(no subject)

[danceboy]

Short version: what phone should I get that works on the T-Mobile network?


My cell phone is dying. I have a motorola startac from 1999, and it's been in decline for some time, but the audio has started to cut out when it's fully open.

I've been planning to switch to T-Mobile for some time (mostly because ricevermicelli uses them).


So my question is, what phone can I get pretty much now, that works on T-Mobile, that is a decent phone?

Web would be really nice. PDA abilities are a plus, but not if they harm the phone-ness. I've been looking at the Blackberry Pearl, but it looks very first-generation. I've had Palm pdas since forever and I really like them, but Palm seems to have given up on PalmOS for the Treos.

Despite the above, of the phones that T-Mobile will currently supply, I'm leaning towards the Pearl, but torn by the Motorolas (Krzr, Razr v3t, i, a, b, c,...) as they are smaller, and probably better as phones.

Does anyone have opinions? I'm not deeply attached to getting the phone through T-Mobile if the right thing exists somewhere else.

FWIW features having been designed badly tends to bother me more than features missing. As an example, most phones have an alarm clock feature, but it's still a rare phone that can be set to not ring when called, but ring at the alarm. And I think it's still a non-existant phone that can be set to not ring when called until the alarm (because sleeping until your alarm goes off is apparently not something that phone designers do?). This lack is why I have a separate alarm clock.

Comments

[dilletante.livejournal.com]

hum. i'm fond of my sidekick 2, and its features are for the most part very well-designed (this is where it wins-- it doesn't do as much as other pda phones but is so good at what it does). but it completely sucks as a phone; and the current model is the sidekick 3 which i don't know much about; and the 2->3 transition was handled so badly (which is why i still have a 2) that i think the danger/t-mobile partnership is on the rocks or else danger is committing corporate suicide sometime in the future.

the mda, which is the pda phone t-mobile was trying to shoehorn everyone onto when my sidekick 2 last broke, is hands-down better at every strictly hardware-dependent function (for instance the camera is pretty amazing for a phone camera), and the interface seemed surprisingly good for a windows-based device, but i didn't play with it very much and didn't test the phone.

sorry this is negative data, and my constraints are different from yours; but i have strong feelings about interfaces too, so i thought i'd mention. :)

as far as i can tell, on the sidekick at least the pda hardware and the phone hardware are completely separate and don't talk to each other at all except for sharing i/o devices and an i/o layer in the os; i've looked at the developers' kit a bit and there seem to be phone parts that pda programs just can't reach. this might just be a consequence of how they've partitioned things off so that 3rd party software doesn't mess with their pristine phone network. but e.g. it might be the case that an alarm clock program (one comes with the phone) can't change the phone ringer settings. now that i think about it, though, i'm kinda curious...