For God So Loved the World

The stadium is the size of Texas, filled with a hundred million screaming, cheering people, give or take a few thousand. The noise is deafening, but it’s your job to find one Rodney Nutwimple and deliver an urgent message from his wife. You have no idea where he’s sitting; being the social Baryshnikov that he is, he could very well be on the move. You have ten seconds.

Go.

We take things for granted. We wake up, brush our teeth, stand beneath hot water, slip on some clothes, and trudge through the day. Yet from the inane morning show banter that rouses us through the anemic little speaker on our clock radio, to the thousands of moving parts working in perfect concert beneath the hood of our car, to the traffic control system that keeps us from becoming commuter bouillabaisse, our lives are set to an uncelebrated symphony of millions upon millions of manufactured miracles. Every day.

For the last twenty years, the telephone has been my touchstone to humanity. From the moment I stepped on a Continental flight in Miami and landed in San Antonio, with a man only a year older than I am today waving forlornly from the gate window in parental concern, it became the primary method by which I’ve communicated with those I care about. Later, in Germany, England, Turkey, Italy, Saudi Arabia, and recently in Las Vegas, it became indispensable.

But a phone is only as useful as the contacts therein, and that’s where I falter. It seems I’ve got fewer and fewer contacts these days, but I’ve got more phones than Jerry Lewis on Labor Day. On the surface it makes little sense, until you dig around a little; the phone is the potential of every word you might say, of every nuance and hesitation of conversation, of every echo of laughter. Essentially my phone is you, in my hand. Either that or I’m bugshit insane.

All our mobile-to-mobile minutes and nights and weekends and unlimited text messaging have done little to slow the relentless expansion of our social universe, where communication technology has become so ubiquitous that it’s easy, perhaps even necessary, to ignore it. Email and cell phones and telemarketers and text messages and general advertising intrude at such a fervent rate that our social evolution cannot keep apace, and we withdraw as a matter of survival.

At least that’s what I tell myself. Why else would that guy in the airport window rarely, if ever, answer my emails, or my youngest brother not return my texts or calls? I’ve put thumbscrews to cerebellum trying to recall what I might have done to offend, to no avail, and now the theory of a wide-reaching cultural phenomenon is probably little more than a salve on my ego, to be honest. It’s no big deal, really. I’m not bearing any grudges, I’m simply perplexed. And maybe a little sad.

We live in a world of engineered miracles. The realization of grand human speculation, forged with the muscle of capitalism, has brought the world closer together and provided a standard of living heretofore unknown in many parts of the world. Even international wireless airtime is getting cheaper and cheaper as competition becomes more and more fierce, and yet I can’t help thinking that we–or at least I–have lost something along the way.

I used a BT payphone to call my grandmother when the Rangers eliminated the Devils in game seven of the 1994 Eastern Conference finals, plunking in successive £1 coins that I’d been hoarding for almost two years. That ten-minute call cost about $30, if I remember, but I’d have gladly paid triple that simply to ask her, “my God, did you SEE that?!” After they won the Cup a month later, I called my brother from San Vito, Italy on a DSN line in a tent city set up in a parking lot. They won on the day before his 19th birthday, and I fondly recall his exuberance, fourteen years later.

At some point I’ll probably learn that having more phones doesn’t equate to better communication, but I’ve always been kind of slow that way. In the meantime, I’m ready. I’ve got all the bases covered.

The bases and right field. And shallow left-center. And the dugout. And the concession stand…the parking lot…

La Donna T-Mobilé

Fewer than six weeks after signing up for a two-year contract plan with AT&T, I learned last night that Verizon has installed a soon-to-be-operational tower less than a mile away. They’re coming to the area with their Broadband PCS B-block holdings in MTA037, Submarket 3, which were acquired in FCC Auction 4 back in nineteen-ninety-friggin’-five. Who knew?

Being the unrepentant mobile geek that I am, for the last two years I’ve been drooling over a particular plot of land less than an eighth of a mile from where they eventually constructed the new PCS antenna, thinking it would make a great spot for a privately owned tower that could be leased to most, if not all, of the major carriers in the area. As previously noted, the closest tower is six miles from here, which in the words of Sister Teresa, my high school guidance counselor, sucks fermented llama balls.

To be certain, this is a sparsely populated region, and the probable ROI of installing equipment to serve fewer than 5000 people offers little appeal, even to me. The low population density coupled with the shorter range of the 1900 MHz frequencies makes me wonder just who Verizon is targeting with their new service, as Alltel is already deeply ensconced in the area as the carrier of choice for those living on the fringe (literally and metaphorically), and none of Verizon’s plans can compete with Alltel’s MyCircle offerings.

My first reaction to the Verizon news ran something along the lines of “hot diggety rhubarb crap,” but after careful scrutiny of their plans and service, my initial ebullience has waned somewhat to a lukewarm “meh,” with light-to-moderate “who-gives-a-shit” forming later in the day.

See, I’ve uncovered a secret.

Well, sure, not a real secret. Anyone can find out about it if they look in the right places, but it might as well be a secret to three out of the four big wireless companies. Rather, two of the three big companies if we don’t count Sprint, and with their recent sun-as-black-as-sackcloth tribulation, I’m not sure we should. All the more reason for those clowns to pay attention.

