Oh, man, I bought the wrong phone

In late June I picked up new phones for the family. My daughter had been complaining about our aging Samsungs and wanted a "feature phone." We opted for new technology from Samsung and some slight modifications to our AT+T plan.

We got three Samsung "Sync" phones (A707) and one Samsung A727 (for me). All of these phones support 3G and streaming video - true broadband. This is really impressive stuff, but I am currently not paying for these services. They also have cool cameras (2 mega pixels on the Syncs and 1.3 mega pixels on the A727) and some somewhat less cool other stuff, like MP3 players. I bought a mess of 2GB micro SD cards so we all have some pretty good storage available.

We're all happy with these and with our changes to the AT+T plan, but a couple weeks ago Gurpreet Maini showed me what he can do with his Samsung Blackjack. It really is the same technology as the A707 and A727 (and Samsung has subsequently released several more phones in this line), but the blackjack has a fully qwerty keyboard and I think a slightly better display than the A727. The A707 or A727 can also act as a broadband modem. The two coolest things that Gurpreet had going with his Blackjack were running his computer off the 3G wireless broadband (amazing) and the setup he had with his home cable TV so that all the channels to which he subscribes are available to him remotely. I believe he uses something called Slingbox for this, but it might be something else (http://us.slingmedia.com/page/products.html).

On our recent trip to the east coast I was amazed when I was out on the Cape May-Lewes Ferry and saw some guy talking on his cell phone, even though we were very far from either shore. I checked and I had 3G signal!

I guess the people who really might think, "Oh man, I bought the wrong phone" might be iPhone buyers. There is no way you could get the kind of bandwidth from the Apple phone. I guess you would have to weigh the alternative of the versatility of each and the major advantages one has in bandwidth and the other in cool user interface. I am still happy with the A727, but technolust is so easy to catch.