thr...@sheol.org (Wayne Throop) wrote:
>Watch, alarm clock, stopwatch, calculator, calendar, appointment book,
>notepad, city-to-timezone index (though who would leave Bangalore out of
>that... but I digress), camera, and optionally web browser, email client,
>gps navigator... let's see, anything else... oh yes, a phone.
>
>And that's the base models, not a smartphone. DUMBphones do all that.
GPS? I still have my dumbphone, a Nokia music-oriented phone. I went
back to it after I dumped the Nokia smartphone. It could take
downloadable Java apps, so I guess it wasn't completely dumb. I guess
there might have teen a timezone index. I used the calendar /
appointment book all the time, as well as the music player and
recorder. But notebook on a 10-key pad? Even with predictive text,
anything more than "Pizza OK?" was painful. And for anything other
than blog decoration, you need a better camera than the dumbphones
had. To my mind, any camera under 3 MP is either a Skype thingy (if
facing screenwards) or for blog decoration shots (facing outwards).
At 3 MP you are getting towards real camera territory, and beyond 5
you're starting to waste battery.
My wife, at her courses last spring, started taking pictures of her
friend's notes because it was easier than photocopying. Photographs
the shopping list board on the fridge rather than copying it or taking
it (there's a reason I bought a wipe-clean board on magnets, sigh)
Smartphones came out at the point where "real" cameras became cheap
enough to stick anywhere. My cheap, generic smartphone's camera is
seriously limited - at 2/3 of a MP, it's not good enough to snap text.
>I had been looking for some time for something with a small
>enough formactor to do at least watch, alarm clock, calculator, calendar,
>and notebook. I found some mostly-satisfactory widgets. Then cellphones
>came along, and though my shorter list of functions *could* in theory be
>less expensive in the form factors I want, I need the cellphone anyways,
>so the motivation to look elsewhere went away. Mostly.
My cellphone has to be thin enough and light enough to keep in a shirt
pocket. After I moved on from the Startac (wrong freq after the move
to Toronto), my next three phones all had lanyards to keep them under
control if they fall out of a shirt pocket. I sometimes tucked the
phone under the shirt if I was wearing a pocketless shirt or didn't
want to look too nerdy when wearing a dress shirt to an event or
interview. My big objection to smartphones is that none of them seem
to believe in lanyard slots.