Does it vibrate?
June 15th, 2009 by joseFor the past couple of months I’ve been obsessing a little bit with my research for a new cellphone. The whole thing started after they took away my Blackberry at work. Apparently sending out 638 texts in one month “is not cool”. I didn’t want to sign up for a new 2 year contract (knowing that a lot of nice phones were coming out this summer) so I bought a non-contract Virgin Mobile phone. It was a Kyocera TNT! which actually has been awesome. I’m proud to say that I currently have a $8 monthly cellphone bill. With cheapness come sacrifices though. Every time I talk to my wife I do so in code to save minutes. I have developed an alien-like language composed of clicking noises to say just about everything. I can pretty much say “I’ll be home at 5:15pm” or “Be careful when you get home, Nina was watching Vietnam movies and booby-trapped the whole house with spears smeared with feces” in under 10 seconds. It’s pretty awesome.
Strangely enough, Chris isn’t fond of this new language so it’s time to be “normal” again and get a regular plan with more than 100 minutes a month. Originally I was going to either get a Palm Pre or a iPhone 3GS after the devices got reviewed. Sprint is the carrier my wife uses so it kinda made sense to go that route. I actually got to play with the Pre and it is very cool. The device had a few strikes against it though, smallish keyboard, very few apps and fairly crappy battery life. My brother-in-law has the device and says his battery life is great (which is good for him) but I’ve also read a bunch of people complaining that their device dies in about 6-8 hours. I really don’t want to take the risk of getting a crappy battery or becoming a slave to charging my phone.
A couple of weeks ago the iPhone 3GS was announced and it looked cool even though it had a bunch of features that I would never use like taking/editing sucky-ass-quality video of my cats. I follow a Chicago blog that constantly bashes how bad the reception is in Chicago. That kinda scared me but I still wanted to try it since I’m not porting my number over. I thought I would just try it for 3 days and return it if it didn’t have any signal at work/home. So that was the plan… until I realized you still have to pay a 10% restocking fee if you decide to get out of the contract in 3 days. That’s $60 freaking bucks. Then I learn that the iPhone is not covered under AT&T’s damage/loss/theft insurance. F_ck that, Wilbur. The last thing I need is to worry about dropping that phone and giving Mr. AT&T another $600 dollars.
So at this point I’m like to hell with this, I’m going back to the clicking noises. That is, until I found the HTC Touch Pro 2… Here’s a few of features that grabbed my attention:
- 3.6″ screen, with a resolution of 800×480. FYI an iPhone is 480×320.
- There are 3 ways to interact with the device: touch-screen, stylus and physical keyboard.
- The keyboard is FREAKING HUGE. Puts my old Blackberry to shame.
- Syncs with GMail and Google Calendar
- Google Maps with GPS/street view
- YouTube native app
- Facebook integration
- Opera Mobile 9.7 (it’s CrAZy fast)
- Word/Excel/PowerPoint
- Website push scheduler. This schedules your phone to get and cache a website at a particular time for quick viewing. I’ll see you at 4:01pm TMZ.com.
- Wifi support.
- Removable battery (1500 mAh). Suck it, iPhone.
- Unlimited laptop tethering!!@!@!
- microSD expansion slot
- Noise-canceling stereo speakerphone.
- Windows Mobile 6.5 (multi-tasking and no “App Store” limitations)
- Total Equipment Protection Plan from Sprint.
Here’s a photo of the device:
Home Screen:
Google Maps:
Opera Mobile 9.7:
Teknoreview.com Review Part 1
Teknoreview.com Review Part 2
So yeah, I like it. Knowing how things usually work I’ll probably get my Blackberry back so all this research is going down the garbage.
