Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Why I still haven't bought a Treo smartphone

It seems like only yesterday I was going on my tirade about why I didn't get the Treo 650 Smartphone I'd been wanting to replace my dead Handspring Visor organizer. Well, it's actually been more like a year (exactly) and I'm still using my pay-as-you go Nokia Shorty from Virgin Wireless. Why keep such a limited little phone around for so long? Two reasons, price and features.

The Price: My Virgin wireless service actually costs me almost exactly what a basic wireless rate plan would cost from one of the major carriers due to my stingy usage of the phone. I have VOIP service at home and I use it as much as possible to avoid crappy cellular coverage and fees. My Nokia Shorty battery is finally starting to die, but I can get a brand new Shorty including a battery and a $20 pre-paid card from Virgin for like $39. It's a no-brainer. Same cost as Verizon or Sprint, or Cingular, but with absolutely no obligation of any rate plan. Plus, my Shorty has a built-in flashlight, a feature that alone has almost made up for the lack of other features over the past year.

Features: Compared to the Treo smartphones of today, the Nokia Shorty is a veritable showcase of um....missing features. It has no color screen, no camera, no mp3 player and almost nothing else you'd want in a fancy new phone. The important thing about the Shorty is that it functions very well as a portable phone and nothing else. It is the perfect size, has no awkward external antennas protruding anywhere and is almost indestructible. I have, on several occasions, dropped the phone on the floor of local bar and stomped on it just to prove my point. Minor scratches are the only damage. This little phone has been worth every penny.

Compare that to the best offerings from any of the carriers and you'll start to understand why I don't own a smartphone and may never own one. There is no single smartphone on the market that does everything I want in my universal device. I had been holding my breath in anticipation of the iPhone that Apple is supposedly working on, but based on the rumors going around the industry, the phone has been delayed because the cellular carriers aren't too keen on all the free features that Apple is building into their phone. Features such as being able to upload music into the phone for free if you already own the song. Cellular carreirs want to control your access to your music and want you to pay a fee for every song you put on the phone. This is fucking retarded on so many levels that you'd have to be an executive in the cellular industry to come up with it. Apparently they just don't want people to use the new features of their high-end phones. I for one, will simply carry a REAL mp3 player around with me until the cellular carriers will let me put my music on my phone FOR FREE. Period. I would urge anyone who reads this to do the same. Do not buy music from cellular carriers. Ever. They fucking suck and you do not need to be encouraging them.

So, since I'm apparently never going to get a phone that can play one of my thousands of MP3 files for free, I'm going to have to carry around an MP3 player for my music. Since I'm already carrying one extra gadget, I might as well carry a PDA around too. I can get a used Handspring Visor for like $30 on eBay, so it looks like I will keep lugging around a little bag 'o gadgets for the forseeable future. As soon as someone comes out with a phone that can double as an MP3 player with a 60GB hard drive and a personal organizer, one that isn't ass-fucked by a ridiculous rate plan (I'm looking at you Verizon), then I'll be buying one. Until then, I will continue to be a happy pay-as-you-go customer who loves his Nokia Shorty. If Virgin comes out with their own version of a smartphone that can do any or all of this stuff, then I'll probably just stay with the pay-as-you-go option forever and the major carriers can bite me. And apparently many others are figuring this out for themselves as Virgin's prepaid cellular division continues to experience excellent growth of around 20% per quarter compared to about 6-10% growth for Verizon, and Sprint's per-subscriber revenues are actually declining after factoring out the growth of their data services. Perhaps their own greed will set them on the right path, but since the music industry and movie industries are getting involved too, the outlook for smartphones and other rich-content services remains bleak for the end user. Until all these providers realize that we are moving toward full-fledged computers built into our phones and we expect to be able to use them like a real computer, the cellular phone market will continue to confuse industry executives and consumers alike.

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