Actually, there is a date on the post, apparently in the theme I’m currently using it’s at the bottom:

This entry was written by emag and posted on March 6, 2008 at 10:09 pm and filed under …

Though it’s a bit lighter than the rest of the text, so it’s pretty easy to miss.

Also, the link to phonescoop has an “Edit search” link, which in this case goes to their “weighted” search page (and with all the weights that I put in for that particular link). There’s also a simpler “unweighted” search that just lets you enumerate features, but that wasn’t nearly as helpful, since some features ARE more important to me than others, I just didn’t feel like trying to come up with a definitive ranking when I was writing the blog post last night.

As a brief followup, I’ve also been hitting Amazon, as well as the bigger GSM carriers’ sites (T-Mobile and AT&T/Cingular here in the states), but by far in terms of searching based on specific features, phonescoop is by far the best, with Amazon coming in second of where I’ve looked.

Since my wife (that still sounds so strange!) deals with Blackberries at work, and has an older one through them, I’ve played with it a bit, but wasn’t too fond of the scroll wheel since it was basically 1-dimensional navigation. I’d expressed an interest to her in the Blackberry 8820, which she happened to actually work on today and suggested that we stop by an AT&T store so I could see if I liked it. It’s actually a lot nicer than the BB8700 that she has through work, as it has a scroll ball instead of a wheel (yay, 2-D nav!).

I also looked at a few other phones, including the BB Curve 8310, the current Palm Treo 680, and some Windows-based phones. Interface-wise, I really liked the Treo, since I’ve been using PalmOS for 10 or so years, but it of course lacks Wi-Fi which I still consider *the* feature.

The Windows phones, especially the Pantech Duo C810 was really neat, hardware-wise, with 2 separate sliders, one for the numeric pad and one for a keyboard, but I couldn’t really get past the Windows interface. Yeah, I’m probably really biased in that regard, but it just felt…clunky.

The BB 8820 and BB C 8310 were fairly nice to navigate and play with, and also have added explicit “back” and “menu” buttons that made using them a bit less-confusing.

I even, though I’m reluctant to admit it, picked up an iPhone to try out. Apparently I’m really NOT the target audience for the thing, as my very first comment had to do with all the fingerprints, and my second was something along the lines of “how the hell do I get off of this screen?” (the last person to use it had left it on some app, and it was non-obvious to me how to get back to the main icon page). It was sleek and shiny (and greasy) and had only one button (though not pressed for us before it left the factory, cf: Dilbert), and thoroughly and completely likely to be destroyed within a week in my pocket or on my belt.

So so far the #1 contender is the BB 8820, for me. I’ve been thinking that, while a camera would be nice to have on the phone, I’m much more likely to make use of the Wi-Fi than the camera, especially since I specifically picked up a tiny 7MP camera as my “walking around” device (and use my dSLR for planned photo shooting events)… View all comments by emag

regards View all comments by guy de byl