Moustache

Suddenly, I get this whole "mobile is the future" thing everyone is talking about.

Cingular 8125So remember how a couple of months ago I (and the rest of the internet) was all ga-ga over the iPhone? I didn't know if I could make it until this summer when it is released. Well it turns out I couldn't, and I caved in and got a Windows Mobile phone (the Cingular 8125 to be exact). It has to be at least twice as thick and four times as heavy as the iPhone, but I AM IN LOVE. This thing is awesome. Now I understand what people are talking about when they refer to the cell phone as "the third screen" and dump gazillions of dollars into mobile startups. Here are some of my experience from my first week with my new phone:

  • I was terrified that this phone is actually running a version of Windows on it. I had visions of getting Blue Screens of Death during the middle of calls and adware. Although I did manage to completely crash the phone twice in my first night, it has been acceptably reliable since then.
  • This is very much a Windows-y phone. I can change almost anything I want, including things I probably should not be able to change on my own. This was definitely created by software developers, whereas the iPhone seems much more designer-led. For example: The LCD brightness control is only accessible on the touchscreen display. In the control panel to adjust the brightness however, you can turn the display back light completely off. If you are foolish enough to see how dark the lowest setting gets, this means that unless you squint very hard and hold the phone under an extremely powerful light you will never find the control to turn the brightness back up again. That little mistake took me about 20 minutes to correct.
  • The UI is extremely ugly. Unsurprisingly this is one of the iPhone's biggest selling points. My Cingular 8125 runs on Windows Mobile 5, which while only a year old feels like a relic from the early days of Palm. Microsoft probably had to deliver to a wide variety of hardware specs, and Windows Mobile 6 looks a bit nicer, but there is a ton of room for improvement here.
  • Installing applications took a while to figure out. This may have been exasperated by me being primarily on a Mac, but it seems to me like there are about four distinctly different ways to install a program on your phone, some of which are impossible to do without hooking it up to a Windows XP box. For Mac-using Windows Mobile phone owners, The Missing Sync is an essential. And this will probably not shock anyone, nearly every application I have tried out suffers from the same featuritis/designed by programmers problems as the OS itself.
  • I put a Nintendo emulator on it, and my productivity went through the floor. In the last week I have played probably 6 hours of Mike Tyson's Punchout. This feature alone would have been enough for me to buy the phone. This is also the feature that will likely get me fired from my job because I'm playing Excitebike in a meeting (I haven't yet, I swear!).
  • Text messages are awesome with a QWERTY keyboard. Luckily there is a character count on the SMS Creation screen because I find myself typing little essays constantly. Another feature is that Windows Mobile handles text messages just like e-mails. I didn't realize how anemic the Motorola UI was in this aspect until I started playing with the Outlook-inspired Message Center.
  • Wi-fi on phones will be the death of me. I am hardly lacking for internet access in my life. But now that my phone has wi-fi, I am finding all sorts of new reasons to hop online. It took every ounce of willpower I had not to read postsecret during church this week. I haven't even turned on the Mobile Data part of my phone yet because I have never been unable to hop on a wi-fi network when i needed connectivity. Supposedly I could run Skype on this phone, but even by my pretty lax standards that seems just a little too nerdy.
  • The multimedia capabilities are completely underrated. A year ago if I had a phone that could hold 2GB worth of media and had a giant touchscreen display I would have been giddy like a schoolgirl. But now, with all the previously mentioned awesome features, I have barely even played with them. Although to be able to give the phone an honest evaluation I just watched an episode of the Colbert Report on it. It was awesome.
  • Typing on a touch screen is not fun. At all. It takes me about 4x as long to dial a phone number using the touch screen as it would on a normal keypad. It will be interesting to see if Apple finds a way to fix this, because at least I have a pull out QWERTY keyboard when I need it.
  • There are about a million mobile apps that should be built. With all the hype in the mobile market, nothing I have seen is really more advanced than Twitter and Dodgeball. That is to say, the space is still extremely primitive. Think the internet in 1996. As more phones in the U.S. become equipped with broadband and more generous data packages this space will explode. The best mobile app I found was Yahoo Go!, although I couldn't get it to even work on my phone. I think there is just an amazing possibility to do some really groundbreaking HCI work in this area, especially when you combine things like GPS (which I plan on adding to my phone ASAP).

All in all, I am giddy about my new toy. I've even made a couple of phone calls on it! Expect more updates in the near future, especially once I figure out to blog from my new phone.

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Posted by Mark Allen on Wednesday, March 28, 2007 Comments (35)

35 Comments »

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