The Nexus 4 is a pretty nice phone

So now I have a Nexus 4 and I have to admit it's a pretty nice phone.

Although ...

There's always some way capitalism LETS ME DOWN EVERY TIME ...

The phone requires a Micro SIM card, and the card I got from my carrier is a SIM card.  So I had to print out a template and stick the card to it and cut the edges of the card down with an XActo knife.

Because nothing says "21st Century" like having to WHITTLE something to make your new phone work.

Wait! The story is not over ...

I THOUGHT I had found a (mediocre) solution to my cellphone problems with a Motorola phone that took pretty good photos.  However, just about a year after I bought it I noticed the sound quality was diminishing quickly.  It got to the point where I couldn't even carry on a conversation.  So, time for a new phone!

<irony>Hooray!!</irony>

The old phone still seemed adequate for photos so I thought I would use it as a camera while travelling.  I got an iPhone a while back through work and it has been great for taking and uploading photos, and the old Motorola would be fine for times when I couldn't legitimately carry my work phone (e.g. when I'm out of the country.  So, I decided I would just get a basic phone to do nothing but phone calls.

Yeah.  About that ...

Turns out that it is extremely difficult to get a basic unlocked phone.  Okay, I ran into problems last time finding a basic phone that took great pictures because the category didn't exist - this time I ran into problems because cheap-but-not-ridiculously-crappy-and-cheap unlocked phones apparently don't exist.  Any more.  There were lots of them when I wanted a good camera, but now that I don't, that whole product category has apparently disappeared.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU


The "best" thing I could find was an Alcatel that was sold by my carrier of choice, 7-11 (that's right, I have a 7-11 cellphone account.  Don't laugh.)  This phone was $30 after discount.  That was certainly cheap enough, and it didn't look too bad.  Here, you have a look and decide for yourself ...

It doesn't look TOO terrible, does it?  Surely it would work as a nothing-but-calls-and-texts phone, wouldn't it?  There were lots of hilariously bad reviews of the phone on the web ("If you take or receive pictures you have 9 days to look at them on a website that does not exist") but for $30 I decided to give it a try.

This phone is ... It's ... I don't know what to say.  I actually hesitate to criticize it because it is just not a standard phone and it seems somehow unfair to hold it to regular standards.  I don't want to spoil this phone's chances at finding an assisted-living opportunity with someone who will accept a special-needs phone to do basic work in some sort of supported environment.  If you are able to, please help this phone.

The sheer ugliness of the thing.  You can't really tell by the photo.  It is so cheap.  So cheap.  It has the build quality of a Pez dispenser.  The back doesn't slide on, or click on - it snaps on.  To get it off, you stick a fingernail in the crack and lever it until it pops off, perhaps without breaking - who can say?

The "on" and "off" buttons (or "send" and "cancel", or whatever they're called ) - can you see them in the photo?  One is marked with an ugly stylized x that looks kinda like a sword, and the other is marked with a bent line. Why?  I don't know.  Push the sword to talk and push the bent piece of metal that brought down the Concorde to hang up.

I could maybe have lived with the extraordinary cheapness and ugliness of the phone, but - It makes loud horrible noises.  Horrible noises that I couldn't shut off.  When you turn it on, it plays an idiotic tune, LOUDLY.  That's bad, but every time you push a key on the keyboard, it makes a cricket like TICK-A sound.  So, if you try to send a text, the phone goes

TICK-A! TICK-A! TICK-A!TICK-A! TICK-A! TICK-A!TICK-A! TICK-A! TICK-A!TICK-A! TICK-A! TICK-A!TICK-A! TICK-A! TICK-A!TICK-A! TICK-A! TICK-A!TICK-A!

That's one TICK-A! for every letter.  So the cacophany above would result from my just texting my NAME.  There is no way I could ever text in public with this phone.  It would be like screaming at the top of my lungs, "LOOK AT MY HORRIBLE PHONE!  CHEAP SHITTY PHONE OVER HERE!  JUST TEXTIN' ON THE WORST PHONE EVERRR!"

So, the Alcatel 356 went back to 7-11 and I ordered a Nexus 4 from Google.  Fuck it, I give up.  It only costs as much as 10 Alcatels, which is like the best deal in the history of the universe.  

The End of the Story First (which is how blogs work)

SO, I was looking at the remnants, stubs and cinders that make up my sad collection of blogs, and for some reason I felt motivated to finish the story of how I Hate My New Cellphone.  I had stopped documenting the cellphone purchase when I was halfway through the process, and the ending was actually kind of amusing.  So here goes the End of The Story:

You will recall (only you won't recall, because this is a blog, so you read the last part first, which is stupid in itself, but this is about cellphone stupidity...) You will recall that I had defined what I wanted in a cellphone (a phone, with good battery life, that could take good pictures and upload them to Facebook or something without being connected to a PC, for a couple hundred bucks, the end).  I had looked at the marketplace circa beginning of 2012 and found that this seemingly reasonable wish list was not fulfillable.  The market was moving to smart phones, which at that point in time were expensive, clunky battery hogs.  No simple networked camera soup for you!

Being obstinate, I refused to accept that and I found a phone on the Internet that seemed to do what I wanted.  It was a Motorola ZN5, a candybar style phone with a Kodak branded camera.

It was an older phone, out for a couple of years and end of life and available for pretty cheap ($150 or something).  The camera seemed good, it had a decent flash, good battery life, and WiFi.  Pretty much what I wanted, so I went ahead and ordered it.  Yaay!

