My New Shoephone

Monday, September 25, 2006

That's right, I got a new phone!

I've been using my current phone for several years, well beyond the two year contract I signed up with. In fact, it was the first cell phone I ever had, after years of holding out and making fun of everyone else. The phone was fairly small and top of the line at the time, but now it's a little junker with a cracked screen and several broken features that never quite worked right, like web access and MMS messages.

No more. Now I have entered the future. Not only have I replaced my old phone, I've massively upgraded to a serious geekout gadgetfest. After waiting out the birthing pangs of the pda/phone's initial years, a broken microphone on my old phone finally convinced my cheap ass to upgrade to a Verizon XV6700, one of the more powerful Windows-powered smartphones out there. That and the fact that Yesi is on Verizon and we'd have unlimited minutes to talk about our favorite TV shows.

Several questions probably pop into mind for those that know me well: 1) it seems very un-Mac-like for me to get something running Windows rather than the simpler and more elegant Palm OS, doesn't it? And 2) if you're going to go the Windows route, why the bulky XV600 instead of the smashingly popular Treo 700w?

  1. Web and Flash development. Can't really get experience building mobile content without an adequate device to test on. Plus new Macs run Windows anyway, so you can always get around any compatibility issues that way. Not that I'm really worried about that - all of my critical needs that would get most people locked into the Office Mobile suite are actually served by websites like gmail, google calendar, google spreadsheets, writely, etc.
  2. A huge Sidekick-style slideout qwerty keyboard and much bigger display. Using a phone for computing-style tasks is hard enough as it is, no need to make it any harder by trying to type on microscopic keyboards and scrolling around tiny screens. Read jk's experiences switching from a Treo to an XV6700 for more on that. Also, the specs are pretty impressive, especially the processor speed - a comparison to the Treo and another phone is halfway down this XV6700 review page.

First impressions:

The keyboard is insanely fun to play with. EVDO is nice, using wifi at the local coffeeshop is even cooler but about the same bandwidth, so cool points wear off after a while. It's a nice backup plan though, since I've already had two dropped EVDO connections on the first day. Mobile web browsers have come a long way and are actually useful now. Most sites are actual HTML pages that look a lot like the desktop versions, it's not garbled WAP nonsense. The physical shape and size is not bad, it's not as big as you'd think - surprisingly, it's still pocketable. I guess my impression of these bigger phones was stuck from back when I first played with an HP iPaq back at UCSD, this giant brick of a thing that was unwieldy to say the least. Even with the XV6700 being one of the larger phones in the market, it still feels much slimmer in comparison.

The biggest takeaway is that it's just such a smile-inducing pleasure to send text messages on this thing after getting used to the torture of typing T9. I'm going to be updating my Twitter page and texting friends to the point of annoyance, I'm sure.

I showed it off tonight to my friend Diana to make her jealous and she turned it around on me instead, compared me to her sister's crackberry-addicted boyfriend. They apparently took it away from him once just to watch him jones for a hit of email. Note to self: buy a sturdy tether for when I'm around rascals.

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