I have to make a quick write-up praising my new cell phone – the Motorola Q. I swtiched from Verizon to Sprint after I was able to get out of my Verizon contract without paying the penalty (apparently not getting service at your house for 2 hours with no new towers in the foreseeable future was enough). Becky’s biggest complaint about my previous phone, the Samsung i730 SmartPhone (which incidentally I hope to sell on eBay, so I shouldn’t trash too much), is that while it may be Smart, it was lousy at being a phone. It was much better at surfing the Internet that taking and receiving calls. I think my poor service had a lot to do with that, but I would frequently miss a call and then four hours to 2 days later see that I had a voicemail. Making calls on it was a challenge because it wasn’t clear where to talk into. It also had a stylus (pen), which just isn’t that easy when you’re in the car or doing anything that requires less than 2 hands.
Here’s my pros and cons list thus far:
PROS
1) I can make clear calls – it’s easy to speak into and hear the other person
2) I can actually take calls inside my house. Even when I drive to my parents, the signal strength is good. It’s supposed to have service in Becky’s hometown as well
3) Having a camera is great – I uploaded all the pictures I took over the weekend to my site and while the quality isn’t great, it allows me to capture pictures I wouldn’t have otherwise gotten. Now I have the chance to make up for the fact we forget our camera everytime we go anywhere.
4) It’s light – I can drop it into my pants pocket and actually forget it’s there
5) It was free – I didn’t have to pay a dime for it through a deal I got at work. You can’t beat that.
CONS (some of these things I may be able to overcome once/if I ever read the manual)
1) The battery seems fairly weak, but with a mini-USB interface I should be able to plug it into my computer, so that’s a bonus
2) I can’t find the setting to make it ring more than 2 times – I’ll have to turn into Quick Draw McGraw to answer a call I’m not expecting
3) I have to unlock it every time I use it. I’m sure that’s great if I ever lose it, but it’s going to be annoying to have to do that forever.
I ordered a 2 GB Mini-SD card so I can store all my music on there to make it my MP3 player. I’m also getting a Bluetooth headset so I can be completely geeky, but hopefully have an easier time of listening to the music or making calls in the car. I promise not to become one of those guys who has his Bluetooth headset in all the time. You never know if they’re actually talking to you in person or not – I always assume they’re on the phone.
Hopefully we all can look forward to more spontaneous pictures now that I have the Q. At least you know that if you call me now and I don’t pick up, I’m either slow or ignoring you. Before it was usually a problem with my phone (although Becky never believed it).