Mechanical Ape

A cou­ple of weeks ago, when I went down to LA, I had the odd­est prob­lem with my cell phone. When my aunts or my cousin tried to call me, I didn’t receive any noti­fi­ca­tion on my end, and they said the phone always went straight to an error mes­sage. My other cousin could call me half of the time, and he could still text mes­sage me nor­mally. We all have T-​Mobile, so it shouldn’t be an inter-​network issue.

That’s really just the lat­est con­firmed case, though; I’ve had prob­lems with my phone for a while. It was mostly lit­tle things before, though, like dropped calls and los­ing recep­tion even when stand­ing still, or the bat­tery jump­ing from full to dead with­out notice. In gen­eral, I was never happy with the recep­tion I got with this thing, and these prob­lems are becom­ing more and more com­mon, so I think it’s time to get myself a new phone.

But what phone to get? Really, all I want is excel­lent recep­tion and decent bat­tery life. I don’t want to have to charge it more than twice a week. Tex­ting would be nice but isn’t essen­tial, and any­thing past that is imma­te­r­ial to me. Oh, and my fam­ily demands that I stick with T-​Mobile. Unfor­tu­nately, no cell car­ri­ers offer a phone like what I just described. They want to pack phones with as many “fea­tures” as pos­si­ble, so they can charge more for offer­ing those “ser­vices.” And they pro­vide incen­tives to both cell phone man­u­fac­tur­ers and con­sumers to make sure they get their way.

Given all that, I’ve resigned myself to my fate of get­ting a smart– or nearly-​smart-​phone as my next model. Every­one I know seems to be switch­ing to Black­ber­ries, and most seem pretty happy with those. There was also a pro­mo­tion recently to get a Curve or Pearl for free, which I wouldn’t mind. And this Tues­day, T-​Mobile is reveal­ing the HTC Dream, which I’m kinda sorta inter­ested in just because it comes with Google Android, and the tin­kerer in me wants to play with it. (If you haven’t heard, Android is Google’s new mobile plat­form to com­pete with Sym­bian, Win­dows Mobile, and what­ever Apple calls the embed­ded OS on the iPhone. It’s open source and has an SDK for devel­op­ers to make and pub­lish any apps for it they want.) T-​Mobile doesn’t even have 3G cov­er­age in Sacra­mento right now, though; it’s sup­pos­edly com­ing mid-​October. And I’m always wary of get­ting a first-​gen product.

So all that being said, does any­one out there know of a good phone I should check out?

Tags: Family, Phone, Work