| I've been doing more research on cellular data plans. A friend bought the Sony Ericsson T616 for the AT&T network, and the plans are very confusing. And expensive. The phone, which I've mentioned before, is beautiful. The camera is okay, but not quite as good as hoped. I still recommend looking at this phone (for non text use especially,) but I simply can't recommend AT&T for mobile data usage. Sprint seems like the way to go for data. T-Mobile, which I have been using, is okay too. At least they have an all you can eat flat rate like Sprint. But Sprint has much faster data speeds. And a much larger coverage area. The downside is that Sprint uses CDMA, not GSM, so there is no chance of taking your Sprint phone outside the country and having it work (well, maybe Iraq, but don't get me started on that boondoogle.) But the reality is that you wouldn't want to roam in Europe with your U.S. based GSM phone plan anyway because the rates would be orders of magnitude higher than just picking up a pre paid GSM phone while you are over there and tossing it when you are done. The other interesting thing I've learned is that incoming phone calls don't come through when your phone is sending or receiving data. This explains why so many calls go right into my voice mail without ringing. I can't believe I never realized why this was happening. But this seems true across carriers and technology, so what are you going to do? Email is the other big differentiator. It can be either push or pull. The blackberry and the hiptop (which is the T-Mobile sidekick) both have push email. This means you don't check for new messages, they are automatically pushed right to your device which notifies you *immediately* when a new message has arrived. Pull email is like what you have on your computer. You have to check and see if there is something new. Sure, software lets you set up automatic checking (polling,) so maybe you don't actually have to check yourself, but it is still pull, there is still a polling interval, and on some mobile services the minimum time between polls is quite large. Obviously push is what you want. But none of the phone carriers have this (again, excepting the blackberry and hiptop, which are phones, but have their roots in the two-way market.) As I understand it some people have gotten around this by using SMS as a new email notification system, but I'm a little fuzzy on the details of such a set up (seems like it might work though.) This is definitely an area I will be investigating, as I have gotten quite spoiled by the excellent email on the sidekick. In any case, I think I am going with Sprint. Rumors are putting the Handspring Treo 600 on sale in NYC on either the 5th, 6th, or 7th of October. Here's a flash demo by the European carrier Orange (so it shows the GSM version of the Treo 600 which is almost identical to the CDMA version I want.) It is an almost perfect device for me. Biggest complaint? No bluetooth. It does have an SD expansion slot, and there are SD bluetooth cards - but it's a Palm OS 5 device, and there are no drivers for bluetooth SD cards for OS 5! I had thought this was just a matter of time, but apparently Palm has said they have no plans to develop the drivers. Opinions differ on how difficult it would be to write the drivers, but it seems clear, at least, that it's not particularly easy. Hagiwara says they are developing such drivers, but apparently they have been saying this for some time without showing anything. Charges of vaporware are rather strong (you'd be surprised how passionate people are about such things.) So possibly the Treo 600 will never have bluetooth. Why would I want bluetooth? (Bluetooth is a short range, low power, wireless technology.) For one thing it means that my contacts (and calendar, etc...) are always synced between my phone and my computer. And this syncing happens in the background whenever my phone is in range of my computer. I don't have to put it in a cradle. I don't even have to take the phone out of my bag or pocket. That's pretty cool. But it gets even better. Because I run Mac OS X, a bluetooth wireless device can completely control any program (well, any applescriptable program, but that's basically every program.) So my phone, camera, PDA, mobile email device also becomes an uber remote for my computer. And since my computer is at the heart of my audio/video setup, this is quite cool. In fact, a remote is about the only thing I was missing. But back to the complaints - I'd also like the camera to be higher resolution. It does take 640 x 480 pictures, which is as good as it gets right now in the U.S. camera phone market, but I know that 1 megapixel camera phones are right around the corner. Still, these pictures will be good for the web, and you can't really do better at the moment. I guess the question is how long does a moment last? Into the first quarter of next year I'd say. At least. |
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