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Mobile Phone Wish List
By Jacob Cohen | January 21, 2008
I’ve been shopping around for new mobile phones recently. Not necessarily because I want to buy one (my current phone is working just fine), but mainly to see what’s out there. It’s been a year or so sinc e I last looked at what sorts of phones are available.
Since I’m not seriously looking to buy a phone right now, the list of features I would “require” in a new phone is a bit unrealistic. However, if they offered a phone with these features right now, I would probably buy it, because it would be my ideal phone.
The features are as follows:
- 3G data connectivity. The main reason I don’t use my phone’s data capability more is that it uses GPRS, which is about as fast as a herd of turtles stampeding through peanut butter.
- Inductive charging. All phones should have this. If a $20 electric toothbrush can have this, a $300+ phone certainly can. Basically this is the sort of charging where you place the device in a cradle, and a coil in the cradle induces a current in a coil inside the device, allowing it to recharge without wires. This should elminate proprietary power connections.
- No proprietary connections. USB and Mini-USB are fine, but none of these proprietary ports that require all sorts of dongles to actually connect to anything else.
- Standard memory card support. SD is probably a good choice. Nothing that requires an adapter or special reader to use.
- OLED external buttons. All the buttons on the exterior of the phone should be remappable, and as such their appearance should be modifiable as well.
- Easily accessible Bluetooth pairing. I can’t believe phone software vendors are still burying the Bluetooth pairing feature behind 4 or more levels of menus. If I get into my car and want to enable the hands free system, it should be a first-tier function on my phone.
- Better yet, automatic Bluetooth pairing. If I drop my phone into a charging cradle, it automatically seeks any Bluetooth devices I’ve previously configured. If they are found, it pairs automatically. That way, if I put the phone in my car, it will automatically pair with the car’s hands-free system. If I drop the phone in my charging cradle at home, it can pair with a Bluetooth-enabled desk handset (which are, unfortunately, still rare and expensive).
- Price under $500
- No service provider fluff. I don’t need any “AT&T Mobile Web” or “T-Mobile T-Zones” or any of that stuff. I’ll just use a regular web browser through my 3G network and access the actual internet.
As it stands, no phone in existence comes close to meeting all of these design requirements. There is nothing out of the realm of possibilities in this list (except perhaps the price point) but it will probably be a while until I see a phone with all this.
Topics: General |
January 22nd, 2008 at 2:16 am
interesting!!!