For about 1 year, I didn’t have a cell phone. I switched jobs a while back, and no longer needed a phone. It was a nice break to not have to worry about this extra device and the coverage inside of my house was very poor (as in NO SERVICE).
Just recently, though, I felt like things were changing. Cellular plans have come down in price, the phones have gotten better and ATT Wireless was rolling out a new GSM 800 network. So I did a little research and I purchased a Sony-Ericsson T637 through AT&T wireless in Mountain View. I will post about that experience in a a few days.
Anyways, this phone was so much better than any other phone I had ever had. The industrial design was nice, it was color, it had a camera, it was small, it’s battery life was excellent, it had a little joystick, it had q-bert, it had internet access via GPRS, and it had bluetooth. All of the features worked as advertised. I even had a ringtone of that old Styx song ‘Mr. Roboto’ on there to successfully annoy my co-workers.
What about voice? Well, yes, that worked great. This phone used ATT Wireless’s new GSM 800 network at 850 mhz as well as the GSM 1800 and GSM 1900 frequencies. That made all the difference in the world. I had coverage in all parts of the house and I didn’t drop calls. Very nice. All other GSM phones did extremely poorly in my house. Don’t even think about data like GPRS or EDGE without GSM 800!
Unfortunately, as you can tell by the tense of that previous run-on sentences, I did not keep the phone. I found it to be a bit underpowered for what I wanted in a handheld communicator. The phone only had about 2 megs of storage, and it’s Java apps were slow. I would also notice that the camera would image about 5 frames after I clicked the ‘shutter’. The showstopper was that the phone’s APIs and platform were way too underpowered for me. So, I returned this great phone and got a greater one.
Now note, I did like the phone and I would recommend it to others… but I needed more out of a phone. The new phone? Well, that is a topic for another blog post 😉