Wi-fi, baby.

T-Mobile’s HotSpot@Home service allows customers to make calls over wi-fi, using either a specialized T-Mobile-branded router optimized for voice communication, or any off-the-shelf wireless router. Those on select two-year plans can opt to pay a $10 monthly fee for unlimited wi-fi calling from any open hotspot in the country, but anyone with a T-Mobile wi-fi-capable phone can use the service with their existing plan. Even those of us on prepaid.

When I first caught wind of this gig after it launched in the middle of last year, I raised a skeptical eyebrow and scoffed so hard I took out a condor in the Sonomas. We’ve all heard nightmare stories about VOIP quality and reliability, and now they want to charge me extra to connect to their shitty, poorly deployed network using my own router? I provide the connection and T-Mobile charges me to use it. Sure. Thanks, but no. I’ll call you. Or not.

After they changed their prepaid plans to allow unlimited nights and mobile-to-mobile for a dollar a day, I signed up. Not long after that, I tried the Samsung Katalyst on my home router using the pay-per-day plan, and it just works. It works like Scrubbing Bubbles on Red Bull and crystal meth.

Voice quality is clear, with very little compression noise, and the wi-fi connection is reliable. The phone does lose the network from time to time, but it seems to pick it up again in short order and maintains a minimum of 2 wi-fi signal bars anywhere in my house. Basically it’s like having a tower in the living room.

Are you listening, Sprint? A company with similar infrastructure liabilities (1900 MHz) found a way to overcome its most glaring shortcoming, a lack of adequate coverage, and turn it into what amounts to its most attractive feature. People aren’t fleeing Sprint in panicked droves because of the lack of a lightning-fast data network, but because of poor service. As far as the paying customer goes, “service” means coverage footprint, call quality/reliability, and selection of handsets. Anything else is incidental; if people are satisfied with those three things, you’re golden. With everything else being equal, the handset is of utmost importance, as it’s the end-user’s only daily physical representation of your service. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to evade the damaging association that a bad phone can wreak upon your network, whether it’s justified or simple consumer ignorance. And there’s no shortage of either bad handsets or ignorant consumers, believe me.

The call quality on the Katalyst is top-shelf, whether on PCS or wi-fi. T-Mobile coverage is now supremely adequate, and their MyFaves plans can be trumped only by Alltel’s MyCircle. T-Mobile offers a total of twelve free pre-rebate phones on their website. Sprint advertises exactly one free phone, the Sanyo SCP-3200, and their plan structure is confusing, at best. Having their voice plans listed in mutant sibling Nextel’s sandbox o’ poop and razorblades doesn’t help customers figure out what they want, either.

Part of Sprint’s trouble might be identity; when I look at their logo, I don’t know what the hell to think. Are they a phone company? A walkie-talkie company? A wireless company? Are they Sprint or are they Nextel? Why is all their stuff yellow and black? To me, yellow and black says “DANGER! FLEE!” and it might have a similar subconscious effect on others, as well.

With their HotSpot@Home service, T-Mobile has solidified its standing in the wireless industry as a provider that wants your money, sure, but they’re not too picky about how you access their network. Versatility, mission clarity, and perception of value are vital elements of success in any business, and now T-Mobile has each of those things stockpiled like illicit corned beef sandwiches during a national delicatessen emergency.

Certain other providers might want to peek over the fence to see what’s going on, before they’re remembered in the same breath with names like Omnipoint and Powertel, both of which are now part of Deutsche Telekom. And Deutsche Telekom is also the parent company of…

Anyone care to take a guess? Anyone?

Good Morning, America, How Are You?

How often do things work out exactly as planned? I originally envisioned this blog as a kind of prepaid cellular service guide, a place where prospective prepaid consumers could handily glean all the pertinent facts and foibles of various pay-as-you-go providers, including comparisons and specific phone reviews, all while being mildly entertained in the process. Kind of like the Branson, Missouri of prepaid sites. Minus the Tom Jones impersonators and Kenny Rogers.

But the truth is that there are already dozens, if not hundreds, of sites with much more comprehensive information than I could ever hope to collect and collate and present in a coherently fantastic fashion. And frankly the thought of collecting and collating and presenting all that data fills me with a kind of greasy, unnameable dread, so much as to pose a dire threat to my sixteen-year sine vomito record. And as far as personal bodily ejecta records go, that’s a pretty good one, so I’m not taking any chances.

Thus the inevitable gap between imagination and creative reality grows a little wider, but then again I don’t have to sing “What’s New Pussycat” in front of sixteen hundred swooning early-generation Baby Boomers clad in skin-tight, lime green polyester pants suits. All in all, a fair trade-off. Sometimes life is sweet.

But when a particularly good deal warps into our sector and opens hailing frequencies, I’m bound by my original prepaid prime directive to let you know about it. Please read…on. Can’t find…witty…segue. Losing…all…cognitive ability.

