Yesterday I moved one step closer to being a respectable (and happy) geek, by moving most of the way into the world of smart phones!
I've wanted a smart phone for a long time—perhaps since my ill-fated run with a Palm PDA back in college. The idea of having my calendar, contacts, to-do lists, etc. on a device that fits in my pocket so that I would always have it seems up there with flying cars to me. After my bad experience with Palm (having a device that's supposed to have all your important info stored on it, but has no persistent storage and was prone to spontaneously draining the batteries dry, was not a winning solution), the next attempt was my iPod. That was good for travel at least, but I couldn't put anything into it on the go, and the reality was that I just didn't carry it everywhere with me since I don't listen to that much music.
Then the iPhone came out, which seemed like an obvious choice, but here one of my shameful geek secrets comes out: I just don't want a smart phone badly enough to pay for it. I could probably have talked myself into the initial cost, but the data plan? I spend the majority of my time in the warm, brain-irradiating field of a WiFi network, so did I really want to pay every month for that tiny bit of extra coverage? Since I was already paying way more than my cellphone was really worth to me every month, it was a tough sell. When I started using GrandCentral (now Google Voice) for all my long distance, and realized I could easily switch to a pay-as-I-go plan, it became even tougher. $80+ dollars a month instead of about $100 a year? No thanks.
Then I got my G1 from work, and I had a ball: as long as I was on WiFi I had all the benefits of a smart phone! And since I've been drinking a lot of the Kool-Aid, the integration with all the Google services (rather than the iPhone's MobileMe, which I don't use) was perfect. The only hitch was that I thought that putting my SIM in the G1 would result in some crazy data fees on my no-data plan, so it wasn't actually my phone—bringing me back to not carrying it everywhere. It was definitely an improvement: no need to remember to sync it, access to recent email (which is conveniently where I keep my to-do lists), ability to write emails while offline and have them auto-send when I got back to WiFi, but it still wasn't always there.
Imagine then how happy I was yesterday to learn that I can disable the phone's cell-data access! Within a few minutes my crappy phone was scattered in pieces across my desk, and my G1 was showing me bars for cell coverage in addition to WiFi. Now I have phone that's a smart phone most of the time, and a PDA (with automagic wireless syncing of pretty much everything I care about) plus dumb (but not painfully bad like most cell phone OS interfaces) phone the rest of the time. So now I'm happy, and perhaps more importantly I'm camouflaged around other geeks as long as I stick close to WiFi. No more pitying looks when they realize that I still live in the ’90s of cell-phones.
One of the coolest parts was the realization that one of the only down-sides to Google Voice—not having a voicemail indicator on my phone—is even better than solved. Because of the new transcription feature, not only do I know that I have voicemail when I look at my phone, I can read it on my phone. Mmm, technology.
And all that for far, far less than 30 Altarian dollars day.
Category: Life
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