{"id":1474,"date":"2003-12-11T14:02:55","date_gmt":"2003-12-11T21:02:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/8stars.org\/aa\/2003\/12\/11\/phone-phun\/"},"modified":"2003-12-11T14:02:55","modified_gmt":"2003-12-11T21:02:55","slug":"phone-phun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/2003\/12\/11\/phone-phun\/","title":{"rendered":"Phone phun"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>More on the <a href=\"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/2003\/12\/08\/and-away-we-go\/\">saga<\/a> of phone switching.<\/p>\n<p>Two days ago, I received my Belkin Bluetooth dongle. Plugged it in and my Mac instantly recognized it.\n<\/p>\n<p>Yesterday, I got the Sony Ericsson (I always forget whether to double the C or the S) T610 and Jabra headset. Reactions:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The phone has very nice industrial design. The buttons are small, but spaced so that I haven&#8217;t really had any fat-finger problems, and I really appreciate that they&#8217;re laid out <em>as a keypad<\/em>, not in the amorphous formations Nokia has favored of late. The joystick doesn&#8217;t always respond predictably to the &#8220;push in&#8221; action but is a nice idea. Screen is ok. Color screens on cellphones create more problems than they solve, but it does look pretty. Some have complained that it washes out badly in sunlight&#8211;this is a little bit of a problem, but tolerable. The phone&#8217;s overall size is a little taller than my old phone when folded, but as slim as the old phone when unfolded.<\/li>\n<li>This is my first candybar phone. The previous one was a flip phone, and the one before that was a sort of hybrid that was a candybar&#8211;or rather brick&#8211;shape with a flap over the keys (this remains my favorite phone shape). This is the first phone I&#8217;ve had where I need to worry about accidental key activation&#8211;it&#8217;s already been making calls without me realizing it. This can be prevented using the key lock feature, but another problem cannot be: touching a key activates the screen; if the keys are constantly being pressed, the screen is always on, and with a color phone, that means the battery gets run down very quickly. The key lock should really be a dedicated slider, rather than a combination of regular keypresses. Time to get some kind of holster. One odd quirk is that the numeric keys can get hooked under the faceplate&#8211;when this happens, the soft keys and joystick stop working. Very frustrating and mystifying until I noticed the wayward key.<\/li>\n<li>I was surprised that this phone doesn&#8217;t auto-discover the time.<\/li>\n<li>As you can see, the camera on the phone takes amazingly shitty pictures. And that picture was taken in &#8220;high-quality&#8221; mode.<br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/content\/t610sample.jpg\" alt=\"sample photo from phone, depicting wacky Chinese space-babies\" height=\"352\" width=\"288\" border=\"0\" hspace=\"0\" vspace=\"0\" \/>\n<\/li>\n<li>Bluetooth is a hoot. I love it. It&#8217;s a little fussy getting two devices to recognize one another, but from a security standpoint, that&#8217;s as it should be. Moving all my contacts from my address book on my Mac to the phone proceeded smoothly&#8211;everything is properly tagged, though I would have preferred that the &#8220;company&#8221; field be ignored. I suppose there must be a way to hack that&#8230; Apart from contacts, files can be moved back and forth between phone and computer via a little file browser. This is OK, but really, the phone should appear on my desktop like just another device. Using the <a href=\"http:\/\/homepage.mac.com\/jonassalling\/Shareware\/Clicker\/index.html\">Salling Clicker<\/a> is great fun, in an incredibly nerdy way.<\/li>\n<li>After following <a href=\"http:\/\/homepage.mac.com\/jrc\/contrib\/tzones\/\">these very helpful instructions<\/a>, I succeeded in connecting my Mac to the Internet via the phone. Slow, but usable. This is pretty nifty. Some bandwidth tests: I found a <a href=\"\/a\/.portel.it\/speed.asp\" title=\"must be used inside a WAP browser\">bandwidth-testing WAP page<\/a> that works in the phone&#8217;s WAP browser: a pathetic 1.43 Kbps. (I have actually owned 300-baud and 2400-bps modems. Funny how these things come around.) Using the phone as a modem, and loading the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.2wire.com\/meter\/bm.html\">2wire bandwidth page<\/a>, I get a more respectable 31.4 Kbps. By way of comparison, that page shows my DSL connection as yielding 1596.2 Kbps. Incidentally, this is much higher than DSL&#8217;s nominal 384 Kbps, but roughly in line with similar tests. The more informative <a href=\"http:\/\/dfw.speakeasy.net\/\">Speakeasy tests<\/a> show the following<br \/>\n<table>\n<tr>\n<th>&nbsp;<\/th>\n<th>GPRS<\/th>\n<th>DSL<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<th>Up<\/th>\n<td>9 Kbps<\/td>\n<td>214 Kbps<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<th>Down<\/th>\n<td>26 Kbps<\/td>\n<td>1200 Kbps<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/li>\n<li>The phone&#8217;s voice dialing works just well enough to be frustrating.