New Phone inside!
Okay — I’ve been wanting a new, special, magical color cell phone for a while. But I could never really justify getting one. At all. I mean, why in the world do I need one? Just so I can dial in full color? No. I think not.
Meanwhile, on the other side of my pocket sits my Sharp Zaurus — an incredibly cool little device that I’ve had for a year… but not very useful for me because I hate carrying a cell phone AND a pda around — especially a PDA the size of my Zaurus. This is no little Palm. It’s a mini-laptop almost, with its slide-out keyboard, etc… Nope. I just can’t use it enough to justify it as a PDA. As an incredibly small (but slow) linux laptop, it would fit the bill, but not as a portable organizer tool. And the problem is this: I actually need some level of organization because I keep getting my brain cross-wired between projects.
So the Zaurus is out — thanks to eBay, it ’s out for 300 bucks to some guy in Hong Kong who isn’t aware that I got the thing as a floor model for $150.
And this little thing is in. A Motorola MPx200.
As soon as I read the review on MSNBC.com a couple of months ago, I was pretty sure this was the phone for me. I liked the idea of combining a PDA with a phone — but not in those Pocket PC phone devices that look like a PDA with an antenna. Those are too huge for me and they’re apparently an absolute pain to dial and navigate as a phone because they were basically meant to be a PDA with a phone tacked on.
But this one is a phone with PDA tacked on. Now, I’ve seen plenty of attempts at this — but this is apparently the first Mobile Windows-based model to hit the US (they’re apparently very popular in Europe and Asia, but for some reason the US sits in the back of the bus when it comes to receiving the latest in cell phone technology.)
The bottom line? I really like it.
Now if only I could figure out how to make toast with it.