A carnival of technology

I like the idea of cellular phones. Telephones began with the idea of assigning a number to a place or a purpose, whereas cell phones assign a number to a person, and I like that idea. I can move outside of the range of my land line exchange or be traveling in a different state, and calling my phone still means calling me rather than calling my home. It provides a freedom similar to that of email where an address follows a person forever (with certain restrictions imparted by technological limitations: the phone company doesn’t appreciate it if you move to a different area code). Phone calls are placed with the intent of contacting a person rather than a place, so the model that cellular phones create seems like a sensible evolution of telephone technology.

I’m actually fairly new the cell phone scene. I didn’t have a phone throughout college, and I got just by using whatever phone was handy wherever I was. I bought my first phone in 2004 when I moved to the Smyrna apartment with Mike, and it’s since been my only phone number. There was a landline in the Smyrna apartment only because the Moshelink ISP could only service a regular phone line, but I’ve since dropped even that and just have a dry pair running to my apartment to provide Internet service. I’m no longer in the phone book, and I’ll never again receive money from Nielsen Media Research (I never did fill out that survey. I guess I should have split that money with Mike, but it was only five bucks.). It felt very liberating to end my forced relationship with BellSouth, and I hope never to go back.

As for my choice in actual phones, I started out only wanting the most basic phone possible. I don’t want a PDA or a mobile computing platform. I’m not nearly organized enough to get any use out of PDA, I don’t care whether my phone can play ten seconds of an obnoxious pop song every time someone calls me, and phones really sucks as computers. My first phone was a Samsung something or another, and besides being a phone it was able to be an alarm clock, play nibbles or something, send and receive SMS messages and act as an AIM client. SMS and AIM are features that have grown on me. I like the idea of being able to send text messages in situations where it’s inappropriate to talk, though I don’t understand why some people choose to tap out messages a third of a letter at time outside of these instances. In any case, the Samsung whatever was a very simple phone, and it cost -$10 after rebate (I think it was $20 before). I liked it.

I broke that phone in 2006. I took a turn too fast on my bicycle and landed on the pocket that the phone was in. At first the only problem seemed to be the cracked screen, so I just made do without being able to see the last digit or two of any number, but after a while I found it more and difficult to find and hold a signal. Time for a new phone. My second phone, the one I use now, is a Motorola V195, which was the cheapest thing I was able to find ($20 after signing another year or two of my life over to the Germans). This phone does a lot more crap. It can play those wave file ringtones, run Java applications and who knows what else. I didn’t care about any of this at first and just appreciated the phone for its ability to be a phone and very long battery life. As an added bonus, the power connector is a mini-USB port, so I can hook the phone up to the computer and download my numbers without having to buy a special cable. It’s been a pretty nice phone, but my error was when I started mashing those buttons and began looking at it as a mobile computing platform.

It all started with those bus rides. I have a bad habit of packing unreadable tomes to entertain me on my commute, and I figured out that for an extra $5 a month I can use the phone to browse the web, instead. I started doing that, sometimes reading news instead of reading books, checking the weather, and searching google to settle bar arguments when no one can find the right book to answer questions about Prince’s age or the capital of South Dakota. The window the phone provides into the Web really sucks, but it works pretty alright for occasional, casual use. More recently, though, I found that Google has a phone application for Google Maps, and I thought I’d give that a try. Maps are nice, so maybe this thing can help me find something the next time I head off into the world completely unprepared. The problem with this is that T-Mobile, like other phone companies, would prefer that I buy my Java applications through them, so they make life inconvenient for everyone else.

The phone’s Java platform makes use of all those security level calls that most people ignore when programing Java, like the one that determines whether you have permission to access the network. This is great and all—I wouldn’t want some jerk’s app sending data all over the place without my permission—but the implementation of the security prompt leaves a little to be desired. There are four choices presented with every data network access attempt: yes always, yes this time, no this time, and no always. Since Google Maps is an unsigned application, I don’t get the first choice, so I have to stop and reauthorize the program every time I pan or zoom. That sucks. There’s a way around it, but it involves messing with my phone’s firmware.

Connecting computers to phones seems to be one of those areas where the programs available in Windows aren’t in any better shape than the ones available in Linux. My best bet seems to be the programs available at the moto4lin project, but I haven’t been able to get very far with it. All of the plugging and unplugging the phone I’ve been doing seems to have gotten out of sync, so I’m probably going to have to reboot my phone or the computer or both (or it could be that the warning messages are correct and I really do need a new cable) before I continue. I hope I don’t have to buy a new phone at the end of this.