The Perfect Gadget

Solemn Note: This post shall henceforth be a eulogy to my cell phone, as no more than five days after I posted this was this very phone stolen right out of my pocket.
In its memory, I hereby pledge never to travel by BMTC buses again.

Now this is gonna be a long one.

I'd been thinking about upgrading from my phone for a while. [from about a month after I got it actually]. And I'd considered several phones and spent a lot of time researching phone models. Not that that makes me an expert, but when a friend of mine asks for my advice on a new phone and after listening to my advice goes and buys a faulty calculator with a torch and calls it a phone, my knowledge in the field is insulted.
Allow me to explain this calculator's fault. It accepts interference with other devices and causes some too. This friend of mine misunderstood those faults as features such as telephony and radio. How naive can one be? Anyway, she din' have enough dough in that month to get something of my recommendation, so she thought she'd get the cheapest thing out there as a two-month-stand. [as in one-night-stand, (temporary) I have to spell out everything, don't I?] I asked her what she'd do with it after 2 months, she actually had no idea. Naive and short-sighted.

Bad calculators aside, when looking for an upgrade to a phone, the new one has to be better than the current one in more than a few ways. So lemme first introduce to you my current phone:
Things I love about it

The Camera.

I'll let the images speak out loud. Click on the thumbnails and when the new window opens, click on the images to see them in full size.
You might wanna try pressing F11 to have more screenspace for the image. Firefox users just right-click on the image [not the thumbnail] and click View Image to optimize the size for your screen. F11 helps Firefox users too.

Autofocus:


Hires [high enough for me]


Xenon flash


My dog betrays his evil side only when the piercing light of Xenonia seeks it out.

Burst Mode


Light in motion Caught by my phone's camera in burst mode [capturing 9 frames in a second].

Flight mode - When they tell you to switch off your phone in flights, all you have to do is switch to Flight mode and you can listen to music and stuff without causing the plane to crash [read: without inducing minor static on the pilots' headphones]

Expandable memory - I can put in a 2GB card. It supports 8gb cards too, theoretically.

Music: Having all that memory helps to carry a lot of your music around and the music player is pretty good. And the HPM-70s are great in-ear phones meant to isolate noise. A huge plus in my case. [My case is explained at the footnote of this post].

PC Synchronization: The standard out-of-the-box package offers you nothing special, but this freeware, MyPhoneExplorer, which works for all phones from SE, is a Godsend. It synchronizes with the PC so well that I can back up all my contacts, messages, calendar appointments, notes and call history with only a few clicks. Transfering contacts and stuff from one phone to another was never easier. And as far as music goes, my music organizer [MediaMonkey] recognizes the device as a removable disk and offers up its Sync-ing capabilities. Works like a charm.

Multitasking – The best part. I can reply to a message while replying to another message that was opened during an internet session (on Opera Mini 4.1) which was going on along with the music playing while there was a game paused in the background (to while away the loading times between pages). I can switch between the two messages I'm typing and I can also switch to the music player to go forward or back within the song. (I don't need to switch to it to alter the volume or change the track or stop/play. There are separate buttons for that.) And all this without any visible slowdown. Even if I copy all the text of the longer one of those messages to the clipboard. Now I didn't try sending files over bluetooth while I was doing this (I've got two ppl waiting for me to reply to their sms'es, after all), but the odds are that I can.[You know that someone's taking a cheap-shot at the iPhone when they start talking about copy-paste and bluetooth. But hey, Apple deserves it. And Apple deserves this too: The iPhone is incapable of recognizing a phone number if it isn't stored with the country code prefixed. Bet you didn't know that.] Back to my phone's speed. The internet is slow, yes [I know you noticed and were itching to post a comment about it].
But that's Airtel's fault. Along with TRAI's. If only they'd get the spectrum for 3G allocated already, I wouldn't have that problem.

Yes my phone has 3G.

Which phone IS this, you ask? [You ask because you either don't already know that or you haven't figured out already {you can find out if you snoop a little bit on what I've already told you and shown you ;) }] I'll tell you that after I tell you what I don't like about it, so the gullible short attention spanned many of you don't make a hasty decision. Man I sound like an Ent all of a sudden.

The Things I don't like about it

Video recording: Oh my FSM! I cant think of anything good to say about it other than that it works, as in, records more than one image [at QCIF resolution! {that's a bad thing}] per second [15 fps actually], in daylight.

The Multitasking: It lets many things go on at the same time. That's mostly a good thing. Only not when it decides to beep your message tune, delivery report tune and other such things while you are listening to music. I know that those alerts should get higher priority and stuff, but why does it pause the music for just vibrating the phone when it's in Silent mode? Just leave the music alone, bitch!

The joystick: Yea, after about a year, it grows a mind of its own. One with an attitude at that. But it doesn't stay bad. It kinda fixes itself in time. And then it doesn't stay good…

Video playback: A 2.0 inch screen with optional playback in Landscape mode. It's good, but it could've been better. The controls for moving about the clip are awkward and sequential mode doesn't work. That's probably why they hid it in a sub-menu and didn't include a shortcut in the media player.

Earphones: There is no 3.5 mm jack. And the provided earphones are crappy buds. The HPM-70's have to be bought separately. But at least they're compatible and cost just INR 350.

Bugs too minor to put into individual categories, but not small enough for me to overlook them : Several.

This is my current phone. The Sony Ericsson K800i. [k790 with 3G and a VGA videocall camera]

An upgrade to this, in the real world would have the following kind of big-numbered boring specs:

• 5Mpix camera with video recording at 30 fps / VGA.
  
• A 3 inch touchscreen with a 800x480 resolution
  
• Memory card support for 1gb to 16gb cards.
  
  • Internal memory should be 128mb shared for messages/notes/contacts/calendar entries.
    
• A 3.5mm jack.
  
• A 1500mAh battery
  
• WiFi, GPS, 3G and EDGE support
  
• Office Document support [including pdf's]
  
• A good music and video player with good music organizing options [including album-art, lyrics and ratings management support]
  
• Capability to power on without a SIM.
  

The Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 satisfies a lot of these features, but as it costs upwards of INR 40K, what I did do in my gadget-quest was to get a PSP instead. Someday Xperia, someday.

The perfect device in an ideal world should actually be several into one.

For example,

It should have a 5 inch screen and also fit into your wallet.

It should be a 10 megapixel camera with a wide-angle lens and optical zoom and should also be your personal assistant who remembers things without being told to.

It should cater to your gaming needs and must be bullet-proof.

It should be capable of video capture at 120 fps and at WVGA resolution and must change colours based on the weather.

Forget FM and IMEI numbers, it should have Satellite Radio and should be impossible to lose/get stolen.

It must be have a slider and a flip form factor. [Yes, both].

It should come with the Shure SE530s free and should be able to mimic the keys to your home/car/bike/etc.

It should connect to the internet without having to depend on the local service providers and should act as a repellent/anti-repellent [as required] for the opposite sex.

And finally, it should be one of a kind and should be cursed. [just coz that'd be cool]

That's it for this post. I'll continue to go mad with power in some other post.

Update: Now that my cell phone is no more with me and I need a replacement, I have entered the hunt myself. Now, considering that I have already made a purchase of the PSP from the gadget department, I definitely cannot opt for the Xperia. Instead I'm leaning towards the G705 and W902 phones. Sucks that neither of those are available in India yet. I dunno how long my mom's willing to stay without her k510, but I'm hoping it's long enough... Sony Ericsson, if you're reading this, I'm waiting. And also, the Xperia is overpriced.