I should begin by explaining that I haven’t paid a phone bill in over seven years. We don’t have a land line at home and Amy and I have benefited from being the recipients of cell phones on corporate or personal calling plans that are not our accounts. So as a beggar I can’t be a chooser. Well, as the IT Director, responsible for the corporate AT&T mobile account, I can pretty much choose any phone I want with one big exception, an iPhone (it’s a long story about a contract).
If I were a paying mobile phone user I would definitely be carrying an Android phone. Not an iPhone because let’s face the obvious, AT&T’s mobile coverage sucks. There’s no way to sugar coat it, the service is just bad. Not long ago my Samsung Blackjack II got stolen. I made a big mistake and replaced it with a Windows Mobile 6.0 LG Incite touch screen. I doubt I can explain how bad this phone performed but I’ll try.
To start the phone looks like a cosmetic case. It even comes with a mascara wand (the stylus) which doesn’t attach to the phone. It just hangs from a little string. How gay. So I threw out the stylus and learned to navigate the painful Windows mobile touch OS with my fingernail. Until the screen froze. It froze a lot. Each time I had to take the battery out to restart the phone.
Add to all this that the phone wouldn’t respond to attempts to answer it and it was a waste of time. So I got another phone. This time I put criteria in place to be met. The phone had to 1. Make and receive calls. 2. Have respectable battery life. 3. Browse the interwebs and 4. Be easy to type on for email and texts.
So I got a Samsung Jack. So far, so good. The phone certainly looks pro business, almost identical in style and size to a Blackberry Curve. I like QWERTY keyboards a little more than softkeys. Windows Mobile 6.1 is better than 6.0 and plays better with non touch screen phones. I’ll see how the Jack does for a few weeks. If I don’t like it in 30 days I can send it back for something else.