots that are grainier than most of your 640×480 webcam pictures, and the mp3 player drains the battery faster than .
I’d much rather have a phone with useful features.. or even a phone with NO features that functions as an acceptably decent phone.
The BlackBerry was actually great, in retrospect- it’s web browser was crap, but on more than one occasion it was usable enough to read some blogs or Wikipedia when I was bored.
The e-mail and calendar functionality was quite good.
I know that newer BlackBerry Pearls might be equipped with GPS and a flash-enabled camera, so there’s always that as an option?
As for providers, well, I’ve had no problems (a few dropped calls, a decent-enough plan) with Bell, but my younger brother has a multi-part horror story that involves at least 32 hours of dealing with slow-witted customer service agents.
June 17th, 2008 at 11:55 pm
SMS is actually 140 bytes of data. “Plain” SMS text is encoded using 7-bit characters to fit into a 140 byte body, which gives you an effective 160-character limit for English text.
… and some random Greek characters.
… and the Euro symbol and generic currency symbol.
Fun!
June 18th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
From Igor (http://mobscure.com/), copied here to completeness…
I’ve read your post but still recommend the iPhone…. Our entire team is getting them, because it is an excellent testing ground for new mobile concepts. I see you have philosophical issues with Apple but there is the best open source developer community around jailbroken iPhones… This makes up for their official closed-platform policy. There is nothing like that for other handsets.
If Apple is still a no-no-no I’d recommend a recent Samsung or a Nokia N95/N96 with Rogers/Fido.
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