Dumbphone

Jun 23, 2008 | blog

Ok, in a moment of weakness (or brilliance… you decide) I jumped at the change to go back to a simple feature phone rather than a smartphone.  So my trusty T-Mobile MDA (my MDA Page is here) has been replaced with the phone you see to the right – a Nokia 5310 XpressMusic. I’d been planning on waiting it out for the US version of the HTC Touch Diamond that would leverage T-Mobile’s 3G network. Or biting the bullet and jumping from T-Mobile to AT&T just for the 3G iPhone this summer.

Instead, I found something that I hadn’t been looking for. Simplicity at a price that I couldn’t pass up. While talking with Amy about phone and such, it dawned on me that the one function of my phone that I use more than anything is… voice calls!?! Yep, turns out all the fancy ‘why? because I can stuff’ just doesn’t count for much when all I really used all my smartphones for over the years is voice calls.

Sure, I’ve used weather apps, email apps, feed aggregators, note taking apps, the new fancy touch-scrolling “today” apps, and many, many, many others.  But in the last year, they’ve really not been of use to me. Probably because of having a laptop with me more often than not, and the proliferation of WiFi.

Still there where two items that I couldn’t live without. Tethering of my laptop and the ability to receive email. Tethering and using the phone’s EDGE service works fine, but alas, email simply sux. I’m working on a solution to that, but it’s not a show stopper. A nifty feature is the ability to sync music with Windows Media Player & Rhapsody’s 4+ million tracks. Kicks ass as a media player, something I hadn’t planned on but was drawn to in the end. I happened to capture a speedtest while connected via EDGE and testing that out.

Then nice thing is that for the first time in about 5 years (probably longer) I’ve got a sexy little phone rather than a big brick hanging off my belt. The fact that it was uber affordable in comparison to a smartphone that’d not use 1/10th of the features helps too.

Being a IT guy, and a technologist at heart, I still long for the big-buck devices… I just don’t have a real use for them at this time. We’ll see if this lasts.