T-Mobile To Go’s recent addition of a pay-per-day option offers three distinct benefits; unlimited 7pm-7am night calling, unlimited T-Mobile-to-T-Mobile calling, and a ten-cents-per-minute rate on regular calls, all for $1 per day, charged only on days which the phone is used for voice calls. This instantly catapults T-Mobile To Go past the likes of AT&T’s GoPhone, Verizon’s InPulse, Virgin Mobile, Boost, and Tracfone, issuing to these competitors a hearty, venti-sized, 1900Mhz Deutsche Telekom finger from its perch high atop the prepaid value obelisk.

For some, the per-day plan holds no attraction. Those who’ve attained Gold Rewards status on T-Mobile’s previous lone prepaid option appreciate the one-year, $10 renewal feature, which is understandable. (After adding $100 to their prepaid accounts, T-Mobile’s pay-per-minute customers can extend their service by one year simply by adding a $10 prepaid card, giving them just-to-have-it cell service for about .83 cents per month after the initial $100.)

With the pay-per-day plan, service is good for 90 days, regardless of the refill amount added. This equates to a just-to-have-it yearly cost of about $40, or $3.33 per month, with four 90-day $10 refill cards added over the course of twelve months. Still an awesome deal, even for the low-use customer.

There are, of course, some drawbacks. For the longest time, until about two days ago, I was T-Mobile’s biggest detractor, as their RF coverage is blatantly poor in many places, including where I live. Their prepaid phone selection is ho-hum; the Nokia 2610 that I used to activate my per-day service has been a pleasant surprise thus far, but the rest of the over-the-counter retail lineup is comprised solely of Samsung handsets. We’ve been down the proverbially foreboding Samsung-GSM alley before, so unless you can throw your Samsung GSM phone out the nearest window and bounce it off a tower stanchion, I’d think twice about slipping your SIM into one of those sinister contraptions.

Another drawback is the somewhat expensive texting rates of .10 cents for each message sent, and .05 cents for each received. While not at bad as GoPhone’s extortionate per-use messaging cost of .15 cents for each message sent or received (AT&T offers messaging bundles for much lower rates, which may be purchased every month only by calling customer service and hacking through a thicket of fifteen tedious prompts), I’d like to see a more economical texting option, even if it includes a higher per-day rate for unlimited texts.

Some might bemoan the lack of unlimited weekends, but considering that the $1 per day charge buys unlimited any-number calling fully half the time, from 7pm to 7am, there’s little to complain about here. The closest equivalent plan if used every day on GoPhone Pay-As-You-Go would cost over $50 per month, with $20 for 3000 night and weekend minutes and the $1 per day access charge. Verizon’s InPulse offers a $1 per day plan that features unlimited mobile-to-mobile, .10 cents per message in or out, and .10 cents per minute all the time. Not completely horrible, unless you don’t know anyone else with Verizon.

If you live in a strong coverage area, along with all other factors considered, T-Mobile has made a bold move that demands the heavy-use prepaid consumer’s serious consideration. Along with their recent 3G rollout in New York City, it makes me wonder what else they might have up their sleeves.

Whatever it might be, it’s gotta be better than lime green polyester pants suits.

Something Wrong with the World Today

First of all, please forgive the crudity of this illustration. I didn’t have time to build it to scale or to paint it.

One of the very best neato things about living on the edge of forsaken nowhere is that when plagues once again descend upon the nations and bands of flesh-crazed reavers begin terrorizing the countryside, you’re usually the last to go. Usually.

After that the list of benefits begins to diminish somewhat; I can hear my heartbeat in the disquieting nocturnal stillness, and one time I watched a giant water bug fly off with a bunny. Not a Superman-Lois Lane, Can-You-Read-My-Mind kind of fly-off-with, but a fly-off-with of the most unsettling variety.

Having lived cheek-to-bowel with sixty trillion people in the Sphincter of the Universe™, gaining a little elbow room seemed like a great idea. Unfortunately, we gained enough elbow room for, hell, I dunno…everyone, and now it’s a ten-mile one-way trek to the nearest MacDonald’s. (We never eat there, but it’s a reliable proximity marker of civilization.) For those who require a sports reference to comprehend any distance longer than “over there,” that’s the length of 194 football fields. Or if you’re from Toledo, 924 bowling alleys.

This means that on the metaphorical scale o’ quality, cell reception out here lies somewhere between a mummified squirrel’s rectum and a bucket of cockroach feet. Often I can’t decide which is better.

When we backed the moving truck to the front door and began tossing our crap into the house, we had a contract plan from Cingular–two TDMA Nokia handsets (3360 and 5165) with 300 anytime minutes, unlimited N/W, and .25 cents per message. Cingular worked fine where we came from; hardly a dropped call and reception as clear as the air of Asgard, but here my sturdy little 3360 simply looked confused for a moment, then uttered a plaintive “Mom?” before collapsing to the floor, unresponsive. I still dig it out and fiddle with it from time to time, marveling at the fact that the once-diminutive pre-GSM Nokia weighs about as much as a rump roast.

This is why reception and call quality are of utmost importance in any handset that I buy. Many people who review phones on publicly accessible websites fail to make the distinction between reception quality and call quality; they assume that a loud, clear earpiece means they’ve got good reception, when all it really means is that they’ve got a good earpiece. Good reception coupled with a good earpiece is just about unknown–I’ve had plenty of phones with one or the other, but trying to find both is like trying to find an ethical lawnmower repairman or an intelligent radio talk show caller. Truly good reception quality (not to be confused with “good enough” reception) can’t be credibly discerned by someone living forty yards from a tower.

