I Need A New Phone

(10 May 2010)

It is true.

My current phone is a Blackberry 8100 Pearl which I got three years ago. I know it is three years because I got it either just before or just after being on leave when my youngest was born, and he's just turned 3.

The phone has changed how I use my cellphone. This one is both small enough to fit in my pocket, and is good enough to do basic internet browsing with. I probably do more recreational browsing through it than I do with a desktop computer, and considering all I do is check hockey scores or read Google Reader posts with it, that says a lot.

There's a lot it can't do, but I rarely feel bothered by it.

So anyways, yes it is three years old. I upgraded the firmware on it to a v4.5, up from the v4.1 I did have. The reasoning for that was to make the Bluetooth work better (I wanted to use it to stream music) but that turned out to be a waste of time for the most part (since I never got a device I could stream music to via Bluetooth). It is slower than it was, exhausts some memory periodically (the web browser claims that "this page is too big to fit in the device memory" requiring a battery pull) and the trackball pearl doesn't work as well as it used to.

And I've had it three years. So, time for a new toy.

So, here are some things I want a new phone to do:

Must:

• be a blackberry (see my post about iPhone Mail Filtering)
• be a phone

Should:

• have a nice web browser
• have WiFi as an option
• fit in my pocket
• play music
• have a camera of better-than-no-camera-at-all quality or better
• be of a cost that I can sell the wife on spending

Toys:

• GPS

This is the thing. What I am considering is a Storm 2. A Blackberry 9520, to be precise, since that should come with radios that will use the Rogers networks properly.

I've found an eBay company which sells "refurbished" phones from other companies, and I can get a Storm 9520 for US$350 (not too bad with today's exchange rate). Shipped out of Toronto, so there are no customs fees. They claim they don't charge PST/GST/HST, but that part sounds a bit dodgy. The only criteria that it fails are the "fit in my pocket" and "be of a cost that I can sell the wife on spending". The former would require a $50 carrier of some sort, and the latter… well the latter would kill the whole idea making it totally academic.

The other thing I've been waiting on is the next-generation Pearl, which is the Blackberry 9100 familly. If Rogers ended up carrying it, it would probably fail the same affordability criteria, and would still have the SureType keyboard which makes general web usage a pain.

I want the Storm, on the idea that if it doesn't fit into my life properly I can probably sell it on to someone else; if I have to resort to the 9100 after that I think I can live with such a result.