My daughter is heading off to college shortly and I've been informed that mother and daughter will be communicating via text messages. I disabled text messaging on my and my wife's phones to prevent unwanted charges from dorks sending unwanted messages. Now I have to turn it back on. Oh joy.
This means enabling text messaging on our sprint phones once again. As it turns out, we're at the end of our 2 year plan so we can upgrade phones at the same time. We had the bottom of the line phones previously, definitely not suited to texting. My wife asked me to look over the new phones and pick one.
I first considered changing to a new service because, frankly, Sprint hasn't been that great and I'm sick of paying $100/month for a stupid phone. But phone companies are run by people too greedy and stupid to realize that if they just made flat rate plans that didn't charge me extra for contacting someone on another service it would be easier for people like me to switch TO them from my current service. But since they offer umpteen different plans (otherwise known as nickel and diming us) it's too much trouble to switch to another service. So Sprint gets to keep my patronage simply due to the fact that I'm too lazy to waste time browsing other services' complex fee and service structures.
Given that I'm staying put with a network, I have only their choices for phones. This is because in the US, bastion of capitalism that is, doesn't force phone companies to separate dial plans from physical phones. On the gsm network is should be possible to simply change the sim card for the network of choice. GSM is pretty widespread these days so such an option would give consumers choices. And with consumer choice comes an equity balance in supply and demand. Belgium knows this, which is why you can't bundle dial plans with phones there. But you can here in the home of the mini-monopolies and the ever dingbat led FCC.
Anyway, I have to choose a Sprint supported phone. I looked over the choices. After many years of waiting I know have a linux option: the Palm Pre. This device is based on Linux kernel 2.6.24 (I believe) and has an open architecture that allows stuffing my own music, etc. directly onto the phone. This will make sync'ing (I hope) a lot easier between contact lists on my desktop. And there is now a developer SDK. Applications are written in CSS, HTML and javascript, apparently though I need to research this more. I did enough research to know that I can write the app and load it directly onto the phone without anyone else's permission. Woohoo!
The Pre is $199 after $100 mail in rebate from Sprint. I hate those rebate things. They get to hang onto my money until they finally get around to sending back the dough. It's just another financial scam supported by our silly corporate laws. BestBuy gets you the same price without having to handle the mail in rebate. But having waited many years for this (past the debacle of the Linux PDA) I think it may just be worth the $199. And it might be the last phone I ever buy.
At least I hope it is.
The funny part about all this is that, to me, it's just a phone. Texting is stupid I don't care to talk to that many people and when I do, well, IT'S A PHONE dammit! Why would I type on a device meant so we can hear the other persons voice? (Answer: teens are stupid and America does whatever it can to avoid having to interact with their children.) So my only purpose for this device in reality is to make phone calls. And that I only do a few times a month. Literally. I do everything else in email on my desktop. The phone is just an annoyance to me. Why would I want to drop everything to attend to someone else's perceived emergency?
But it's also technology and a new platform for tool development. And that part is fun. People are a pain. Technology is fun. So while everyone else is trying to look cool by having one I'll be looking cool while I tear it apart (figuratively and literally) to see what I can make it do.
update: 2009-08-23
Why I didn't realize this before I wasted an evening at Best Buy I don't know, but of course Sprint invoked their nickle-and-dime clause in order to get the Pre: you can't have the Pre unless you buy their data plan. I don't have their data plan. I don't want their data plan. I don't want to spend any more money on a STUPID PHONE!
I got the free cheapo phone with the 2 yr contract. I handed them my balls and they gave me the phone. They got the better half of that deal.