My Dream Phone

I finally found my dream cell phone. I’ve gone through so many phones, from my first gray clunky Moto flip phone in 1995 to my trusty T-Mobile branded Sony Ericsson T610 (and a lot of Nokia in-between), and I’ve never had one I really liked. Every few years, when I go to buy a phone, I’m always so baffled that I can’t find something that really impresses me. Here’s a market segment that people for years have been predicting is the future and will outsell any other computing platform, and no one can truly get it right?

I recently set about upgrading my T610. My first try was the black Moto Razr first, but it drove me nuts! My main complaints are that its UI was very poorly designed and its Bluetooth sync didn’t interface well with my car. So, I returned the Razr.

In its place, I just bought an unlocked Sony Ericsson K750i. Oh man, what a phone! My two big complaints with the T610 were poor reception and slow UI. Smallish memory is also a problem, but I worked around it.

The 750i resolves those problems and much, much more. The reception on this phone is the best I’ve had for a cell phone; works great! The UI? Its the most intuitive, handy, responsive, and good-looking UI I’ve yet seen in a cell phone — the recent calls menu and event viewer screen are particular standouts. It has a built-in MP3/MP4/WAV player and plays videos too (MP4 and other formats). The Bluetooth (1.2 I think) is much faster than the Razr and the T610 and supports a “remote control” profile that lets me control OS X in some interesting ways (but I still prefer Salling Clicker for that). When syncing or transferring data, it displays granular progress indicators rather than the opaque “doing something” indicators on other phones I’ve used.

The phone works wonderfully with my car — much faster than the T610 and just as functional. Much better than the Razr. It works very well with my Motorola H500 bluetooth headset (discovers it quickly every time and gracefully disconnects). And wow! Salling Clicker works so well. I’ve never had a phone that is able to use the Salling Clicker Java client, and on this phone it rocks. Much better than the pure Bluetooth cilent the T610 used (I never tried with the Razr).

And, it has a built-in 2 megapixel camera that also works very well, and a memory card slot (Sony’s proprietary Memory Stick… grrr….).

But rambling about features, that’s not really the point. The phone reminds me so much of my Apple products: its well-designed, polished, slick, and Just Works, usually exactly the way I want it to. Its the first cell phone I’ve been truly satisfied with. I highly recommend it.

(I am aware that Sony’s new models, including a replacement for the K750i, are right around the corner, but I just can’t wait for them. Besides, with a whole new Bluetooth stack, I’m worried that it won’t work with iSync, Salling Clicker, and my car out of the box — and that’s a show-stopper for me.)