Thursday, May 17, 2007

Phoney business

In a week or so the Treo 700p Maintenance Release (as Palm is calling it) will be available. It will supposedly carry the major improvements from the new Treo 755 (which is basically a 700p in the 750 case, with fixed software), though not all the new features. It will probably improve my phone a lot.

But I've been thinking about it. And I've come to a decision. If/when it is released with HSDPA support (the 3G standard for GSM) I will buy an iPhone. It's not because I love Cingular - I actually like CDMA voice quality better than GSM. It's not because I'll save money - since iPhone will not work as a modem I'll have to get a separate $60/month data account with either Verizon or Sprint.


What it is for is the little things. Things like the horrible multiple-call interface all CDMA phones share. For the way EVDO data transmission can't happen alongside CDMA voice calls. Because my voicemail doesn't recognize when I'm calling it from my handset and makes me use a PIN even then (yes, I've programmed a macro to make it auto-dial the PIN, but that doesn't always work). And because when I call someone from my cell the caller ID reports me as "MASSACHUSETTS", even though other carriers can carry my actual name in the caller ID. True, Verizon has generally better voice quality, but enough things suck about the service that I won't hesitate when I can get an iPhone with 3G support.


(I'd actually jump now, but there's no phone worth jumping for on the GSM side yet - and iPhone is all but certain to only include EDGE support in the first rev)

No comments: