John C. has been giving me a very slightly hard time about my new phone habit. Honestly, I hate getting new phones, and I wish I could just get one that would last until it fell apart. Then I would re-buy the same model and use that. If possible, I'd buy in bulk. This is what I do with shoes.
The problem is that the US is so amazingly far behind the rest of the world in deploying Awesome Cell Phone Technology that I always know that my phone is obsolete when I buy it and that I will be able to replace it with an obsolete state of the art phone in a few years.
About a year ago, I bought a Nokie 6620. It's what John had, and I knew I could use it as a Bluetooth modem to get online with T-Mobile. Two months later, it went missing and I got a RAZR v3 to replace it. It was one of the only decent GPRS phones I could get from T-Mobile, especially if I wanted to be sure I could use it as a modem. Lately, I've been getting more and more frustrated with the terrible speeds I get over GPRS. I get about 40Kbps, which is good for basic GPRS, but still dreadful. The latency is about one second. The only thing whose speed I don't notice is the delivery of mail out of my Postfix queue.
I'd really like to get a faster phone. In most of the world, I'd be getting HSDPA. It can get up to ridiculously fast speeds, starting at 1.8Mbps. Of course, T-Mobile doesn't support HSDPA, and doesn't sell any phones that support it. I thought about buying a RAZR v3xx, but I'd have to buy it on the open market. For a non-telco-locked phone in the US, that basically means the grey market. On eBay, it looked like it was going to run me about $300 to get one, which was just too much. It would've left me ready when HSDPA hits T-Mobile, but... who knows when or if that will happen.
Finally, I called up T-Mobile and I told them that I wanted a phone that had Bluetooth and EDGE. As usual, they were really helpful, even though the rep had to put me on hold a couple times to find out what the hell I was talking about. Sometime this week, I should receive a new Nokia 6103. If I can get it working at a modem, I'm keeping it. Otherwise I'm sending it back and getting another new phone.
If that phone doesn't work, I'll get another new phone.
I can quit, though, anytime that I want.
