I’m without a smartphone right now, in a period of transition between iPhone 3G and the Nexus One. It’s been enlightening, so I thought I’d document my experience here, since it’s a story with a happy Android Ending. Read on for a laugh or maybe just a good cry.
In November 2007, I bought an first-generation iPhone. It was my first smartphone. I hate to sound so effusive, but getting your first smartphone really changes a person’s life. I went from not texting, not having access to my email or the web while on the go, and using an actual paper calendar, to having all those things wrapped up in my phone.
Now, a scant 2 years and change later, my pocket pinging me for text messages, emails, calendar alarms, auction reminders, and IMs is a completely normal and accepted part of my life; it’s only at times when I cannot use my smartphone that I realize how much I depend on it.
I’m on day 5.
It’s killing me.
I’m selling my iPhone; the auction ends in 2 days, and someone had better Buy It Now. In preparation to sell it, I restored it twice, filled it with music three times (to overwrite my personal data), and jailbroke it. I can’t use it again. I’m smartphone-less until I can buy my Nexus One.
On day 1, I thought it would be a good thing. Using my backup phone for a week or so would cleanse my smartphone palate. It might even give me two perspectives on my upcoming Nexus One: that of an iPhone switcher, and a first-time smartphone user.
Idiot.
What makes me stupid is to think that I would be fine. See, I’ve done this once before. A month and a half before the iPhone 3G was released, I convinced my wife and friends to sell our iPhones and tough it out until the release of the 3G. I jailbroke and unlocked each of them, and we each made about $250 after the purchase of our 3G’s. That was a rough month. Somehow I thought it would be different this time.
In fact, it’s worse. I don’t know what it was that made me even more dependent on my phone. Was it the fact that I’ve had nearly 2 years with this phone, compared to 8 months with the original? Was it the increased usefulness of iPhone OS 2.x and 3.x? All I know is that an internet-connected smartphone is digital crack cocaine.
The whole experience reminds me of the bit by comedian Louis C.K.: everything’s amazing, nobody’s happy. I was so dissatisfied with my iPhone 3G experience (the lag, the limitations, the screen size, the camera) that I’m about to spend over $500 to upgrade to a Nexus One. But when the only thing you can do with your phone is make calls, you realize just how amazing internet-connected smartphones are.
The Replacements
I have a couple of dumbphones that I keep for backup purposes, and overseas traveling. One is a Nokia 6061, a flip phone that lacks an external screen, so you can’t see who’s calling you. It also has the worst predictive text of all time. I have a Nokia 6610, which once held the distinction of smallest GSM phone, which makes it fun to carry around, even if it doesn’t use MP3 ringtones or have a camera. My friend borrowed that phone during our last phone swap, and won’t give it back.
So this time around, I’m using my wife’s backup, a Motorola Z3 Rizr. It’s a T9 (shudder) slider, with a 176x220px screen, a 2MP camera, and at least the ability to Bluetooth humorous mp3’s as ringtones. You can read more depressing details here.
Somebody Shoot Me
Multi-tap is the worst invention since the apartment window cage and T9 isn’t much better. In case you’re not familiar with the term, multi-tap is where you have to hit 55,444,555,pause,555,0,6,33,0,66,pause,666,9 to type “kill me now.” You can call Japan with less dialing.
And yes, I get it. The numbers 0-9 have had numerical equivalents since the 1960’s and have been standardized internationally since 1994. But if you send as few as one SMS a month, you’ll wish you had some kind of qwerty keyboard to do it with. Even with predictive text, the experience is awful. The Motorola’s guessing at words so that I only have to hit each number once resulted in these gems: “To a point. Pies a pondle evangelista” and “Call mexido u get a chance” Even I don’t know what I was trying to say.
I sent a total of 12 text messages before I got my iPhone. I was up to texting about 5-15 times a day last week. Now even my dad will text me a few things, and my responses are down to “cool”, “awesome”, “be there soon”. Quite the reversal of roles. On T9, it’s just so painfully slow. Something that would’ve taken me less than 10 seconds now takes me nearly a minute. It’s crippling. And to think, Nokia still makes “smartphones” with T9 keypads!
The last nail is the lack of data accessibility. My Z3 is actually from England (my wife at the time wanted the black Z3, not the T-Mobile blue one), and I can’t seem to get it to work with my AT&T data plan. So I have no access to the internet or my e-mail, or MMS.
I can do literally nothing with this phone but make phone calls. I’ve experienced boredom for the first time in a long time, as I can’t just pop into Rolando or Home Run Challenge, or Enjoy Sudoku Daily to kill monotony.
Wait, What?
The agony of this past week has been punctuated by some real genuine surprises. After 18+ months on the iPhone, it’s amazing to see what you get used to.
Almost everyone dogs AT&T’s service. I surely didn’t think it was great . . . I was even considering jumping ship to T-Mobile for the Nexus One. But the Z3 tells a different story. And as a phone, it isn’t exactly designed for maximum reception. Like the original iPhone and the HTC legend, only the bottom third of the phone comprises the antenna. However, in my office, the Z3 has much, much stronger reception than the iPhone 3G. I typically got 1-2 bars of service, and often none at all in my concrete bunker, but the Motorola mocked me with a cheery 3-4 bars at all times! I’ve yet to drop a call with this phone. Perhaps AT&T isn’t the villain of the iPhone reception issues after all.
The next pleasant surprise is how capable this phone is. It has a feature that took several iterations to implement on the iPhone: Exchange support. Not only will its (relatively pitiful) mail client sync your mail, it will sync your contacts and calendars with any exchange service, like Google Sync. I was amazed. Of course, because I can’t get EDGE data working on the phone, I can’t use the feature. Which is a gripe, because that means I have no contacts.
Another shock was the snappiness the phone has. My iPhone 3G running software 3.1.3 gets mighty slow when doing simple things like opening email or sending an SMS. There’s keyboard lag aplenty. Not so with my dumbphone. Notwithstanding the speed of typing, I can access and send SMS messages much quicker on this crappy little phone than on my iPhone.
Finally, the camera on the Motorola Z3 Rizr reminded me just how far we haven’t come with cell phone cameras. It’s 2 megapixels, but it has a FLASH, something even the iPhone doesn’t have. Not only that, but it takes better pictures than a non-3GS iPhone. Just for comparison, the picture on the left is from an iPhone. I didn’t take it. The picture on the right is from the Z3, I took it in Brookstone while looking in one of those trippy magnifying mirrors. The noise, pixilation, and JPEG artifact are much less on the Z3 picture.
The Take-Away
What I’m choosing to take away from this experience is appreciation for the amazing time we live in. When you have the kind of computing power a desktop computer had 10 years ago, in your pocket, and you are connected at all times to the internet, and have every avenue of communication open to you all day, every day, that’s something to be thankful for.
Also, I can’t wait to write my review of the Nexus One.
