weill aspects

originally posted october 23, 2005

In Praise of Dumb Phones

You wouldn't notice it by the many unpacked boxes that still litter the lower level of my house, but I've spent many years trying to get organized. Back in my sophomore year of high school, I got myself a PalmPilot Personal Edition. The 512 kilobytes of memory helped keep track of all my work and what few notes I took. It wasn't until 2002 that I finally broke down and bought a mobile phone. Seeking to reduce my gadget load, I bought a Handspring Treo 270 "smartphone" in the summer of 2003. As 2004 gave way to 2005 I began to phase out the Treo 270 in favor of a new toy: the Motorola v180, T-Mobile's second-cheapest phone. Why would I downgrade to such a lowly piece of crap device for communication?

It's Tiny

One thing I never liked about the Treo was that it was about as big as the Palm III that it replaced. The thumb-sized keyboard made the device fairly wide, the 160x160-pixel screen made it tall, and the flip cover made it thick. It fit easily in a jacket pocket but in the summer I had to either stuff it in my laptop bag or strap it to my belt.

The v180, meanwhile, has few buttons besides the 0-9, *, and # telephone keys. It's also a flip phone so it's not terribly thin, but it's so narrow that I can simply stuff it into my pocket with my keys or wallet. It even fits into the little pocket-watch pocket on my jeans. No little leather or neoprene case is needed beacuse…

It's Disposable

Ever since I got my first PalmPilot, which cost me some $300 in high-school dollars, I've had this compulsion to clothe my consumer electronics in form-fitting protective cases. My Treo came with a case that the seller provided. The v180 came with no such case, so it just gets stuffed into a pocket. I really don't care if it gets scratched or scuffed or dropped on the ground since all the phone numbers are reproduced on my laptop and contained on the tiny SIM card that'll go into my next phone as well.

In January of this year the flip lid snapped right off of the Treo while I was in the middle of a phone call. I ended up buying a replacement lid from eBay and having the seller install it. Total cost: about $60, nearly as much as my disposable phone cost brand-new.

It Lasts Forever On a Charge

The Treo, which I admittedly bought used, would hold its charge for barely two days at a time with light usage. The batteries were built-in so if I wanted to replace them, I'd be at the mercy of mail-in repair services either from Handspring, Palm Inc., or some other site from eBay. The smartphone did everything but I'd have to bring a charger everywhere I went. Interestingly, after I took out the SIM card and turned off the cell-phone component of the Treo, the batteries lasted for weeks. I don't know whether the Treo's battery was too small or its radio too power-hungry, but my newer tiny phone can last a solid week on a charge — and if that's not good enough, I can grab an extra battery and be good for another week at a time.

I'm Not a Business Traveler

T-Mobile barely even considers me a "customer" in any meaningful sense. I use the phone so little that the $30 per month plan is enough for me: 300 anytime minutes, unlimited weekend minutes, and no such thing as nighttime minutes. Most smartphones I've seen out there are owned by frequent business travelers who might genuinely need to run a pocket-sized web browser while sitting in a waiting room or send a few thousand e-mails while on the go. I didn't even sign up for the $20/month add-on plan that would have let me use the Treo as a wireless Internet device.

I have enough off-line documents and applicatiosn on my laptop to get work done or amuse myself without Internet connectivity. If my company wants me to be connected everywhere all the time, they can buy me all the data service they want.

It'll Be Obsolete and I Won't Care

I can't envision spending $500 on a brand-new smartphone. It'd be nice to have an organizer, a Bluetooth modem, a spiffy remote control for my computer, an MP3 player, and so forth all on hand, except I don't want to be tied to a service provider. T-Mobile's service is crappy enough in Pittsburgh; even if I were to move to a different neighborhood I'd be in a bad spot if a high-end smartphone became just an oversized, overpriced date book.

About the only thing I miss about the Treo is a memo pad. I wish I could have a way to take notes on hand at any time. Fortunately I've put in an order for some Picopads, wallet-sized note pads with a tiny pen to match. (The pen, naturally, is what makes them worth the few bucks they cost.) I don't mind that my notes won't sync back up with my computer; I just need to make sure I don't forget anything important.

Stay tuned for my update in the next few months when I foolishly buy a Sidekick III and turn out to love it. Technology moves too fast for me to plant myself into the sand.

Back to October 2005, or to the year 2005.

Where am I?

This is Weill Aspects, the official news archive of Jason Weill Web Productions. All articles posted to the front page end up here. This page was generated automatically by a series of Perl scripts.

Articles in Weill Aspects are organized solely by date. You may find the Google search in the left column to be useful if you are looking for an article but do not know the date on which it was posted.

Weill Aspects is composed of static web pages generated as appropriate when a new article is posted. It was developed in May 2001 as a way of managing the content on this site. I also used it extensively while in Japan, during which time I did not have continuous access to the Internet. I was able to write daily updates during July and August 2002, pack the files onto a CD-R or memory device, and upload them from the Internet-connected computers at school.

These scripts are all hacked together in less than elegant fashion, and I don't plan to release them. Some of the design that went into Aspects also was used to develop Livestat, a suite of Perl scripts to process statistics for academic competition tournaments. Livestat is available freely.