A Tribute to the Best Phone I've Ever Owned

This post comes at a time when I just learned that I will be getting the T-Mobile/HTC/Google G1 Android phone (enough keywords?) after all. A nice call to T-Mobile and they upgraded my upgrade to the full upgrade. And even better yet, it will be delivered on my birthday!

So before this information becomes obsolete, I wanted to pay tribute to my lone (cellular) companion these past months, the Nokia 1208.

This is close to actual size... on my monitor anyway.

Just look at that phone for a minute. It's such a mid-90's style. And you don't even see the UI there, but believe me, this phone rivals the Jitterbug for size of on-screen font. I bought this phone when my Samsung t629 died and I refused to pay more than $30 for a phone (I got this for $29.99 plus tax, so it's a wash). I'm going to put this next line in its own paragraph to highlight its importance.

This is the best phone I have ever owned:

• It's better than my first phone (Samsung SPH-A400) because it reliably sends and receives calls.
• It's better than my second phone (Sanyo SCP-700) because it's about half the size.
• It's better than my third phone (Sidekick II) because it's not the size of a brick. Also, it was roughly 10 times cheaper.
• It's better than my fourth phone (Samsung t629) because it doesn't break when I look at it wrong.

Let's talk about that last point. The t629 was a very fragile phone. The slider got sticky pretty quickly, and I had to stop the spring from sliding it because it was too fast and would make lots of rattling noises. Too little too late, as you can see what happened.

On the flip side, I have literally used the Nokia 1208 as a drumstick; At the latest Tufts football game, the Pep Band (which I direct) needed an additional percussionist for a particular song. We needed a cowbell player for Low Rider. So I grabbed the cowbell and asked Keith for a drumstick. He didn't have one; none of the drummers had extras. So I reached into my pockets, found my phone, tested it, and then wailed away. I probably played 15 different full-length songs with cowbell and phone. (Just to be clear, this was a musical-quality cowbell, not the crap you see people dingle at sporting events... no offense Rays fans, I love you guys!) And the phone works great!

So it's indestructible. That's awesome. The other awesome feature: a flashlight.

Yes, a flashlight.

Why every phone doesn't have one, I will never know. The Nokia 1208 has a $0.05 LED on the top of it that is bright enough to see keyholes, navigate over sleeping cats, and probably flag down help on the side of a night road. I mean, come on! How obvious is that?!

I highly recommend this phone to anyone who A) doesn't need Internet and B) wants a reliable, indestructible, and cheap phone. I'll sure be keeping mine as a backup.

UPDATE: T-Mobile has the phone on sale for $19.99 with a $25 refill card included. Hot!

The Coolest Phone Ever

No matter how much I hate Google, I can't wait to get my hands on the first Android phone, the HTC Dream. Presales start September 17th (though I will like unable to participate, as Boston is not getting 3G service from T-Mobile right away) for a release date of October 13th. I just can't wait! I haven't been this excited about technology since, well, probably my DS.

A Eulogy For A Phone

All good things must come to an end. I've been using a Samsung T629 cell phone for about a year now, when all of a sudden this happened:

Through the looking glass.
A power cycle solved the problem for about an hour, then it reinverted. I just worked with the weird phone until I shut it off for the movie theater. Now it will not power up at all.

It is truly a sad day for all phone-kind.

What really sucks is that both Targets I've been to have been sold out of T-Mobile prepaid phones. What the crap man!

Why I Miss My Sidekick

I had a T-Mobile Sidekick II for about 18 months before I destroyed the LCD screen. Many things about it were really annoying, like its huge size and incessant alert windows not dismissable by the "end call" button. But it definitely aced one thing: sound management.

Most people have some idea of how they want their cell to make sounds, but these ideas vary. For example, I just had a conversation with a coworker that went like this:

Matt: I wish my phone had an option to silence all sounds.
Ed: Mine has that, but I wish it wouldn't silence alarms.
Matt: Then it wouldn't be all sounds.

Enter the Sidekick's sound profiles. The Sidekick has something like six default sound profiles: All off, buzz, low, medium, high, maximum. Ok, great, but what if I want incoming calls to ring but text messages to vibrate? You can go into the profiles and edit the volumes for all types of sounds. Want everything but new voicemail to make sounds? Go right ahead. The Sidekick also allows you to add or remove profiles and even to order them (since you usually select them with the volume buttons).

But wait, there's more! You can tell the Sidekick to automatically use certain profiles at certain times of day. The designers clearly had working people in mind when they added the options for "weekend only" rules. So after about 15 minutes of customization, I never had to worry about the Sidekick's sounds again!

As much as I love my new phone (Samsung t629, a sexy little number), I have toggle vibrate twice a day. Anything that I have to do repeatedly in software should be automated.