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My cellphone is better than the DS, PSP and Gameboy combined
So this week was my birthday, so now I'm 17. Whoope! My present was a cellphone, a Motorola E815, serviced by Alltel.
It's one hell of a phone. I watch TV, listen to the Radio, take pictures, take videos, watch episodes of South Park, listen to mp3's, check email, browse the web, play awesome arcade and Atari games (Tetris, hells yeah), oh, and call people. It's fuckin' bad ass. I can't keep my hands off it.
I got a 1GB card to store movies and music on, so I've been messing with that quite a bit. And get this. When people call me, I have it set to show their picture.
That's another thing, it's got two screens. One's for showing time and telling you who's calling, and the other is for doing everything else.
I can't believe a cellphone would ever replace any of my gadgets (mp3 player, PSP, computer), and do it well. It seems like the PSP was too big and heavy and didn't try to simplify things enough.
As far as games go, it's made me very happy. I have galaga, tetris, pool, pacman, and many more games that have made my gaming experience on the PC look dull. For instance, I was finishing up Half-Life 2: Episode 1 up tonight and it bored me. It was a good game, but graphics aren't everything. And if I could, I wouldn't carry around hl2 anyway. There's something about simplification that makes things so much more enjoyable.
It's one hell of a phone. I watch TV, listen to the Radio, take pictures, take videos, watch episodes of South Park, listen to mp3's, check email, browse the web, play awesome arcade and Atari games (Tetris, hells yeah), oh, and call people. It's fuckin' bad ass. I can't keep my hands off it.
I got a 1GB card to store movies and music on, so I've been messing with that quite a bit. And get this. When people call me, I have it set to show their picture.
That's another thing, it's got two screens. One's for showing time and telling you who's calling, and the other is for doing everything else.
I can't believe a cellphone would ever replace any of my gadgets (mp3 player, PSP, computer), and do it well. It seems like the PSP was too big and heavy and didn't try to simplify things enough.
As far as games go, it's made me very happy. I have galaga, tetris, pool, pacman, and many more games that have made my gaming experience on the PC look dull. For instance, I was finishing up Half-Life 2: Episode 1 up tonight and it bored me. It was a good game, but graphics aren't everything. And if I could, I wouldn't carry around hl2 anyway. There's something about simplification that makes things so much more enjoyable.
Comments
One question, though: how is the screen size when it comes to web browsing/email? How much text can the screen display at a time?
Videos look really good too. I watched American Psycho all the way through, and it looked and sounded awesome. I converted it to 3GPP from an AVI. It's the video format it uses, and the companies who make the cellphones provide an encoder and decoder for it.
By the way, don't get the RAZR. It's a piece of shit. Who gives a rats ass about how thin it is. I've heard countless complaints about the screen falling off. Also, it's missing expandable memory and a headphone jack. Those are two very important parts of a good phone. Luckily, I have them on mine.
As far as touchscreens go, I don't care. It works just fine without one. It's easy to input text with the dial buttons anyway.
Speaking of the Q, I might get one at the end of the year when my Verizon contract runs out. The reason it is big is because it isn't just a cellphone, it's a smartphone. That means it's a phone and a palm-pilot combined. If you think your phone has features, the Q blows it away. And while it may look big, go see it at the store. It's smaller than a GameBoy Pocket. The features people are really raving about on the Q are the stereo bluetooth headphones (a2dp). Most phones just have mono bluetooth headphone support, so using them as music players sucks ass.
I'll probably talk a lot more about this topic towards the end of the year when I'm shopping and resesarching.
Most good phones, usually GSM phones, use SIM cards. A SIM card has all your account information and your phone number, it's what really counts. If your phone doesn't use SIM, it's probably a crap american phone. The way SIM is supposed to work you can buy a SIM card, and move it from one phone to the next. That way you can change phones easily without notifying your provider.
Now, some providers have deals where they give out cheap phones with plans and such. They don't want you taking the phones they sold at a discount and using them on someone else's network. So what they do is lock the phone. If nobody locked phones you could take a T-Mobile SIM card, stick it in a phone from Cingular and it would work. Someone would call your Cingular number and the phone would ring. That's what locking a phone means.
