Saturday, July 28, 2007

What is important in a phone?

Looking at phones and contemplating actually picking one I want raises the question: what do i actually want from a phone?

I mean, obviously I want to make calls. Since I have no land line, my cell phone needs to be reliable, preferably on the best network (currently, this seems to be 3G). I want Bluetooth capability, as it would be nice to have a hands-free device. I drive a stick, so you can imagine how much fun it is. Music playing would be wonderful, as my current iPod is my laptop. I definitely want to be able to load mp3 ringtones; sick of paying for crappy 2-bar tones over the network. A camera phone would be a plus, but definitely not required. As I get into higher-end phones, I definitely want to be able to run video game emulators on it (NES and MAME for sure, SNES/Genesis if the phone has enough power). I even have a use for Exchange calendar reminders now.

What do you look for in a phone? Just a phone, or a true multi-purpose device? And what do you do with it? I have a coworker who runs a Palm emulator on his WM5 phone, just so he can run an insulin-calculator he has (he has diabetes).

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I want my phone to clean the house, organise my books and bring me a beer.

Colleen said...

My personal phone is just a phone, it doesn't even have a camera. Now that I work for a company that manufactures cell phone, I get crap all the time for not having one of our phones, but I don't like them. I'd even use them if they were free and we made them to work with my service.
I definitely buy my phones more for the look than the features.

Anonymous said...

It is crazy what phones to nowadays. I would like it if I could block certain incoming numbers, though. That would be a good feature.