[geeks] Opinions on T-Mobile and Verizon

[Mike Meredith]

On Sat, 24 Nov 2007 07:27:51 -0500, James Fogg wrote:
> sometimes even by Bluetooth (more often by USB). I find only children
> use the big pay-for features like sending photos, watching videos and
> continual TXTing.

Curious because TXTing is *enormous* in Europe and it isn't just
children who do it ... I regularly get texts from my mum who has to put
in reading glasses to read the phone screen (just a little hint as to
how old she is).

> > On a related note: cell data plans cost too much.  Are there
> > any decent phones out there with WIFI?

There's plenty of *smartphones* with WiFi and some of those make very
good (and very expensive) 'just phones' (my Nokia E90 is great ... nice
and chunky, good audio, and reasonable buttons). The downside of WiFi
is the power requirement ... my old N80i would only last a day or less
if the VoIP was particularly active.

> your phone-only desires. Honestly, I find only techie business users
> really ever push a phone to it's full abilities. That's why I got the
> Samsung with the keyboard. I rarely use the advanced features, but

I suspect most smartphone users settle down to only using a subset of
the features; that subset varies a lot so you need *all* the features
to get a useful phone. For instance the big application I use is my
diary; whereas a colleague ignores the diary and loves mobile email.

As to WiFi there is one killer application that should use Wifi on a
'just phone' device ... VoIP. I use VoIP at two fixed locations (home
and work) and cell calls elsewhere.

-- 
Mike Meredith (http://zonky.org/)
 Power corrupts; Powerpoint corrupts absolutely.
 -- Vint Cerf