And you know, it has been a pretty good camera and a pretty good phone.  I took it to India where it was my main camera (my wife Michele took pictures with our conventional digital camera).  I took over a thousand photos.  I could enable the camera with one hand, by feel, by clicking the unlock button and sliding the lens cover.  Within two seconds I could lift the camera and take a picture.  I made a point of not even looking at the LCD screen, I just pointed and clicked at absolutely everything in front of me.  I got tons of excellent pictures that way and picturetaking was never obtrusive.

BUT - Always a big but -

My phone itself apparently came from India.  I bought it in Canada, but over the Internet, and it seems to be an Indian phone.  So, for example, my contacts list includes about half a dozen Motorola technical support numbers for places like Mumbai, New Delhi and so on, and I can't erase them.  Everyone before "M" in the alphabet, they are fine, but everyone after that, I have to scroll through a list of completely useless Hindi Motorola numbers before I can get to them.

Being from India, this phone has some unusual wallpapers preinstalled:


The phone's Indian identity was not really a problem, and I actually kind of liked it as a reminder of my India trip.  However, the websharing of photos did not work out at all.  Turns out the phone can really only upload photos to a Kodak Easyshare website.  OK, I thought, I will build a whole image repository on this Easyshare thingee and it can be an online home for my pictures.  So I went to easyshare.kodak.com or whatever and set up my account with hierarchical file folders and whatnot.  Then I loaded up some pictures from the phone.  Then I went back to find them.  Nothing!  What the hell?

Turns out that the phone uploaded them to some European version of easyshare, easyshare.kodak.cc.eu or some damn thing like that.  And I could not change it for love or money.  I guess I could have gone with the flow and built my image repository in the Czech republic or wherever it was.  But somehow I lost enthusiasm at that point.

Now I have a corporate iPhone that does everything I want perfectly.  Too bad its not mine.

Shopping for a Phone, Or, "You Can't Always Get What You Want"

So off I went to shop for a phone.  I looked at phones available locally (e.g. at 7-11, which offered the SpeakOut cell plan I was switching to) but mostly I looked online.

What I found is that there are a lot of smartphones available that can do a lot of things, but they tend to be way more complicated than I need for my simple requirements.  They tend to run Android and resemble tiny little PCs in their flexibility, power and pain-in-the-ass complexity.  Oh sure they can surf the Web and run Angry Birds games and display the local weather and blah blah blah but they also have to be charged every day, or more than that if you use them a lot.  They freeze sometimes, and require rebooting.  Software incompatibilities can arise, and you have to troubleshoot things.  I sensed that Android was like Windows circa 1995 (or today for that matter), powerful and irritating.  I sensed I needed something more restrained, a phone engineered to do one or two things well, not a general purpose computing platform.

I saw a few cool looking items.  There was the Palm Pre,

 

which appeared to be a nice basic unit that could do everything I wanted.  Even better was this gem,

a Microsoft Kin 1.  Look how teeny it is!  Its the size of the Canadian $5 coin, when it eventually gets released!  I love it!  And it's "integrated with social media", which sounds like you should be able to upload pictures from it. 


However ... whenever I found a phone I liked, it was always unavailable.  It seems the type of phone I wanted was what is called a "multifunction phone" and it is obsolete.  These phones are so hopelessly 2008, no one wants them any more.  Everyone wants a smart phone, one of those Android monsters I described earlier. Which look like this:

Aww, shit.

Picking a new phone

2011 - Such an exciting time.  Apple is on the fourth generation of iPhone, and Android phones are appearing everywhere.  It should be easy to find an excellent cellphone for any taste and any budget, right?  Right?

Looking around, I quickly realized that there are thousands and thousands of phones out there, and to have any success in finding a good one, you need to determine exactly what you want.  Fortunately, I was able to define my wants to a razor's edge.  I wanted a phone that was:

• Unlocked and compatible with my GSM network.
• Fairly small, easy to fit in my pocket.
• Good battery life, able to go a few days without recharging if I didn't use it much and able to withstand a couple hours of conversation.  As good as my old piece-o-crap phone, OK?
• Equipped with a reasonably good camera.  By "reasonably good", I mean "able to produce pictures that I could actually look at later."
• Able to transfer pictures to an online service, preferably Facebook, in an easy wireless way.  Like my iPod Touch (hopefully better resolution pictures than the iPod, because the iPod almost violates the "pictures-good-enough-to-actually-look-at" requirement above).

To summarize, what I wanted was 1) a phone, that 2) had a camera that could take okay pictures that 3) I could easily upload.  I was going to make phone calls and send text messages and take pictures and post them online.  THAT'S IT.

My budget was, say, $200.  Doesn't sound unreasonable, does it?


Yeah.  Well.  About that...

The story behind the lousy cellphone

So my three year contract with Bell Mobility was coming to an end (yay!) and I had to decide what to do about a cellphone.  Since I don't use my cell all that much and since I didn't want to have a contract with any of the providers in the evil cesspool that is the Canadian cellphone marketplace, I decided to get a pay-as-you-go cellphone. 

The provider I picked was SpeakOut!, which is available at 7-11.  So far, I am very happy with them - they are the best in Canada for basic pay-as-you-go cell service, in my opinion.  But to go with my new cellphone service, I had to pick a new cellphone.  And that's where my sorrows began.