Tech Talk, Part I

I haven't done a good gadget post in a long time, but it's not because I haven't had gadget news to tell. It seems like a good time to revive my consumer electronics musings, given new promptings on both the home and work fronts.

As you all know, I have a deep love of HTC phones; my last phone posting in December 2008 was a rave about the AT&T FUZE. I couldn't bring myself to indulge in the crazy purchase price, and after trying out multiple unsatisfactory phones during the previous month, I found myself an HTC 8525 on eBay to provide me some comfort. It should be noted that, immediately after this debacle, my blogging frequency declined precipitously. Coincidence? I think not. I still mourn the 8125 days, when my phone was happy and blogging was easy.

Fast-forward to a year later; my 8525, at the end of a couple of months of weird sluggish performance, dies an untimely death just before I'm set to travel home for Christmas. (As a bonus, my cordless phone battery died at the same time, so for a solid day I was without any phone at all.) I felt nervous about traveling without a cell (how quickly our technology aid becomes a technology crutch), so I headed into the T-Mobile store to convince them to show me the good handset love. In the intervening year, both the HTC craze and the Android craze had swept the nation. Somehow, I allowed myself to be talked into a Motorola CLIQ, in the belief that T-Mobile's online backup features would make up for the contact sync failings of the G1.

Not so fast, sister. Attempting to sync my contacts through T-Mobile Backup was as aggravating as any other Outlook-to-Android solution previously tried; plus I discovered that T-Mobile had somehow creepily kept copies of test pictures I took when I was trying out my Blackberry Curve (I didn't even know they'd been synced online in any way). But the true deal-breaker was the fact that the CLIQ with its MOTOBLUR functions was like a hyperactive child that drains all your energy - literally, all my battery power was out within 8 hours. Yes, I was charging up the battery properly, and yes, I tried turning off all the social networking features; despite all that, and despite turning my phone off for much of my train ride home, I had so little battery power that I had to borrow a stranger's phone to call my sister to pick me up from the station, instead of using the brand-new phone I'd purchased days earlier.

In a white rage, I returned to the T-Mobile store when I got back to Boston, and convinced the store manager that they'd darn well better give me a new smartphone for the sale price at which I had bought the CLIQ, regardless of whether their holiday sale was over. (I think he may have been afraid that I was about to go all Mad Black Woman on him.) Irritated and exhausted, I took the manager's recommendation for time-tested reliability over flash and fun, and I finally boarded the Blackberry bus, with a Bold 9700. Pros: email setup is the easiest thing in the world, and syncing with Outlook is the second easiest. Cons: small keyboard (but thankfully QWERTY), small screen, no stylus, no touch screen.

I've had a love/hate relationship with my Blackberry since I bought it. It does my PDA stuff pretty well - certainly much better than any Android phone - but there are little features of its PIM applications, its phone options, and how screen selection works that just drive me batty. There are a number of useful and entertaining applications from Blackberry App World; but I always feel cramped by the small screen I have to work on. The keyboard also cramps my style, because as much as I have developed my skill at Blackberry typing, writing anything longer than a couple paragraphs is very uncomfortable. (Also, see aforementioned screen issue for trying to read what you just typed.)

So I've been struggling since January with the fact that I have a basically functional phone, but I just don't like it very much. Or, at least, I had a basically functional phone for a while ...

Up next: Part II - The Phone That Didn't Love Me, and Why No Laptop Lives Forever