The phones that I’ve used with the best reception performance are the Motorola C139, the Krzr K1, the Razr V3xx, the Motorola E815, the Motorola V190, and the BlackBerry Curve 8310. This means that the phone will find and keep a radio signal where others might falter and display a “no service” message. However, this doesn’t mean that the phone will have great earpiece quality; the V190 comes to mind in that it will hold on to a signal like a salivating constrictor, but I’d rather communicate using paper airplane notes than talk on it for any length of time–the earpiece not only distorts voices, it’s uncomfortable to hold against your head. The toothy bastard will snag a radio wave, though, and with an earbud or the loudspeaker it’s not bad at all.

The LG Scoop, from Alltel, is an example of a phone that gets mediocre reception, yet offers superior earpiece quality. It’s also free of most of the deal-breaking hidden quirks that drive me insane after a couple of days, like unnecessarily complicated text messaging menus and poor construction quality. The Scoop’s drawbacks are mainly its size and the questionable usefulness of its qwerty keyboard, which is too big for efficient double-thumb typing.

I have very, very few gripes with the Curve 8310, simply because it does everything that I want it to do, even without using it for email or any of the native BlackBerry services. It has great call quality and good reception in an area that, four years ago, was a one-provider rodeo. The screen and back cover are easily smudged, but I’m trying very hard not to be such an obsessive tit about it. To demonstrate how much I’m growing, I didn’t even affix a custom-cut PSP screen protector to my Curve. Fingerprints still hurt, though. A lot.

When it comes to buying a phone, especially on a contract plan, first check out the provider’s exchange policy. If they don’t let you bring that lemon back and exchange it for something else at least once, don’t sign with them. Don’t let anyone push you into overbuying something that you don’t want or need just because he’s low on contract activations that month. Instead, do some research on your own; check out Cnet’s excellent mobile section, along with Phonescoop, and HowardForums for honest advice from people with no personal financial stake in your phone purchase.

And remember, as with any business, it’s not their money until the check clears.

A Muse to Death

You might recall a previous entry in which I furiously scribbled my distaste for things that don’t work as advertised. Let me amend this to note that it’s especially maddening if said deficiency is beyond my ability to influence or affect, frustrating me almost past the utilization of coherent and indelible word structure usements.

To prove that the Tiny Gods o’ Technoware have a cock walloping sense of humor, they have bestowed upon me a phone which underscores the suckliciousness of things that don’t work properly. The Samsung U706, or the Muse, as it’s called on a network that shall remain nameless but which still makes me want to slip hot daggers into my eyes, not only underscores this principle but smacks it in the chops and scrawls nasty things about its mother on various bathroom walls.

Buying a phone is a little like buying a car; you never really know if you’re going to like it until you’ve lived with it for a while, as some of the most brain-liquefying tendencies often don’t show up until after several days or weeks together. Occasionally you run into a phone that seems to have all its geese on a leash; solid construction, good sound, impressive features, strong reception, and then you get it home only to discover that hey, it’s the fucking Devil.

Not an imp. Not some peon necromancer with misguided aspirations. Not even a mildly ambitious yet cautiously circumspect Tourette’s-afflicted Balrog.

The fucking Devil. In your phone. Grrr. Argh.

This time I can’t even blame the phone. The Samsung Muse, a CDMA handset, seems like a pretty solid customer; CDMA being where Samsung shines and all. This time the fault likes squarely on the shoulders of BubbaNet, the brain-dead twits who threw an old TV antenna across a chain-link fence and called it a wireless network, and to whom I keep giving money because I’m something of a brain-dead twit myself. Why can’t I quit you, BubbaNet? Man.

See, for whatever reason, my Muse won’t receive off-network text messages. This means that if you use AT&T, or Sprint, or T-Mobile, or Verizon, or Claro, or Orange, or Vodafone, or any network in the world other than BubbaNet, I won’t get your text. You’ll get mine, but I won’t get yours unless you possess the same pissing-on-your-own-forehead consumer judgment that I do. I know this because I spent the better part of an hour on the phone with tech support; the first tech I spoke to was dumber than peas, a guy who wanted to get me off the phone as quickly as possible and who succeeded thanks to his Star Wars: A New Hope Bullshit Re-Release Special Edition Death Star explosion of indifference, complete with shockwave ring. The second, a woman, listened to my problem, understood it, was very polite and personable, and thoroughly investigated the myriad possibilities before uttering those dreaded words:

Trouble ticket.

Insert Charlie Brown’s cry of dismay here at the temerity of those football-yanking weasels. “Trouble ticket” is corporate tech-supportese for “we’re going to ignore your problem until you go away.” It means that they’ve bought my trouble a friggin’ ticket on the next space shuttle, and they’re going to launch that bastard into deep, deep space where no one will ever see it again unless they have a revolving line of credit at Breeb’lak’s House of Anal Probes. Nothing, and by nothing I mean nothing in the history of the world, has ever been resolved once a trouble ticket has been opened.

