Cloudy Thinking

If you’re regular Cloudy Thinking reader, you know I’ve been struggling to find my Next Great Phone/PDA. Treo? Samsung i730? Motorola Q? HP 65xx or 67xx? Almost every week the Gadget porn sites (Engadget, Gizmodo, and a dozen others) reveal Yet Another Sexy Smart Phone.

I have been hanging on by a thread. Several times I’ve told you I use a simple Kyocera 414 candy bar phone. It has very basic features with so-so battery life, but excellent voice dialing, and a decent though uninspired user interface.

The 414 is nothing special, but when I bought it 15 months ago my selection criteria was simply “what’s cheap but useable that will last me 6-12 months until a GREAT phone comes out?” So the Kyocera 414 became my “daily driver.” But it grew on me. At first I figured I’d use it for such a short period I did not even invest in a car charger. What a dreamer!

Two days ago my phone finally caught a nasty cold. People would call me, and I could just barely hear them. I was sure I’d accidentally screwed up the settings, so I waited a couple of days and fiddled and even did a hard reset. Today I realized, “It’s time to replace this sick puppy.”

Since I am NOT yet satisfied with any of the various smart phones available, I asked my IT shop if they had a used phone I could borrow for a few months. They did, but none were Verizon phones. I am a certified Verizon partisan who is not interested (I think…) in switching wireless carriers.

So this evening I went to the Verizon store, figuring I’d just suck it up and upgrade to a Motorola E815 (admittedly a great little flip phone with lots of goodies), then find some way to pawn it off on someone else in say six months when my Smart Phone ship comes in.

At the Verizon store I headed over to the service desk, again hoping the guy would say, “oh, you did XYZ (you IDIOT), here let me fix it.” No dice. We made a test call, he couldn’t hear anything on my phone, and at the other end the sound quality was gruesome.

OK, now I faced a decisions: should I shell out the money for the E815? Nope. Although my phone was not in warranty, Verizon/Kyocera offered to replace it for a measly $50. In about 7 nanoseconds I said, “Here’s my Visa card.”

They sucked the phone numbers out of my sick Kyocera, and injected them into the replacement. It turns out I got a new Kyocera 414 as my replacement. How cool is that?

Well, it SUCKS. Now I have a phone that will easily last me another 15+ months. It’s simple, unassuming, not sexy, not smart, and not stylish. (It reminds me of me….)

But I can dial the Kyocera 414 with one hand while driving 70 miles per hour. It has decent voice dialing, and suvcessfully makes and receives calls.

What’s not to like?

Besides, (and the details will wait for a future episode) I still love my Palm Tungsten C . It has a better screen than any smart sexy new phone/PDA hybrid. It syncs with my Oracle Corporate Time. It syncs with my simple but usable Palm desktop. It has a great keyboard. The T-C has WiFi I never use, and fabulous batter life.

Best of all, the Tungsten C is MINE. I paid for it two years ago, and it still works as well as it ever did.

So explain to me why I need to jam a PDA and a cell phone together then tolerate a device that’s too big to slip comfortably into my pocket, with a screen too small and for my un-young eyes, so-so battery life, that has substantially llower resolution (and slower processor and no SD card) than my Tungsten C?

Can you spell “compromise?”

I proudly remain in the two-device camp: a cheap little usable candy bar phone and a decent size (admittedly a little portly) Tungsten C PDA.

As Martin Luther King said in a completely different context, “Free at last.”

In my case, I am free of all that (self-induced) stress of worrying about where and when I’ll find the perfect smart phone/PDA.

I’ll admit:should Motorola one day, out of the blue, ship me an evaluation Moto Q I’ll try it. I also know two satisfied Samsung i730 users, and a bunch of semi-satisfied Treo 600 or 650 users. (But beware, I sur erun into a lot of people who like the Treo but mention frequent lock-ups. That i snot hwre I want to invest $400 of my money!) Maybe the new Treo 700 model with Microsoft software will be more stable? Who knows.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 28th, 2005 at 10:21 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.