Steve Reads

My cell phone — an LG, the cheapest I could find when I bought it from the Verizon store [1] — is on its last legs. Actually, it’s been on its last legs for a while. I think it’s on its last toe by now. So now I’m searching for a new cell phone. My ideal cell phone is like so:

• Contains a nice camera, and lets me treat the photos as JPEGs — rather than Verizon’s approach on my current crappy cell phone: I can’t get the photos off the phone, and I can’t even send them to a regular email address.
• Lets me send email through my chosen provider. In my case this means through an IMAP server. Bonus points if it can do something awesome like execute a remote ssh command whenever I want to do IMAP.
• Lets me get my data onto and off of it with no difficulty. E.g., I don’t need to go to a Verizon store to transfer my address book.
• Can receive MP3s via Bluetooth and USB, and can play them at reasonable quality.
• Lets me put whatever apps I want on it, including Skype. SSH is rather important here.
• Has a nice interface. If I do ssh, it needs an Escape key and so forth.
• Does WiFi.
• Can run Linux, even if it requires me to jump through some hoops. Bonus points if it runs Linux natively.

That will do for now. This is a pipe dream, though: as far as I can tell, no phone approaches this.

Of course the iPhone appears to be the best mobile device out there. People seem to love their BlackBerries. I’ve heard good things about Treos.

The Nokia 810 is intriguing to me. The trouble is that it does WiFi but not cell. To use it as a cell, you have to have another cell running Bluetooth nearby. If my experience with friends who have Bluetooth headphones is any indication, the sound quality will be wretched.

My only hope is that the Googlephone will save us. Essentially what I want is a small Linux box that’s specialized for voice. If it runs Skype at cell quality, I’m all for it.

But in the meantime, I really do need a phone. So I went on eBay and bought a Treo 650 for $64 including shipping. It’s one or two generations back, but it should do as a stopgap.

Verizon charges $45 per month for unlimited data. That would be on top of the $10 per month I pay for unlimited texts, and $60 for 900 anytime minutes. I may drop texts altogether if I get unlimited data; I’m not sure.

I’ve started looking around at other service providers as well. It may be time to switch to T-Mobile and get a BlackBerry. Or maybe the Treo will work as a nice stopgap and hold me over until Verizon opens up their network or the Googlephone comes out.

Isn’t it odd that cell providers suck so very badly?

[1] — After endless pestering from the Verizon salesman, who obviously works on commission. No, I don’t need anything more expensive. After it became clear that I was going to spend the very smallest amount that I could, his interest in me visibly died. For this reason alone, I would like to end this silliness within American cell-phone providers, whereby one is corraled into a store run by the phone provider to do routine things like buy a new phone, carry phone numbers from an old phone to a new, etc. When cell service becomes just a special kind of Internet service, and cell phones just a very small sort of computer, we’ll have arrived.