Tower of Pisa? Trouble ticket. Still open.

Liberty Bell? You guessed it.

Great Sphinx? Probably the first.

It’s not that tech support was uniformly useless; the second person I talked to was very willing, very eager to solve my problem, though she was effectively stymied by BubbaNet’s policy of not actually providing any kind of useful service whatsoever. She didn’t attribute my difficulties to user error, or to the “other networks” (all of which work fine with each other, yet somehow it’s their fault when they can’t communicate with BubbaNet’s System o’ Shittiness). First tech, I’m looking at you, here. Dickface.

So now I wait. I wait for a call that won’t come. I wait like some pathetic, acne-cratered unwashed slob waits for that first fumbling encounter with a girl he didn’t meet at a family get-together, and then I go grumbling back, complete with cartoon cloud overhead, to BubbaNet’s local brick-and-mortar cesspit and try to finagle some sort of resolution to this ass-bending conundrum.

Maybe next time I’ll just pay someone to kick me in the crotch.

Updated on May 2, later; The kind but clueless folks at BubbaNet’s retail store managed to resolve my text messaging issue after I suggested changing the phone number, which was in turn suggested to me last night by Almost Helpful Tech #2. It seems that the problem was in their recent deployment of of new local exchanges that completely befuddled every network but their own. And I, of course, had received one of the new numbers. Not anymore.

Still no callback on the phantom trouble ticket that’s floating around out in the ether. Maybe I’ll hear from them by the time the current technology goes obsolete, but I’m not holding my breath.

Q Will Be Assimilated

Some devices are a joy to use. Consider the average toaster; no fuss, no complication, just slip bread in, pull toast out a minute later. No unnecessary hinges or latches or doors on a toaster, no mysterious buttons, just pure, unadulterated simplicity right there on your kitchen counter. Or your bathroom counter, depending on your long-term outlook on things.

The refrigerator is another beautifully efficient appliance. What could be more elegant than a giant cold box with food inside? Usually only the best food, too, like cheese, meat, and other cheese; you’re not likely to encounter any rice cakes or wheat squares or oatmeal when you poke around in there, and thanks once again for tiny blessings. Simply open the door, withdraw frigid delectables. Wonderful.

If you had to perform a convoluted ritual of head bobbing, pygmy tossing, and interpretive dance set to Rocky Mountain High every time you wanted a bowl of Rainforest Crunch, who’d bother? If the fridge door wouldn’t open unless I recited The Rime of the Ancient Mariner while dressed like Little Orphan Annie and holding over my head a duck hatched on St. Swithun’s Day, it would certainly make me consider heavily investing in nonperishables, I tell you.

Inefficiency bugs me. Taking three steps when one will do just fine makes me want to choke a kitten, especially if it’s because some other lazy idiot didn’t feel like doing his job, either. The unnecessary sorting and filing of utterly useless forms at Large Specialty Retail Chain thrilled me about as much as standing in line at the DMV, so I routinely tossed them, and instructed the Minions to do the same. I discovered early on that maintaining even the slimmest soupçon of sanity depended on identifying anything which was truly unimportant and promptly ignoring it, all the while feigning a level of diligence that would shame Patek Phillippe. It worked well.

Which brings me to the Motorola Q9h. If painfully cumbersome inefficiency were money, this thing would be gleefully firing people from its own reality show.

The Q hated me. Both it and its no-nonsense, shut-up-and-swim operating system, Windows Mobile 6, tried to drive me out of my mind with unnecessary button presses and needlessly complicated program management, so I took that sucker for a ride from which it hasn’t returned. Replaced its recalcitrant ass with a BlackBerry Curve, and things have been much more agreeable since.

On its own as a device, the Q was…large. Its keys were large, its screen was large, and the extended battery possessed the bicuspid-threatening thickness of a four-square Chunky bar. Talking on it was like holding a trade paperback to the side of my head, and the last thing I need assistance with is looking like a goober. (No-no, N-Gage. Not again. You go sit in your corner and think about what you’ve done!)

The Q’s sound quality was fine, but if I have to choose between slightly compromised audio quality and Windows Mobile, I’ll pick the former any day. Although the Q has a dedicated messaging key, WM defaults to the last folder viewed; this means that if you receive a text message or an email, it’s necessary to manually navigate to the inbox in order to read the message, a process which can require up to seven button presses if you left the messaging application on a folder other than the inbox. Beautiful, eh? Yes. Beautiful like cholera.

It’s also necessary to use the task manager application just to close other applications; if you simply navigate back to the home screen using the end key or the dedicated home key, whatever you were doing previously remains open in the background, which shortens battery life and slows system speed. There’s no way to close an application from within the application–again, only the task manager can be used for this, and unless you map it to the program bar, you’ll have to go digging through four levels of menus just to find the stupid thing.

Inefficiency.

The BlackBerry OS is far from perfect, but it performs well enough that my brain has stopped swelling from the inelegant frustration of the Q/Windows Mobile experience. The Curve is small enough to text on with one hand, yet not so small that two hands can’t be used. The call quality and reception are solid, and it’s got a good camera and impressive media capabilities. The Q’s keyboard requires two hands for texting and almost anything else, as it’s wider than my thumb is long.

