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Hey everyone,
Looks like this is the place where I make the obligatory "Hi, I'm new here" post.
I've been on Verizon for several years now because my family is originally from a rural area and Verizon has the best nationwide coverage. Now, as a busy graduate student, I both need to and like to keep myself organized - notes, calendars, contacts, email, voice, and whatever else I might need. I've done this well enough up to now, but in the last several months I became sick of hauling around an 8GB iPod Touch 1G plus an older LG flip phone; the utility of both devices is limited, and for a while I chafed at the knowledge that I could not get an iPhone like I really wanted to. I wanted just ONE device to pack around. (I know that probably sounds like heresy to you, but bear with me.) I'm on contract with Verizon and I'm due for an upgrade soon, so I was thinking about dropping Verizon and going to AT&T.
What really changed my mind is the horror stories I started to hear about the iPhone - dropped calls, unreliable network, slower speeds than on Verizon, etc. I don't mean to sound like I'm bagging hard on the iPhone and AT&T, but if I'm going to invest in a phone, it needs to be able to fulfill its primary function more or less without flaw, especially since I'm a grad student who needs to squeeze value from every dollar. A phone isn't much of a phone if it isn't reliable, and it seems to me that I would have a good chance of having quite a few problems if I were to go out and buy an iPhone. My office mate has a basic AT&T candybar phone and he confirmed that he's had problems with AT&T, dropped calls, and the like, so that settled the matter for me - I'd stick with Verizon.
But what to get? The obvious choice for a smartphone on Verizon is a Blackberry, but I'd never so much as handled one before, even though I'd seen them in the wild. I decided to head down to the Verizon store yesterday and try out the Storm and the Tour. Now, I have to say, I was quite impressed. Both of these phones are just gorgeous - every bit as sexy, and maybe even more so, than the iPhone. I was particularly impressed by the Storm's looks, and coming from an iPod Touch, I was pretty sure that I'd be most likely to want the Storm and its touchscreen and virtual keyboard - the less moving parts, the better, I thought. But when I picked up the Storm, I actually found the typing experience to be somewhat more onerous than I had hoped for. Don't get me wrong - the (very accurate) predictive typing in portrait mode was a technological revelation for me, and the click-screen wasn't nearly as awful as I had been led to believe. But alas, the touchscreen keyboard didn't quite measure up to the iPod's keyboard that I already knew well and which Apple has poured so much effort into making usable. Since I wanted to make communication the central reason of owning a smartphone, I wanted to make the typing experience as smooth as possible.
So I picked up the Tour, started typing a few sentences, and I noticed that my first few thumb-keystrokes were a bit awkward as I tried to figure out where the keys were. But by the end of the very first sentence, I noticed that my typing speed more than doubled, and I had the pretty strong intuition that if I bought the Tour, I'd be able to type really fast on it after a while. Moreover, the smaller screen didn't bother me, and I felt that watching the demo video that the sales rep. played for me was like watching the video on a very small HD TV - really stunning quality, no doubt about it. The trackball felt very natural to me; the beveled edges of the keys helped a lot; the media player looked good; overall, I was really impressed by the Tour and how quickly I took to its keyboard, and I was really starting to get excited about this beautiful little black-and-silver device.
Anyway, that's where I'm at now. I'm eligible for an upgrade in 22 days. I haven't yet officially settled on either option, because I know the Storm 2 is waiting in the wings, but I was so impressed by the Tour's usability that I'm this close to pulling the trigger on an upgrade and not even waiting for the Storm 2 (or any other future smartphone that comes out on Verizon). I'm pretty sick of my old clamshell, and I think it's just about time for me to join the ranks of the Blackberry-addicted.
So hi everyone. Nice to be here!
08-09-09 05:48 PM
Sorry about that, though.
