The (old) Licquia Family Blog

This is the old blog site, powered by a simple blogging system called Blosxom. It's here to keep old links from breaking, and for whatever historic interest might remain.

Here's the current site.



Sun, 15 Jun 2003

New toy: cell phone

The accident a few weeks ago confirmed the need for me to carry a cell phone. We've had one for a long time now, but just one; as it turned out, Tami was more likely to carry it than I am. So, last weekend, Tami and I upgraded the phone we had, and got a second one. Of course, being a gadget geek, we had to get the so-called "third generation" phones, with the Internet connectivity, text messages, pictures, and so on.

Our old phone was with Sprint PCS; for various reasons, we chose to stay with Sprint. The other carriers had various problems; coverage in Champaign was iffy with AT&T, T-Mobile didn't roam, and we've had bad experiences with Cingular. (Come to think of it, Verizon wasn't represented at the Best Buy where we checked all this out. Can anyone comment on their services?) We both got Sanyo 8100 phones; Sprint and Sanyo both have information on it. (Sprint doesn't seem to believe in permalinks, so the Sprint link might not work for you.)

Sprint's philosophy towards their services is interesting. Whenever possible, they seem to want to make advances services use the Internet. This means that the Wireless Web service is key to just about everything they do that isn't traditional phone territory, including text messaging, pictures, downloadable features (like ring tones), and so on. This has its drawbacks; its text messaging interface, for example, is a little bit clunky. I do like the general idea, though, as it seems to be trivial to add services to the phone.

On the other hand, there are signs that some parts of Sprint are a bit behind the curve on Internet integration. Picture access is a good example. It, like everything else, is Internet-based; when you send pictures to other phone users, you get Short Mail (Sprint's name for text messaging) with a URI you select that takes you to the Web site to view the picture. They do this for both phones, where it makes sense, and Internet E-mail, where it doesn't; why they don't just attach the picture to the E-mail is a mystery. Downloading is possible, but you have to click on a link; you end up with a ZIP file of the JPEG-encoded picture, which is redundant, since JPEGs are already compressed. All of this makes it difficult to send pictures to your computer that can be picked up by a script and automatically saved. (Difficult, but not impossible; I've already done it, and am working now on auto-posting of pictures to this site.)

Verdict on American third-generation phones: nice, but still not where they need to be.

Jun 15, 2003 | Comments are no longer available