Although the Q supports MicroSD cards of up to 32Gb, it’s not possible to create a music playlist on the device itself, which is like having to eat all the cake in the world every time you want a Twinkie. Why bother to include a media player only to cripple it with such mystifying semi-usefulness?

Research in Motion, the maker of the Blackberry, is constantly upgrading and redesigning their equipment so that their lineup of handsets is as versatile as the phones themselves. Motorola seems content to cede the smartphone market to RIM while focusing on imitating its own past success with the Razr 2 and the Rizr Z9. The death of innovation; a groundbreaking strategy.

If the staid, stodgy Q is even a moderately accurate barometer of Motorola’s forecast, they’d better start handing out raincoats.

And perhaps parachutes.

You Spin Me

I like things a certain way. Those close to me might tell you that I like them my way, but they’re all on crack anyway, so pay no attention to them. Especially if they ask to borrow money.

I’m not hard to please, specifically, as much as I prefer that things function as advertised. That’s all. Nothing drives me so thoroughly shitting-in-the-water-fountain insane as an item that’s supposed to perform a particular task or work in a particular fashion, but doesn’t. Picture if you will:

A bathroom door that doesn’t completely latch. A toilet tank arm-float-thing that doesn’t shut off the water. An ice maker that won’t. A cat that doesn’t chase and gleefully eviscerate crawling things. A phone that creaks and rattles and in general makes more noise than a busload of crickets.

Since I now possess all five pieces to the Amulet of Eye-Gouging Annoyance +6 as outlined above, I’ve earned the right to gripe, and I suppose that I’ll finally have to admit that I am, as someone dear once told me, a giant fussy prick. (Right again, mom.)

Okay, but only about the things that matter. I can live with the door, and the ice maker, for now. And the toilet tank float. So we flibber the arm a few times, and the water shuts off, big deal. And I can even live with the cat, who is easily as squeamish about Southern insects as I am; where I grew up an earwig was a big deal, here they’ve got bugs bigger than a chicken leg. Seriously. Where I draw the line, though, deeply and emphatically with the toe of my generic, unused running shoe, is at a phone that exhibits more neurotic personality tics than I do.

That’s right. This town ain’t big enough, yadda yadda yadda, and I was here first. So the Sony-Ericsson Z750 is gonna have to skedaddle. Probably. Maybe.

Crap.

It gets better reception than any AT&T handset that I’ve used save the Krzr, and signal strength is at a premium around here. The earpiece quality is second to none. The keypad is large and slick and lends itself well to text messaging, and the screen is vivid and clear. Most of the time. More on that later.

The plastic used in the housing feels flimsy and cheap, and pressing the function buttons above the keypad causes it to creak and moan. Admittedly, this probably would bother only a handful of obsessively neurotic wackjobs around the world, but recall an earlier reference to “giant fussy prick” and comprehend, would you kindly. The external OLED display is useless even in late twilight, as it simply can’t be seen under anything stronger than moderate indoor lighting, and the internal screen, though pretty, automatically grows dimmer under low-light conditions. There’s no way to change this.

Regardless of whether it’s a phone or a meddling politician, I don’t want shit thinking for me. This is the reason I’ve sworn off (okay, mostly sworn off) Samsung and LG; I want a phone and its function to change to serve my needs, not the other way around. If I want to assign the right soft key to opening the Happytime Kool-Aid Bunnyfart folder on my phone, instead of the AT&T MediaNet MoneySink garbage that I’ll never use, so what? What’s the big deal? When the Z750 abandoned some of the more endearing versatility of its older sibling, the W580, in exchange for the less flexible UI design of its peninsular cousins, I balked. Loudly. Like the balkers of yore. Old school.

It’s impossible to turn off the data connection on the Z750. Prolly got somethin’ to do with their high-falutin’ 3G fancypants HSDPAWCDMAUMTS bunk. The center button on the 4-way toggle is assigned to open MediaNet instead of the menu. Again, no way to change it; the button is defiantly emblazoned with the AT&T MediaNet logo, as if daring you to even try to reassign it. It scoffs at your silly, willful individualism. Now go away.

With only one exchange permitted per transaction, I find myself waffling like Mrs. Butterworth over here. A different Z750 could conceivably lack the construction flaws that plagued (mildly infected) the one I bought, but that won’t address the design deficiencies in the UI.

For a mid-range phone, the Z750 is a solid performer with an oddly rigid yet flaky personality and questionable build. Frankly, the damn thing makes me want to speak harshly to an old lady without immediate pause or apology but perhaps with tinges of regret later on which might initially be mistaken for indigestion.

Bad Bad Donkeys

It’s inevitable; crack open a hundred oysters, you’ll probably find a couple of pearls. Poke around a little, though, and you’re bound to also find some crap.

I’ve owned a lot of phones. It is, dare I say, a mild obsession, and I’ve stopped trying to understand it or overcome it. Like running water, I attempt to gracefully flow around my strongest urges and regroup, unscathed, on the other side once the divisive influence passes. Most of the time I do okay. Most of the time.

