Tag Archives: phone

Jan 24

Phone envy

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In the past 24 hours, I’ve heard about two friends using Droid cell phones — one posted to her Facebook account, and the other’s husband was telling me about it this morning at church.

Right now, I’m watching and listening to Leo Laporte’s weekly This Week In Tech livestream, and Leo is talking about the fact that he’s completely switched from his iPhone to his Google Nexus, with no regrets.

I will soon have to make a decision about my cell phone. If I stay with AT&T, I can get a new cell phone the middle of next month; if I decide to take my business elsewhere, I will have to wait until my contract actually runs out in June.

I have a grudge against AT&T because I pay the same $30 per month for my data plan as someone in Murfreesboro or Nashville, even though they get 3G data service and I only get Edge service here in Shelbyville. But my grandfathered-in calling plan with AT&T is pretty cheap, and if I were to take my business elsewhere I would probably end up paying more each month in total.

I’m scared that my tax refund will not be as large as normal this year, because I’ll end up having to pay the tax on some honoraria I got from lay speaking in 2009 added to the (relatively-small) income from the novel. So I am probably going to end up looking at a “free” phone. There are some cheap touch-screen phones without PDA or application capabilities, but the really nice touch-screen smart phones are probably more than I need to spend right this moment. And I have to have PDA capabilities (that is, I need to synch my calendar and contacts between my computer and my phone). I also want a phone that works on international frequencies, which limits my choices even further, although the world phones seem to be more common now than in the past.

I may end up getting something in the same form factor as my Blackjack II.

I’ll take a look once we get to mid-February and see what AT&T is offering.

Jun 17

Problem-solving

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Well, the reason you didn’t hear much out of me last night is that I spent hours — literally — setting up my new smartphone. Here is the capsule version:

  • Because I don’t have MS Office, I don’t have MS Outlook. And Windows Mobile devices are set up to synch with Outlook. Luckily, I had found a way to use the freeware program FinchSync to synch with the Mozilla Thunderbird address book and the Mozilla Sunbird calendar. I had to install and set up Sunbird, install and set up FinchSync on both the phone and my computer, and clean out my long-unused Thunderbird address book (I now channel all of my personal e-mail accounts through GMail and work with them online) so that I could import up-to-date addresses from Palm Desktop.
  • I got FinchSync running, but I had some other minor problem with the phone and went to the AT&T web site to try to find the answer. The very first thing I should have checked after bringing the phone home was for a firmware upgrade. There was, in fact, a firmware upgrade, which also included an upgrade of Windows Mobile from version 5 to version 6. So I did that, which was time-consuming and which erased every modification I’d made to the handset up to that point.
  • I re-installed FinchSync and the GMail Java applet, both of which had been deleted by the firmware upgrade. When I went to re-sync the phone, I discovered that the new version of Windows Mobile on the phone wanted a new version of ActiveSync on my PC, so I had to find, download and set that up.
  • The export of address data from Palm Desktop into Thunderbird went relatively well, but there’s a “display name” category in Thunderbird for which there was no equivalent in Palm — and that’s the category that shows up first when the contacts appear on the phone. So I had to go in and manually create a “display name” for each of my 150 or so contacts. I also had to manually enter my upcoming calendar items into Sunbird (which I really like, BTW).
  • There was also the normal stuff like warranty registration and just figuring out how to use the thing. It took me a good 15-20 minutes just to try to figure out how to change the ringer volume.

It sounds like a lot of trouble, and it was, but it was also sort of fun — and I think I’m going to be very happy with the Blackjack.

Jun 14

Waiting for Blackjack

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Well, I answered my own question online and I have ordered my new Blackjack. Yes, I know there’s a more-advanced Blackjack II, but with the mission trip coming up I didn’t want to spend the $199 out-of-pocket cost, even though $100 of it would have been rebated eventually. The original Blackjack was free with a two-year contract extension.

They promise delivery in two business days, so I’m assuming the phone will get shipped Monday and I’ll have it Wednesday at the latest.

Between now and then, I’m going to go through the contacts on my Palm and weed out ones that I’m not sure are still accurate or where there’s little chance I’ll ever need the information again.

I’ve already downloaded the instruction manual so I can see what all it can do!

UPDATE: AT&T is now showing that the phone has been shipped, even though today is Saturday. Woo hoo!