The other thing you have to worry about is crippling phones. A phone like a Palm Treo or Motorola Q has many many advanced features. If you get one of these phones from Verizon you will notice that they have disabled many of the features. Imagine if a car factory made a car with cruise control. Then the car dealer cut the wires to disable the cruise control before he sold it to you. He also won't tell you, or anyone, the secret to getting the cruise control to work again. This is crippling.
Mostly crippling is used to disable bluetooth modems. If the bluetooth modem is not disabled that means you can connect your laptop to your phone wth bluetooth, then connect the phone to the Internet. That means you can get your laptop on the Internet anywhere with cellular service. If you have an unlimited data plan, that's fantastic. The reason they cripple this is because the service providers want you to buy their unecessary PCMCIA modem cards and pay an extra fee to get laptops online.
What do you do about this? Some phones have an unlock code. It isn't easy to get the unlock code. Some phones require firmware flashes, that's dangerous. There are some services out there that will sell you shady software to unlock your phone. There are some people out there who will let you mail them your phone, they will unlock it and mail it back to you for a fee. Searching for phone unlocking on Google is like seraching for warez. You'll just run into shady sites and spammers everywhere.
What do you do about this? You shell out and buy a phone that is already unlocked. There are plenty of stores around the world with varying degrees of shadiness that sell phones which are already unlocked. All you have to do is go to the provider of your choice, buy a plan, get the SIM card and you're good to go. If you're phone doesn't use SIM cards then you have to figure out the magic secrets to make it go. It varies wildly from phone to phone and provider to provider. Good luck with that.
Besides, only cameras really lose quality when combined with phones because they have to be shrunken down. DAPs and PDAs can be combined with phones without diminishing quality. The ROKR doesn't compare to an iPod, but that's not because it can't. If they wanted to, they could easily make an mp3 playing phone that was good at both tasks. Look at the Treo. The Treo isn't worse at being a phone than any other phone. It also isn't worse at being a PDA than any other PDA. They combined the phone and PDA without diminishing the quality of either. It has problems like not being able to receive phone calls while browsing the web, but that's only because PalmOS sucks. Get the Treo 700w with Windows Mobile, and all the problems of a non multi-tasking PalmOS go away.
Rym always make the argument that he doesn't need all that stuff. He just wants a phone. Well, do you really need a phone? If you're talking about need, you don't need any of this crap. You need food, shelter and water. I'm not saying everyone in the world needs the fanciest smart-phone that comes with the entire kitchen sink. Most people should just get a normal crap phone with a crap camera. On the other hand, I strongly encourage geeky people to explore the world of smart-phones. They provide an excellent way to enhance the geek lifestyle, you just might not realize it until you get one and really start playing with it. These phones can do a lot of things once you start installing software on them. The latest smart-phones are really just slow computers with slow net connections. They can do a lot of things that your provider may not tell you about. Those are the things that will give you a reason to get a fancy phone.
I'm probably getting a new phone late this year, early next year. The Motorola Q and the HTC Excalibur(T-Mobile dash) are looking pretty good. Expect talk on GeekNights about it when it happens.
I'd love to have a tiny, powerful laptop with a cell Internet connection and a bluetooth phone. I'm not willing, however, to pay what it costs to get that. I don't need it enough to warrant the cost. I use whatever phone Sprint will give me for free. I've never owned a laptop.
PDAs and things like that aren't advanced enough, in my opinion, to bother with. IBM gave me a PDA a few years ago, which I never used for anything other than a Pokedex. What I want either doesn't exist yet or is too expensive.
Furthermore, the technology is advancing rapidly. If I buy an expensive gadget now, which doesn't do everything I want it to as well as I want it to, I'm out of luck next year when devices are twice as powerful, half as large, faster, and cheaper. The tech just isn't at the level where I care about it yet, and I'm not going to invest in something that doesn't serve my needs or desires.