Every once in a while, though, I get scathed. Hard. Last week’s sojourn into the Land of Sony-Ericssonia was harrowing, what with the rebellion and all, but my misguided apprehension was put decisively to rest by the realization that the W580 is one of the best phones I’ve used in the last two years. Yesterday, however, I embarked on the Tax Refund Phone Acquisition Tour, Phase II, and got waylaid like a passing Krispy Kreme deliveryman outside fat camp.

As noted a few posts ago, Samsung and LG have their CDMA web-footed waterfowl in a proper column. Their GSM handsets, however, gobble moldy poo.

What do these companies have against me customizing my phone to fit the things that I want to do? Exactly why, on the Samsung A737 and A707 (more popularly known as the Sync), can’t I save my text messages directly to the phone instead of the SIM? Why can’t I assign a message tone outside the predetermined selection of message tones, like, say, oh, from the memory card? (Possible with Samsung, though not LG.) Why can’t I customize the 4-way toggle to function in ways that I see fit? Why can’t I turn off the data connection when I know that I’m not going to use it, in order to prolong battery life? Why can’t I get a decent signal outside a metropolitan area, and why-oh-freakin’-why can’t LG produce a GSM phone with an earpiece that doesn’t make the person on the other end sound as though they’re gargling ferrets?

So yeah, I bought the stupid Sync, running through my self-determined allotment of phone expenditures from my tax refund. The first one’s screen was DOA out of the box, so I swapped it for another one. That was my first mistake. My second, and probably larger, was replacing the second Samsung with an LG CU575.

As I learned over the past twenty-four hours, the CU in LG’s nomenclature should be followed by “but not hear you.” In a service area in which most Nokias, virtually all Motorolas, and now the W580 perform just swell, the CU575’s radio has the attention span of Nipper on a Mountain Dew-Mochalatta cocktail; once it loses its signal you might as well pack up the sandwiches, fold up the blanket, and put an ad in the classifieds, because that puppy ain’t coming back on his own.

As bad as the CU575 was in terms of reception, its sound quality was worse; I feasted on an appetizer of braised static followed by roast distortion medallions with hollandaise dropouts. Afterward, apple-glazed noise rounded out an experience that can only be described as robustly inadequate. The CU575 did easily outperform the Samsung, though, as the Sync was unable to hold a signal long enough to even test its call quality.

The Sync also took longer than average to receive text messages, even after altering the message center from the default national number to an East Coast center. Didn’t make a difference; text messages took nearly two minutes to arrive, another area in which the CU575 outperformed the Sync, as its incoming texts arrived without delay. The Sync had a better screen than the LG, but came saddled with Samsung’s monkey shit interface, so you’d better be a huge fan of orange and black. It’s worth noting that the Hue from Alltel offers three different color schemes, so perhaps the blame for the Halloween UI should rest squarely with AT&T. The much newer A737 slider shares most of the same faults with the Sync, including the color scheme, though it seems to have marginally better reception in low-signal areas. For what it’s worth.

Samsung and LG make some of the best CDMA handsets out there (the Hue and the Scoop come immediately to mind), but once they step into the GSM arena they get pummeled like critical analysis at an Obama rally.

It’ll be a long time before I take a chance on those two unproven GSM entities again. For the moment, at least, I’m sticking with the familiar.

Thank You Ether Bunny!

It’s that time again. In a sweeping act of magnanimity, Uncle Sam has deigned to return some of the money that you paid into his compulsory interest-free loan program last year, and now, if you’re lucky, you get to spend a little of your own dough. Congratulations.

Nuncle, for all his high-minded altruism, has been a little slow on the payment this year, but that’s okay; he’s still got a few days before I send a couple associates over to start waling on those procrastinating patellas of his. I can afford to offer that extorting, sticky-fingered shitheel a little grace, because ol’ Cousin Cletus came through right quick with his payment.

State refunds don’t generally add up to as much as Federal refunds, but screw it; money’s money, and the good ol’ boys from Upyonder owed me enough to pay for this slick lil’ number right here. I was a bit wary of trusting the Sony-Ericsson amalgamation again, as I’m not a huge fan of their stuff, but I read some favorable impressions of the W580 and took a chance.

First off, I’m a sucker for anything that comes with extra stuff. The Nokia 6085 wooed me with irresistible phone swag the likes of which I haven’t seen in years, and the W580 nearly shadows it step-for-step; it included a data cable, a pretty decent pair of headphones, and a 256Mb Memory Stick Micro. Sony’s M2 stick-thing provides half as much storage as the 512Mb MicroSD card that came with the Nokia, but I’m not about to scoff at anything included in a retail phone box these days. Although it would be nice if Sony stopped trying to jam its proprietary (or semi-proprietary, as the M2 is a joint venture with SanDisk) storage formats down our resistant, TransFlash-using gullets, I’m not gonna complain.

My favorite feature of the W580 isn’t the intuitive music interface, or the competent 2.0 Megapixel camera, or even the deviously lickable screen, (and it’s certainly not the reception, which is adequately meh), but rather the color. I am, all things being equal, a pretty greasy bastard, so any phone that’s covered in slick, glossy black surfaces and little rubberized fingerprint-catching doohickeys basically makes me want to kick a dog. The W580’s silvery-white matte finish is perfect for those of us whose ears produce more oil than Satan, and who can’t stand to have their stuff continuously slathered in a fine layer of goo.

