The Wrong Time

[dsrtao]

My cellphone is dying. It's a Palm Treo 700P that is, erm, coming up on 3.5 years old now, which is quite a lifetime for a phone these days. Service is with Sprint, which is (a) extremely cheap -- $33/month for 500 minutes and unlimited data and text, where unlimited is defined as "we don't tell you when we think you're going overboard, but you can't shove more than a gigabyte or so a month through that thing anyway". The battery has had it, the physical jack for recharging is worn to the point where it takes 2+ minutes of fiddling in order to get a connection, and the four buttons I use the most are becoming unresponsive.

Sprint notes that I am costing them money on this plan (see price) and do not wish to renew it. The new cost for similar service will be $80/month.

Options:

Windows Mobile something.
iPorn.
Blackberry something.

Scratch all of those.

Palm Pre
Nokia N900
Android Things

The Palm Pre seems a little woogy. Not enough battery. No memory card expansion. Ringer volume is said to be low. Also, first generation device. No can buy.

The Nokia N900 is not yet available. Might it be available November 1, when T-Mobile comes out of the closet with a $50/month everything plan and also pie? Who knows. But if I can hold on 2 weeks, I might find out.

The second generation of Android devices are coming out. The top-of-the-line one, which might work very well, is the Motorola Tao. It's an awful lot like an N900 in terms of hardware. Con: Verizon is expensive, and I expect they will have an exclusive arrangement for a long time. Sprint says the Samsung Moment will be available November 1, and that's not as shiny as the Tao but might do. Faster CPU.

Anyone have thoughts?

Comments

[n2mlq.livejournal.com]

well. Anything VZ is castrated to start with, and double secret locked too, so I would tend to stay away from the Motorola Droid (the latest name).

I'm a well known advocate of both the iPhone and T-Mobile, so that's the combination I use, however, this being said, the MyTouch 3g is for my money the next best phone out there, and I may get one yet, since i am at the stage of cheap new phone for all three lines on my contract.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Maemo is on its fifth generation and mature enough to understand external bluetooth keyboards -- the HID works, unlike on iPhone or Android. The N900 is hackable by design and Nokia will permit 3rd party ROM images (all that happens is the DRM subsystem stops working). It is believed that Dataviz' Documents to Go will be available on the N900. Frankly, unless Apple pull a rabbit out of the hat before next April, it is looking more and more likely that an N900 will be my next smartphone (because I want a pocket computer that can do word processing or give me a command line interface, not just whatever tasks the minions of St. Steve of Jobs think are appropriate to a smartphone user).

[dsrtao]

You talked me into an N800, and I haven't regretted that.

The N900 isn't handled by any carrier in the US yet; as I said, T-Mobile is widely rumoured to be trying to re-invent themselves in two weeks. Those rumours include a $50/month all-you-can-eat talk/text/data plan, and the N900. If so (and assuming I can keep the Treo going that long), it's a top contender.

Bit of a brain dump

[metageek.livejournal.com]

I almost definitely want the N900. My N75 is on its last legs (it got immersed about 14 months ago), and I want something with HSDPA, (at least); once I've got that level of speed, tethering the N810 through Bluetooth will be a bottleneck. And, of course, it'd be nice to get down to one device.

There are problems, though. Firstly: the N900 doesn't do MMS. The reason is actually somewhat comprehensible: MMS requires two separate network connections (in Linux terms, two interfaces), which may have the same IP address (in Linux terms, no way). (The way MMS works is, you get an SMS with a message identifier, then you connect to the MMS server over WAP. Yes, WAP.) Come to think of it, this is probably why the iPhone took so long to support MMS, too: its Unix kernel can't cope with multiple interfaces with the same address. Since AT&T needed a software upgrade to handle iPhone MMS, I suspect Apple cheated: they redefined MMS to run over the regular IP connection.

Second: the N900's keyboard is more limited than the N810's. Three rows instead of four; a T of arrow keys instead of a D-pad; no keys for <, >, ^, %, or ~; + and - have been moved from their own keys to requiring a bucky bit. All this may be OK for phone use (though I roll my eyes at a Web browser with no ~ or %), but it'd be a serious impediment to programming. (OTOH, the faster CPU and larger storage may be worth it.)

Third: I don't know if I want to move to T-Mobile. I'd be paying the same money (under their current plans) for worse coverage. Their 3G network has a reputation for performing better than AT&T, at least when it's there; but that might be because it's underused. If they get Cool New Phones, and go for $50 unlimited, they'll get a swarm of new subscribers, and might get swamped.

So, I've looked at other devices. The iPhone is a walled garden, but there's a lot inside that garden. (Besides, I haven't written any apps for my Symbian phones, either. If I'm carrying two devices, it might be best to accept limitations on the one that's just a modem.) The real problem is that it can't tether (on AT&T) without jailbreaking it; and jailbreaking is an ongoing struggle. Oh, and there's no way for a Linux box to get files onto it.

The Pre has firstgenerationitis, and no native apps, and an App Store that's almost as closed as the iPhone's.

Android is a mixed bag. The dev environment is Java (bleah); native apps are possible, but difficult; phones can be rooted, and nobody works hard to stop you; none of the current devices has a CPU as fast as the one in the N900, Pre, and iPhone 3GS. If you root your phone, you can use it to tether over WiFi, which should eliminate the bottleneck you get with Bluetooth tethering—but nobody knows yet whether the Cool New Android Phones coming out soon will be rootable.

For me, it'll be several months before I buy anyway (probably not until May, when ITA does annual bonuses), but there's what I know right now.

Re: Bit of a brain dump

[dsrtao]

I don't care about MMS; I'm likely to not even care much about SMS -- it was temporarily important to a paging/email combo system, but I've phased that out.

Keyboards on phones are, for me, used for typing in URLs and doing very brief bits of emergency sysadmin work via SSH. It's unlikely to be more than an hour or so until I can get to a real machine with a real connection, so that's my usage scenario.

We Will See.

Re: Bit of a brain dump

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Makes sense. Unfortunately, cvirtue and I use MMS a lot; for me to use a phone that doesn't receive MMS, I'd have to be able to get her a phone and data plan to let her send email. (Also, I'd have to have a phone that can beep me if I get email from her, but not from other people.)

[polydad.livejournal.com]

I saw your contribution on Siderea's "fatherhood" thread, and added you to my friend's list. Welcome.

best,

Joel. (Also Joshua von Starkwald, now in An Tir)