Vivek’s Blog

So I’ve been looking to buy a new cell phone to replace my aging Nokia 6230. Since the past one year.

Surely that’s too much time to be doing research Vivek? Phones come and go and like any other shiny gadget (or bus or train or girl), there’s always a new one around the corner. But as they say, too much research never killed anyone. Except perhaps Marie Curie and her husband.

Well so anyway, I am a year into my “research” and I am no closer to actually buying a phone than I was a year ago. The number of phones I’ve looked at will drive any sane person, well, insane. A question that might pop into your brains, dear readers, is why haven’t I bought a phone yet? The answer is not brief, but convoluted, and one that needs to be given. Let me warn you, this is long. And painful. Proceed only if you really want to.

There is a basic problem with almost every phone out there. Compromises. For reasons best known to them, manufacturers tend to leave important and/or useful features out of phones. While this disease afflicts the high-end smart phones the most, budget-buyers often have to choose between feature sets, rather than getting it all. It seems like it’s smart business strategy - never give consumers everything so that they are tempted to either buy phones above their budget or to keep changing phones every few months. So far, it has worked. People will often fork out a few extra rupees (or dollars or euros or whatever else floats your boat) for a phone with a particular feature that is important to them. There are also those who have to settle with feature-deficient phones because they are on strict budgets.

In the high-end segment, the features that manufacturers sometimes choose to exclude are baffling. Case in point - the Sony Ericsson W950 which lacks a camera. Don’t even get me started on companies making “world phones” and business phones and then not including a quad-band GSM radio. Seriously, is the extra GSM900/GSM850 band that expensive? Why does model X have it but not model Y? Business executives travel the world and the lack of quad-band can be quite annoying. The 3G situation isn’t any better. Europe and Asia went on their merry way with WCDMA 2100 while the US, as is customary, wanted things their own way. So AT&T chose the 850 and 1900 bands for 3G data. And more recently, T-Mobile launched 3G on the 1700MHz band. Fantastic, right? You haven’t heard the best part yet! There is no phone on the market that includes all 3G bands! You either get 2100 or you get 850/1900 or you get 1700. The upcoming HTC Touch Cruise and i-mate Ultimate series of phones do rectify this, however.

Next on the hitlist are cameras in phones. A lot of people don’t need or want them because they work in a place that prohibits cameras. So how about increasing the selection of handsets without cameras? And while we’re talking about cameras, can someone please tell me why two models with the same number designation, the 6500 Slide and Classic, come with different cameras? The choice of what camera goes into a phone is almost arbitrary. While the 6500 Slide will be a relatively cheap non-Symbian phone, it still gets the 3MP camera while the N81 gets a paltry 2MP? What’s the point of the super-glossy finish on the N81? It will attract fingerprints and scratches every time you touch it.

Operating systems. Low-mid-end phones don’t need Symbian or Windows Mobile. But high-end phones do. Someone obviously needs to get that into the heads of SE’s executives. They seem intent on relegating Symbian to the “business phones.” Why? You have a good phone in the K850, then why not make it a more attractive proposition by including an OS that can actually do something? And while you’re at it SE, please include quad-band radios in your high-end phones. SERIOUSLY! And what the hell is up with your phones either coming with EDGE or 3G and not both? You do realize that not all markets have 3G, right? Who’s brilliant idea was it to put only an 802.11b chip in your high-end phones? And while we’re talking about improving SE products, how about differentiating your products a little? So many SE phones hit the market with more or less the same feature set and only slightly differing looks. Confusing customers is not smart at all.

Time to market is horrendous for cell phones these days. They take a minimum of 2-3 months to get a phone to retailers after announcing them. Apple is known to announce products the day they become available but for once, they announced a product 6 months before it came out. Yep, I’m looking at you, iPhone. I don’t like the iPhone but there are several things it gets right. For one, the new $399 price tag is superb, if only it didn’t have its balls tied to AT&T. Apple understood the need for a high-res screen in order to display webpages better. The phone has Wi-Fi and quad-band. In fact, it’s the one phone that meets my requirements well. But I want buttons and I hate iTunes and I can’t afford to pay $60 a month for the iPhone plan. I haven’t even mentioned the fiasco with the bricked iPhones.

Nokia has a habit of unleashing buggy devices on the masses who are hungry for the next shiny gadget. These early adopters get stuck with faulty units and Nokia earns money from people basically acting as testers. The N95 is one such phone. The original comes with a shitty battery that barely makes it through the day. The newer ones feature a MUCH better battery and the N95-3 exchanges Euro 3G for US 3G. The screen size on the N95 8GB has been upped by 0.2 inches but the resolution is standard QVGA. While not a huge issue, putting a higher resolution display would’ve been the logical thing to do. But then again, logic is a rarity around these parts.

65k color displays. My three-year-old Nokia 6230 has one. It was spoogetastic when I bought it. Since then, we’ve seen screens with 262k colors and even 16 million colors. But good luck finding a Windows Mobile device that goes higher than 65k. Or for that matter, a WM phone that isn’t a brick. Okay, I’ll give you the Samsung i series and the Motorola Q series. Does Microsoft ask for higher license fees if your device isn’t two-inches thick and weighs less than 200g?

How many times do you read reviews of phones that say the processor and memory are unable to keep up with the applications that users want to run?  Who tests these phones? If I were a tester and had to wait for more than two seconds for an application to start up, I would fracking send the prototype back to the engineers to fix the lag. If you want to put a resource-heavy app in your phone, give it the juice it needs, like a fast processor and oodles of RAM.

I love knocking Samsung phones. While their units in Korea are awesomely amazing, the rest of the world gets phones that are behind the times compared to other manufacturers. Anyone recall how long it took them to finally start offering Bluetooth as standard even on high-end phones? Even now, they are unwilling to use Symbian or WM for more than a handful of phones. On the other hand, they are hell-bent on making phones so thin that at some point, emo kids will use them to slit their wrists.

Motorola needs to wake the frak up from their collective three-year coma. That’s how long ago the RAZR came out and was somehow lapped up by technologically disinclined consumers. Motorola has released phones with the most retarded names over the last two years - ROKR, RIZR, and KRZR. I think they just fired the guy responsible for product names and replaced him with a teen obsessed with IM-speak before the RAZR was announced.

To summarize, each manufacturer has their problems which they either don’t want to get rid of, or just don’t have the common sense to get rid of. Nokia makes devices whose first batches come with shoddy quality. SE can’t decide between EDGE and 3G. HTC doesn’t like phones less than 1-inch thick. Samsung doesn’t even try to match up to Nokia and HTC in terms of features. Motorola designers and engineers have been mesmerized by the RAZR name and design far too much. LG is too caught up with how to best advertize their shiny phones. Apple made a valiant first attempt, but the iPhone needs to improve. And come unlocked. And not cause problems with third-party apps that people install.

I don’t know what phone I want to get. I think the N95 is somewhat bulky although I haven’t fondled one myself. It’s also ridiculously expensive. All other phones require compromises I am hesitant to make. I fear this will go the way it went 3 years ago when I decided against a smartphone because of the same kind of jerking around by phone manufacturers. I have until January 19 to decide.

At this point, my long shortlist contains the following phones: Nokia E61i, N81, N95-3, N95 8GB, E51; i-mate Ultimate 8150; HP iPaq 910c