The earpiece on the W580 has a sweet spot with a narrow margin for error, so if you don’t position the thing just right against your ear, you lose about half the available volume. Had I not found the fix for this in relatively short order (and had I not, like the Supreme Dillhole of All I Survey®, immediately lost the receipt), I would have packed it up and returned it forthwith to its place of origin or to the nearest convenient parallel dimension. Luckily, sense prevailed and I moved the frikken’ thing around a bit while talking. Whoo. Ready diploma now me is.

Another of the W580’s nifty features is the ability to use any downloaded media file in any way you wish, whether as wallpaper or as a ring tone or message tone. Sounds simple, sure, but not all phones support this. In another rare bit of customization that’s rapidly going the way of common sense and good taste, it also allows changing the shortcuts mapped to the 4-way selector. Samsung? LG? Take notes. There’ll be a quiz.

Don’t bother with this bad boy if orange isn’t your thing. It’s everywhere; on the keys, the logos, the menus, you name it. That’s a stylistic preference, though, and doesn’t affect the quality of the end product in any practical way. In general, the W580 pulls in a good enough signal and offers a generous multimedia experience, and if you prefer the bar or slider form over clamshells, it’s hard to pinpoint a reasonable gripe here.

Where Do We Go?

Corporations are good at getting you to spend money. They employ entire firms of people whose sole function is to discover myriadly multipluous methods of removing you from your hard-earned scratch, even if it’s against your better judgment and intent. No foul here, it’s just what they do–no point in decrying the egg for being egg-shaped, after all.

One of the methods by which these nefarious shitbags accomplish their pecuniary sleight of hand is to increase the perception of a product or service’s value without actually delivering anything of significant utility. At Large Specialty Retail Chain, or Greedy Assholes Making Employees Sixty-Third Overall Priority, they trained us to increase the profit perceived value of a sale by aggressively pitching an assload of things that the customer usually didn’t want or need, most often in the form of reservations, subscriptions, and accessories. You’ve seen that tactic before, no doubt. (And would you like a nice hot apple pie with that? Sure! Does it come with a first aid kit so I can repair the damage to my tongue from the scrumptious molten aluminum apple-cinnamon filling?) Mmmm, skin grafts.

Corporations that offer ubiquitous subscription-based services, such as cable and cell phones, find themselves in a particularly tough spot when it comes to increasing revenue, profit, stock prices and, ultimately, the value of executives’ options. Once they’ve saturated a market with subscribers (consider how many people you know who don’t have a cell phone), what comes next? Aside from raising their rates, a decidedly unpopular tactic if one ever pulled on mukluks and ran naked around the boardroom, the only alternative they’ve got is to offer more crap you don’t want.

Every day we hear about 3G. New 3G this, HSPDA/UMTS/W-CDMA that, and up until recently my most pressing question was “what in the sweet holy concrete Christmas fruitcake hell do all those letters mean?!” Now that I know what they mean, I’ll share them with you and spread joy and peppermint bunny poop o’er the land.

Ready? Brace yourself.

To the average cell phone user, they mean exactly dick. To the CEO of Very Large Mobility, Inc., they mean a few things. An obscenely large yacht. A chateau in southern Switzerland. Early retirement. An embarrassingly younger girlfriend with enormous hooters.

Hmm.

Oh yes. Anyway. 3G, which is a term that indicates the third generation of cell phone technology, translates to faster and broader data rates, along with increased network capacity and lower battery life. If you plan on using your phone to watch TV or surf the web while you drive Cody and Tyler to their no-score everybody-wins tee ball game, that’s a Good Thing. If, like most of us, you use your phone only for calls and texts, 3G sounds about as appealing as a catshit soufflé, and even less useful.

I don’t care about 3G data services, or HSDPA speeds of between 300k to 3Mbps. Each of the 3G GSM phones that I’ve used have drained the life from a battery faster than Jay Leno could harsh the collective buzz at a Pride Parade. I’m not going to videoconference or download songs to my phone through any provider’s expensive-as-civet-poo proprietary music service, and apparently neither are most people, which explains the slow buy-in from the majority of phone users to a system that they simply do not need.

But again, this is what they do, these duplicitous asswipes. They spend billions licensing the spectrum and developing the infrastructure for these networks, and then they spend even more inventing the demand. They roll the cost into overpriced data plans so that Mr. iPhone Q. Dingleberry can surf the web and tap-tap tappity-tap his greasy, fingerprint-smudged screen until the aftershocks of Steve Jobs’ sanctimonious orgasm can be felt by every angora herder in Ankara. Hey, send me a picture message, would you, Mr. iPhone? What? No? Just as I thought.

3G and its various acronymed appellations can only be as useful as the content and functionality allow, delivered at a price that the average Jim Average is comfortable with. So while we lag behind countries like Japan and South Korea in terms of interface deployment, we do pretty well at not slobbering the corporate knob to toe the line at the adoption of gratuitous and questionably useful technology.

I’ll take it.