supposedly apple is working on their version of a cell phone–unofficial name: iphone. i’d love to have one. not just because i’m an apple fanatic, but because i’m sure it would just work.
unlike my current sony ericcson z520a phone, which i’ve quit carrying around because it constantly takes pictures of the inside of my pocket, thanks to the external camera button that you can’t disable. and same said button falls right where your finger naturally does when you hold the phone to talk, so in order to talk to someone and not simultaneously take random photos, i had to retrain myself in how to hold a cell phone.
very usable. thanks sony.
anyway, while i’m waiting on steve jobs to bless me with an iphone and solve my problem, here’s an absolutely hysterical review of an sprint/lg phone with a built-in mp3 player, via daring fireball. evidently sony ericcson fired the designer of my phone, and he went to work for sprint or lg, or maybe both.
here’s a sample, from the article:
Turn on the phone. Go into the MP3 player again. There’s no signal, and, guess what? You can’t get into to the MP3 player unless you can establish a network connection to the Sprint Music Store. Even to play your own MP3s!
OK, so this is an MP3 player that doesn’t really work on the subway and won’t work on a plane, the two places I’m most likely to listen to MP3s. Not very appealing.
A little bit more exploring and I discovered that there’s another entirely separate MP3 player on this device. It’s hard to find. You have to go to Tools, then Memory Card, then to the Music folder, and another MP3 player starts up which you can use to listen to your MP3s. For this player, you don’t have to be on the network, so it works in the subway, but—get this—the minute you close the clamshell, the music stops! I am literally not making this up. There are two bad MP3 players on this device, neither one of which remembers where you’re up to, neither one of which can be used on the subway with the phone folded in my pocket, neither one of which has a fast-forward feature.
I have literally never seen such a useless MP3 player.
great piece of writing. and the funniest part is that sprint gave the guy the phone for free, so he’d use it and blog about it.
i have no idea how any of these companies stay in business.