The Internet in My Pants

For about a week now my goal has been to get the Internet in my pants. That is to say, I’d like a smart phone that lets me do Internet-y things like send e-mail, txt, get maps, read RSS, post photos to my Flickr account, blog a bit, etc. I don’t need it to be a media player or take videos. I’m not even sure that I want it to open Office docs.

Why do I need a smart phone? I have no idea. Not like I have any one calling me or texting me. Nor will I use it to conduct business. The Cat has suggested that it is a toy and she is mostly right. We don’t use our cell phones to communicate much (either her’s is out of juice or mine is MIA). I just feel like we are missing out on some sort of important technology. Like the people who said that the Internet was just a fad. I don’t want to be that old guy who can’t understand why you can only use your phone to pay for groceries come 2025.

It should be easy to pick out a phone, but it’s not. I tend to obsess over purchases, read reviews and comments and generally troll the Web looking for some one to endorse the product I’ve latched on to. Cell phone reviews lack consistency. If a reviewer loves a phone on one site, then another reviewer hates it on another site. Same for user reviews; they never match the sites review. And of course there are at least 2 users that said the phone didn’t work at all or broke with in seconds of turning it on.

All that being said, my quest goes on. I’m looking for a phone that:

• Is more smart phone and not so much a PDA (I’m looking at you Treo).
• Has a full QWERTY keyboard. None of that regular phone keypad crap. And it should slide out; I don’t care for the phones that open like a laptop.
• Can surf the Internet. I realize that it’s not going to be everything on the Internet, but it should be close.
• Has a camera. Nothing fancy, but most have 1.3 megapixel now.
• Can handle to do some Web 2.0 stuff, so I guess Java or some such.

I’ve been looking at two phones. Both from T-Mobile: the MDA or the Sidekick 3. Both have the features I want but the MDA has a bit more and is slightly more adult. One interesting little gizmo is the Sony Mylo. It’s not quite a phone; you don’t pay for a service cause it runs on WiFi, which limits where you can actually use the thing. But it has Skype and Google Chat to offset its lack of anywhere phone service. The Cat and I played around with them at the Sony store. I was pretty impressed and if it was cheaper I probably would have picked one up. Everyone seems on fire about the Q; I’ll have to read about that one, though it doesn’t have the slide keyboard. People the hell out of the Blackberry Pearl also, but I don’t like the keypad.

One thing I don’t understand is the phone stores. They either don’t have any phones set up so you can actually use them or the phones are dummy shells. Doesn’t anyone test the things before they buy? I used an employee’s MDA at one store (his browser history had porn in it) and they couldn’t find a Sidekick for me to mess with. They should have had both fired up and ready to go to entice me. At the Sony store they didn’t even provide their little Mylo with a good WiFi signal. I used it on a weak signal that was just floating around.

If anyone can think of a phone that would satisfy my requirements just let me know.

By the way, Amazon has some pretty good phone deals.