a blog by Peter Leonard
My trusty Ericsson T39 finally bit the dust the other day, searching in vain for a signal without ever finding one. Looks like its time for an upgrade, but navigating the confusing world of service plans, phones and carriers is enough to confuse even me, who's had a cell phone since high school. You are in a twisty maze of rebates, all alike.
Throw into the mix the fact I'm moving to Seattle in late August, and that I want a phone that is not SIM-locked (restricted to one carrier), and that the company with the best prices on new phones (T-Mobile {née VoiceStream}) refused to deal with me because I'm a current customer and thus not a new SSN for their quota.
I finally went ahead and ordered the Nokia 3650 through ATT Wireless -- after years of loyalty to a Swedish phone, I'm Finnished. I can't find anything in SonyEricsson's current lineup for $150 which has
I actually played around with a 3650 at NAB, when I was looking into video on cell phones.
I'm under no illusion that 90% of the features will be useful on this phone -- certainly a RealVideo player on a cell phone, at today's GPRS data rates, is a ticket to nothing other than penury -- but a bigger screen is nice for reading CNN's and the BBC's WAP sites. Now to rig up a perl script to automatically post pictures taken with the built-in camera to this blog...