FluxHQ - Rambings of Beings from a Parallel Universe

Everybody and their grandmother is looking to cut costs these days and one of the first stops they make in that process is their telephone bill. I’ve been one of the “earlier” adopters of low cost telephony solutions as they trickled into the US market over the years and yet, I still find myself looking for the utopian device with a utopian plan. What I’ve found out should come as no surprise to anyone, perfection in this world is non-existent. But if you think about it, with the way things stand in the US telephony market today, there has to be a way to make this happen, and that’s why I set out on my “quest”, tired of teeny bopper types and their flash, my prerogative was productivity and low cost.

So my journey began with the iPhone. After listening to Señor Jobs in his keynote I began to think that this quest of mine would be pretty meaningless and rather short. But unfortunately for me that wasn’t the case. The commercial availability of the iPhone brought with it a major problem, for me. AT&T. Not my top choice for carrier and definitely not the carrier with the most cost effective plans. Why Apple chose them over, T-Mobile for instance, puzzles me. I figured, well for the utopian device I would be willing to sacrifice the carrier choice part. That was not to be either. Apple did not allow third party apps on their phone and I just couldn’t get over typing on a touch screen interface. The rest of the offering though is stellar, the web browser, mapping, music player, tight software integration and of course all the gimmicks, including my favorite, the pinch zoom. So since the application offerings are slim and the fact that it wouldn’t work on a carrier of my choosing, I decided I was going to pass on the iPhone and wait for iteration 2 or 3 of the product to maybe find that utopian phone of mine.

Moving on, the rest of the offerings could now be classified as Windows Mobile devices, Symbian devices, Palms or Blackberries. I was skeptical about running windows on my mobile device, when I did not trust windows on my computer. Nonetheless, I persevered and gave it a shot. The beginning wasn’t too pleasant, and after a few lock-ups I started using the device. The user interface is a little too nested and finding something turns out to be a pretty tedious task. The other issue I had with WM6 was shoddy power management on the software end. Then there’s the usual windows problems, memory leaks, sudden crashes and suspect memory intensive applications. The positive side of this is that the platform does have a ton of applications written for it, including skype, MS Office documents can be created as well as read and there are quite a few nifty devices running this OS. The bad outweighs the good here so this were a no go.

The Symbian OS started out really promising, people raved about it’s stability as an OS, it’s long feature list and it’s intuitive user interface. The one major flaw of Symbian is that it is designed with smartphones in mind and does provide a solid foundation for them, but it does not offer much for a general computing device. Since I wasn’t looking for a clamshell that could do email and browse the internet, this wasn’t meant to be either. Additionally the device choices are rather slim here in the US.

Palm was one of the pioneers in this space, but gross mismanagement and piss poor product development have created a laggard in this space. Garnet felt slow and clunky in addition to the fact that multi-tasking is a chore and brings the machine almost to it’s, well, knees. The Palm device choices are also not very aesthetically appealing and leaves much to be desired. Chalk up a major disappointment here.

Well, that left me with the Blackberry line from Research In Motion. I was pleasantly surprised with what I found. On the software side, though the OS is a bit flaky, the applications are solid and fast. The push email feature is speedy and very functional, the applications work really well with the device and it’s physical limitations. Multi-tasking, call quality and battery life were all above acceptable standards. The only thing that left a little to be desired was the internet browser, the native browser was ho-hum and Opera on the Blackberry offered rich text internet browsing but that still does not hold a candle to Safari on the iPhone. The included mapping application is good, though you can download Google Maps for the device along with a slew of other Google Applications. On the hardware end, the 8820 and the 8320 impressed me the most, the latter with GPS. They are also UMA capable phones which work with T-Mobile’s Hotspot @ home service. Apart from that they are quad band phones with WiFi, big screens, very nice keyboards and great styling. It’s easy to see why users get addicted to their Blackberries, hence the name ‘Crackberry’, but despite the sounds of it, it’s not the device’s fault that it’s good at what it does, users need to moderate and set limits for their usage, if they find it to be addictive.

So the choice was made, and since I am a big fan of T-Mobile and their cost effective yet very functional calling plans with data & blackberry access, it is the Blackberry for now. The 8820 if you’ve got a few bills to get an unlocked phone or an almost free 8320 from T-mobile.

The quest though hasn’t ended, the perfect device is ever so close, now if someone would just get it together and make one. The other thing I would like to see happen more is VoIP on mobile phones, and I don’t mean a service like jajah or eko.

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