Mobile Madness

My wife and I have been looking to replace our mobile phones for quite some time. We got our phones in the summer of 2007 (back when we were living in Cincinnati, no less). She got a Sanyo Katana and I got a first-generation Motorola Q. These were our first new phones since 2004, so we were quite excited.

Hate-Hate Relationship

The Moto Q enabled me to browse the web on-the-go for the first time. And man, was it liberating! Applications like Google Maps, Skype, and Octrotalk literally changed the way I lived and worked. Having it meant that I was connected anytime I wanted to be.

But I slowly realized the handful of applications that would be the most beneficial to me were hard to find, or non-existent. Battery life dropped off drastically, it became excruciatingly slow to the extent that I even performed a master reset. (Which brought to light the harsh reality that there was no reliable way to synchronize the contacts with my Mac.) Performance continued to degrade, and it’s now almost 2 years after that point.

We have had the opportunity to upgrade to new phones via an “upgrade credit” from Sprint. But that means extending our contract another two years, which we just weren’t willing do to, because…

iPhone

During that same time, while I struggled daily with my Windows Mobile-powered device, Apple announced and released the iPhone (original, 3G, and 3GS); which have unequivocally and irreversibly changed the mobile phone landscape. Prior to the iPhone, “smartphones” may have been smart, but they were hardly ready for the masses. Nobody can claim that a pre-iPhone Treo or BlackBerry offered a better end user experience than the iPhone provides.

All that being said, we’d love to switch to at&t and get iPhones; but that involves a significant long-term cost investment which we’re just not willing to make. But if we don’t end up with iPhones by June of 2011, we should have just taken Sprint up on their offer and gotten better phones to tide us over.

Time will tell, I suppose!