if you missed the quote, it’s a misquote from Full Moon wo Sagashite anime.. should translate to “Searching for a cell phone”, if neither me nor Chris White are too drunk.
How much difficult can be to find a new cellphone? It’s not like I have the same string requirements that Ariya Hidayat has (by the way, if Ariya is reading, I think Nokia still produce a phone similar to the old 5110, that should what you need.. but it’s not that cheap either, €59 here it seems), and I’m happy with the phones that are currently in trend, if they have a price I can afford.
First of all, why should I be looking for a new phone? I bought the Motorola V180 I’m using just last year, and works perfectly fine, and I’m not going to archive it yet. The issue is completely different. First of all, that phonenumber is the one I use for my work (and for Gentoo too, being the one I gave to the rest of the council 😉 ), and sometimes you really need to shut your job off; add to that that I forgot it in clear text in my curriculum vitæ, so it’s all but “private” right now.
Add to that the “issue” that my provider is Wind but almost all my friends use Vodafone instead, to the result that I’m almost never called when something is up (because it will costs too much to them), although I changed my plan to one that allows me to not spend that much.
The two only requirements I had for this new phone were: a) clamshell form factor, as I found myself quite comfortable with the V180 b) UMTS support (because if I hope hard enough, next time the idiots whom I pay for the DSL line take a month to fix a cable I’ll have UMTS around here at least to keep up with my mails).
Of course, my brand of preference was Motorola, as the V180 is the third Motorola phone I used, and I always had positive experiences, especially with regard to solidity. I removed from the “viable” list Nokia (because I hate T9, I prefer Motorola’s iTAP if I have to use an auto-composer), Samsung and LG (because both of those two are quite fragile, to my experience). The first thing I found on Motorola’s site was the V1075, a good UMTS phone, that was “exclusive Vodafone”.. but I couldn’t buy it from their own e-Shop. Today I was able to look for it in two shops and it’s totally sold out… such a phone at €150 was not bad at all.
Now, I can understand, if it’s sold out, it’s sold out. But you put on your site a model that is available only through Vodafone, and their site tells you that’s no more available? By the way, during the night between Sunday and Monday, the e-Shop actually reported the phone as available, but it couldn’t be bought anyway… not much professionalism from both Vodafone and Motorola, if they still list it in their list of phones with special discounts but it’s not available.
Now, my current choice would be the V3x, that is pretty interesting phone, but the €360 official price is way over what I can spend on it, even with the new job going to back me up; MediaWorld (the one that in Germany is called MediaMarkt) seems to have it at a 30% discount, €250, which is somehow acceptable to me, but they don’t allow me to buy it from the site, which means it’s unlikely they’ll have it available on site 🙁 I’ll go looking for it in the next days, but I don’t count on that either, although the official price might go down a bit in the next months with the announce of the new KRZR.
I’m afraid that I’ll have to live with the same phone used for friends and work, which means my friend won’t be able to reach me when I’m going to take my total breaks 😛 (not like they try to reach me that much anyway…).
One of the other things I was tempted to do, was to help with the kdebluetooth package, especially knowing Marco “RockMan” Gulino is looking for help to release a new version, so that the new KMobileTools will work as intended, too, but without a bluetooth phone is difficult to do 😛
Suggestions are accepted… I was looking at the models from NEC (because I remember a good old phone I had of them, pretty good indeed), but their site is not the best of the designs, I cannot see it plenty on Konqueror without Flash Player, I’ll see if I can look better at it with the Mac, but the images I’ve seen from Konqueror of their clamshell models aren’t really of a design I like :/
