A few weeks ago, my phone broke. Some key was stuck or something triggering the voice record feature to always want to activate causing the phone to lock up. This is actually the second Razr that has done is. The first one was under warranty so I got it replaced. Not the case this time. =( My girlfriend was kind enough to give me her old phone(Thank you!). It has some problems with it, but at least people can reach me. (One of the problems that you can't volume on the phone is really low for some reason. I use a bluetooth ear piece as a work around. It took a while to get use to using one.)
Anyway, I started researching what my next phone should be. I need to upgrade to something that has email capabilities. At work, we are starting to scale up IT operations and I need to be able to get system status alerts and keep in touch with the rest of the team. So, I started looking at the different options.
iPhone - An obvious candidate. It looks sleek and packs alot of features. Also with Job s stating that may Apple will open up the APIs to 3rd parties will make the phone even better. However, there are a few downsides to it. It is a first generation phone. It is going to have issues and bugs with it. Another issue is how fragile is the phone going to be? Since it is mostly screen, how is it going to react to being in my pant pocket or even my bookbag. I could image it being scratched up pretty good. Suprisingly, price isn't a major concern. Don't get me wrong, 600 dollars is high, but compared to the other phones I have been looking at, the price difference isn't that much. Also I won't need to get a replacement for my iPod by having the iPhone. BTW, If you haven't seen the iPhone ads, check me out on Apple's
site. I think the "Calamari" is the best one.
MotoQ - A lot people have the MotoQ including my boss. It is a nice phone and with my friend telling me that there is a black one, it looks like my razr I have now. The keys seems pretty big and spread out a little bit so you aren't mis-keying too much. The other thing is that the MotoQ is not available on the AT&T network. I would prefer to stay with AT&T since most of the people I can on that plan and I can take advantage of the free M2M minutes.
BlackBerry 8800/Curve - Someone showed me the 8800 about 1 month back. He got the GPS package added to his plan and was showing off how his phone was doing turn-by-turn navigation with real-time updates on our way down to Atlantic City. The car we were in had GPS navigation and the blackberry seemed update a little faster than the car navigation was. Having the GPS would be a nice feature to have. In terms of email capabilities, since Blackberry is a push technology it seems that I would get updates faster than phone needing to put a server call. The phone's downside is that it doesn't have camera built-in. Surprisingly, I use the phone-camera often. The
next latest BlackBerry model, Curve, has camera and a redesigned body. I haven't touched one yet so I need to get over to a Cingular store at some point.
So, right now those are the phones that I'm considering. I read on Scoble's
blog about a Nokia phone called N95. Don't know too much about it. I need to do a little bit of research on it.
Anyways, today I booted up my "broken" Razr today since I needed to get a grab a number of the cell. And somewhat surprisingly the phone works. It looks like the "key" got unstuck or something. I guess it fixed itself. I still need to figure out what smartphone/pda to get, just not as rushed as before. =)
