wskellenger's Journal: New cellphone

I got my new cellphone (one word or two?) last week. I've had the old Siemens M55 for about two years, and I decided to see if I could get a new one.

T-Mobile is my carrier, and I was able to get a new phone at the new subscriber price. I really wanted the following in a new phone:

• Bluetooth (to talk to my Palm Tungsten)
• Bar style like my old Siemens (not a flip phone)
• Voice dialing
• Long battery life (Siemens was about 2 days)
• Quad-band GSM (world phone)
• NO CAMERA (I would love a camera phone, but unfortunately they are prohibited at almost all automotive proving grounds, which means I can't have one. Yes, security does check them.)

What I found out was that the last item made it impossible to get the first item with T-Mobile's current offerings. Every Bluetooth phone had a camera.

Secondly, getting a world phone narrowed it down to about four or five models, and the only one that was not a flip was a Samsung. Perhaps Samsung stands for quality now, but my brain has never associated the brand with anything good.

This leaves the Motorola V188, which is a new model. So what did I get on my list of wants?

• Voice dialing
• Long battery life
• Quad-band GSM
• No camera

4/6 isn't bad, but the other two (Bluetooth and a non-flip style) were kind of requirements. I'm getting used to the flip style... But coming out of the coffee shop the other day on my way to work, I snagged the phone out of my pocket and wanted to call a co-worker with hot coffee in the left hand, phone in the right. I now had to get it unflipped with one hand. The bar style shines in this respsect.

Secondly, I did have Bluetooth in an Ericsson T39 world phone that I bought on eBay, however this phone died after only a month of usage. That purchase was one of the worst I've ever made and I could write another entry about that phone alone. Regardless, Bluetooth connectivity from my Palm was very cool. Writing/sending text messages or dialing numbers from my Palm address book was a piece of cake.

I'm getting used to the Motorola menu system and am finding that I can get it set up to be very similar to the Siemens. Some things that I really grew to like about the old Siemens are notably absent, such as:

• Ability to vibe and ring at the same time. Isn't this something that most people would like? Amazes me that I can't set the phone up to do this. I've got it set to vibe, THEN ring right now, which is sort of okay for me.
• Silence the ringer with a single button. On the Siemens I just press and hold the "*" key to jump to vibrate mode, press and hold "*" again to return to ringing mode. I did figure out how to set up a shortcut on the phone to do this with two presses, so I think I'm satisfied with that.
• Text messaging keys are moved around. On the Siemens the "1" key was a space, now it's the "*" key. Punctuation is under the "1" key on the Moto where it was under "0" before. "*" is space as I mentioned, on the Siements "*" was punctuation. These changes make texting a pain in the ass! Surprised there isn't a standard for this.

There are some cool Linux --> Motorola utilites, such as moto4lin, which gives you a filesystem-like view of the phone's contents. I got it working and it's pretty cool. The V188 connects to the computer using a tiny USB port; the same cable that I use for my Rio MP3 player is employed here.

Overall, it's cool, I did get some very long battery life (five days w/out a charge is great!) and the ability to connect it to my PC and play with it -- it will play MP3 ringtones, so I can upload whatever I want. I'll be in New Zealand this June, so I'll take it with me and see if I get service there.