<\/li>\n<li>Sound quality seems OK. I can&#8217;t really comment on reception: there&#8217;s a T-mobile tower within rock-throwing distance of my home, so I always get 4 bars here, but at Gwen&#8217;s, I rarely get even two bars, as her neighborhood is poorly served by T-mobile (you hear that, guys?).<\/li>\n<li>My speech coming through the Jabra headset sounds poor, but incoming sound is fine. The headset doesn&#8217;t feel very secure on my head, and apparently will not pair with my Mac, but it works. The phone comes with a wired headset that&#8217;s also OK.<\/li>\n<li>The phone has a huge array of bells and whistles&#8211;both literally and figuratively. There are scads of annoying ringtones, and if you don&#8217;t like those, you can import more, or even compose them on a little in-phone music sequencer. No kidding: it has a four-track display (drums, guitar, keyboard, horns) with 32 canned snippets for each; you lay down one snippet per measure for each, and keep building up measures until you&#8217;ve got a song. I&#8217;m pretty sure Moby has traded in his studio for this phone.<\/li>\n<li>Apart from that, this phone is complicated enough that you really need the manual. I couldn&#8217;t figure out how to put the phone into vibrate mode without navigating through four layers of menus until I found out I had to set one setting and then I could hold down the C key whenever I wanted to go into vibrate mode. The phone is also set up to encourage you to use its Internet connectivity more than you might expect&#8211;it has a dedicated Internet button on the side, and several menu options put Internet-based content higher up than content inside the phone. This strikes me as a bit cheesy, but I can live with it.<\/li>\n<li>One interesting feature for managing the complexity of this phone is a feature called &#8220;profiles&#8221; (there&#8217;s a similar feature on the Mac called &#8220;Location,&#8221; which would obviously be a problematic name if applied to a mobile phone). Profiles are a group of settings for use in different situations&#8211;at home, in your car, walking around, at the office, etc. Switching profiles changes a bunch of profiles all at once. Good idea, poor execution. How?\n<ul>\n<li>The phone comes with several canned profiles; to change one, you select the profile as your working profile, and then edit everything. This makes it harder to reuse your existing settings and modify them&#8211;much better would be an option to save the current settings as new profile. <\/li>\n<li>Although many features can be subsumed under a profile, there are some that cannot&#8211;for example, the key lock, which is handy when out and about, but useless at home.<\/li>\n<li>Profile switching is mostly a manual affair. The phone does come with a headset, and it automatically switches to a handsfree profile when the headset is plugged in (but apparently not with the Bluetooth headset), so clearly there&#8217;s some ability to switch automatically. This approach should be extended: I&#8217;d like the phone to go into &#8220;at home&#8221; mode when it is within reach of my computer (as discoverable through Bluetooth), or perhaps when plugged in. This idea could be taken a step further by placing (or discovering) &#8220;bluetooth buttons&#8221; at other locations one regularly visits, so I could have one in my car, one at my coffee shop, etc. A bluetooth button needn&#8217;t be more than a transponder that identifies itself with a name and perhaps a GPS position.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>My old number has not been ported to the new phone yet, but I have initiated the process. I wound up speaking with four different operators yesterday, each of whom told me I needed to talk to a different department (except for the last one), and each of whom encouraged me to bring my phone and an old Sprint bill in to a local T-mobile office in person (including the last one, but I insisted on doing it over the phone, so she relented). By the way, &#8220;port&#8221; seems to be the magic word&#8211;anyone who is transferring service from one carrier to another will save a couple minutes by using that word rather than &#8220;transfer,&#8221; etc. But the new phone does work, and is providing me with much amusement.<\/p>\n<p>So, what would make the phone better? Better reception. A camera that&#8217;s actually worth using. A memory-card slot. Perhaps an MP3 player (though that would probably be politically unpopular at Sony). A slider to control key-locking, and making ring volume and silent ring part of the volume controls (why they are not is a mystery). The UI could do with a few tweaks.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll update this entry as news develops.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Getting acquainted with the T610<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1474\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/8stars.org\/a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}