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  It seems the type of phone I wanted was what is called a "multifunction phone" and it is obsolete.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.