21st century phone
So, a couple of weeks ago, I broke *another* holster for my faithfull old Motorola t730 cell phone. This was truly a cell phone. It had no camera, no internet, I had not purchased games or navigation for it. It was on its 3rd battery, and second faceplate. The keys were finally starting to stick a little and I was frustrated about it not having an alarm option and some other shortcomings. Since I had broken 2 holsters I was down to my last one. I decided to go to best buy and re-supply. Low and behold, the waves and waves of 3g phones have filled the racks with tons of huge holsters. Little ones designed to fit my phone are obsolete (which in turn means my phone is really old...). So, off to verizon to make good on all that snail mail spam about upgrades they keep filling my recycle bin with.
I decided to buy the Blackberry curve. Since Verizon announce the new Storm touch screen blackberry, my rep was only too happy to unload a curve to me at discount. The buttons are smallish, but I handle them better than my fat fingers would handle on a touch screen. I bundled a car charger, blue tooth headset and body glove with the purchase. Body glove is great, the naked phone is too slippery for me. Car charger is meh, I already had most of what I needed to charge this from my days of using an ipod shuffle in the car. Bluetooth is totally situational. See, I would only wear the earpiece to take calls on a long drive. BUT, I'm using the mp3 player on the phone for long drives. Something about having the mini jack filled with the tape adapter to play music on the car stereo horks up the ability to actually hear through the bluetooth earbud. Sure, the music automaticaly pauses when a call comes in, but I have to unplug the stereo to take the call. For that much one handed work while driving, I might as well hold the phone to my ear and sell the bluetooth...
Camera is decent for a phone. It will be nice to have something to record the state of things at a car accident without having to rely on our digital camera, or a disposable. I still prefer using cameras to take pictures, not phones.
Calculator and memo pad are loads better than previous phone. Address book syncs up with my outlook address book. It can read pdf files and xls files, but I cannot store them on the phone. I can read them as attachments to an email, but cannot create or have them locally. Sad panda.
Internet is slow, but what the hey, its on my phone. I'll take it.
Been testing out Google maps vs Verizon VZNavigator. I hate the turn by turn directions. Phone has no sense of how making tons of lefts and rights on tiny roads to approximate a crow flies path is totally worse than sticking to a main road for a long time and making one turn onto another main road. Google can only approximate where I am within a radius of the cell tower I am connected to. Verizon uses 3 towers at a time to triangulate my position so close that I fear for my privacy. The follow me map rocks in navigator. Now if only I could set it to always show north on the top of my screen instead of rotating the map at intervals.
I put a huge 8 gb card in the phone to hold files, but if I put more than 1000 songs on it, the os won't locate all of them. So I apparently have about 1.5 gig free for pictures.
Still, this was the perfect purchase this month. I needed GPS for our cars (and this isn't tied to one car), I recently dedicated my iPod solely to my iPod enabled alarm clock, and my old phone kept trying to commit sepuku by leaping off of my belt.