I just recently had to get a new cell phone because my old one was dying (the microphone was giving out). The Verizon store didn’t have the one model that I was really interested in, so I settled for another model (an Audiovox phone).
After spending nearly 2 weeks with it, I really came to hate it. Here’s why:
- It had no “one-beep” ring option (great for meetings; I never feel my phone when it vibrates)
- It only stores 10 voice memos (this is a deal breaker for me; I record oodles of voice memos when driving back and forth to Bloomington)
- When you delete a voice memo, it jumps back up to the first voice memo (this is quite annoying that you have to scroll all the way back down again)
- It takes 7 clicks to make a voice memo
- Closing the lid automatically aborts just about everything (like a voice memo — as opposed to finishing and saving a voice memo)
- dialing from addressbook always defaults to the cell phone entry — you can’t have a different default (E.g., home phone) for each addressbook entry
This made that phone unworkable for me. So I exercised the “you can return/exchange your phone within 15 days” policy and got a Motorola phone. It was a bit more expensive, but it has a lot more of the features that I wanted:
- 1-touch voice memos
- Voice memos are bounded by memory capacity, not the number of memos
- The addressbook is a little different; you actually have a different entry for cell/home/office for each person, but I can get used to that — at least I can easily pick which one I want to call
- It doesn’t have a one-beep ring, but I guess I can get used to that (I couldn’t find any phones that had a one-beep ring, actually) — it does have different “profiles” of ring style (loud, soft, etc.)
And last, I accidentally found out today that my phone actually has Bluetooth. I’ve long disdained Bluetooth because it’s fundamentally insecure, but it does allow one signficant feature that I plan to use frequently — the fact that I can sync my Mac addressbook to my phone. YES!!! Tiger’s iSync natively supports talking my phone, so now all the phone numbers in my phone exactly match my Addressbook (and I can activate Bluetooth selectively in my phone so that it’s only on when I synchronize with my Mac; that’s secure enough for me).
I FINALLY have one and only one addressbook (Mac had previously allowed me to consolidate IM, E-mail, and PDA, now I finally can share it with my phone). Waaaa-hoooooooooooo!