[brad]

I like some of the features of a smartphone but am not willing to pay for a data plan, so I've been using a simple cellphone for calls and an iPod Touch for smartphone features, which requires having a WiFi connection. You can actually do the same thing with an iPhone, a Nokia E71, or other smartphone that allows you to use WiFi -- just get a voice-only plan and use WiFi connections for your smartphone applications. The disadvantage of course is that WiFi is frequently unavailable and often costs money.

I just came back from a trip to Washington DC, where 80% of the population appears to be using smartphones, mostly Blackberries and iPhones. It was amusing and a little creepy to stand on a Metro platform and see all these people staring down at their phones and tapping away, oblivious to the world around them.

To me, the chief advantage of a smartphone is also its chief drawback: not only are you always available by phone, but by email as well. It can be helpful if you are traveling in the midst of a busy time at work and need to keep up with your email, but it can also lead to a lack of "down" time and it encourages employers and colleagues to expect you to be available 24/7.

I do find a smartphone useful in daily life: the iPod/iPhone has an app that shows me when the next bus will be passing by at the top of my street, and tells me how frequently the Metro trains are running on my line. I love the mapping capabilities -- even the iPod Touch, which doesn't have GPS, can use triangulation of known WiFi spots to show you where you are. It's remarkably accurate. Once it knows your location you can just type in a word like "pizza" and it'll populate the map with all pizza places in your area, and you can tap on any one to get the phone number (with the iPhone you can make a call as well). You can also use the iPod Touch to get turn-by-turn mapped directions that work even when you're out of range of WiFi (you have to use the Maps app to map out your route when you're connected to WiFi, but it saves the directions and you can follow them all the way home without being connected. It's not quite like GPS, more like a printout of Google Maps directions, but I've used it on several trips and it's great.

Data plans are far cheaper and more generous in the US than in Canada, so I'm boycotting data plans here; I'd rather not support overpriced plans and can use WiFi to meet my needs until/unless the rates come dow.

 

[brad]

You're right about the roaming fees for GPS etc.

Much as I love the idea of an iPhone (and truly love my iPod Touch), I'm actually buying an unlocked Nokia E71 which has many of the same capabilities (but with a standard keyboard, no touchscreen). When traveling in the US and Europe, my plan is to buy a pay-as-you-go local SIM card so I don't have to deal with the roaming fees. That's inconvenient from the standpoint of not having a fixed phone number, but when Google Voice becomes available to us Canadians that problem will be solved: you give out just one phone number to your friends and colleagues and it will ring on any phone you own no matter what its "real" phone number.

Virtually all my business travel and much of my vacation travel is in the US, and I'm really tired of paying $3/minute for cellphone calls when I'm there. Plus we go to France every two years to visit friends and family.

 

[brad]

I'm planning to get an iPhone by the end of the month. Although it is more expensive than a regular phone the additional cost is offset by the productivity gains that the device delivers.

While that might sound like rationalization, I think it's true. I have both an iPod Touch and a Nokia E71 smartphone. The E71 is regarded by many people (including many Nokia employees) as the best phone Nokia has ever produced. But after using it for the past four or five months, I can see why the iPhone is so popular. The Nokia's easy to use for the most basic functions (dialing and answering calls, writing text messages, getting your voicemail, taking photos), but you practically need an IT degree to do anything more advanced than that. And Nokia's counterpart to Apple's app store is cumbersome to use; I couldn't even get it to connect and gave up. Furthermore, when you plug the phone into your computer you get a bunch of unexplained options for how to connect (USB mass storage device, connect via Nokia's PC Connect software, etc.) and they don't work correctly. If you're want to update your phone with PC Connect and choose PC Connect mode, the computer shows the phone as unrecognized and it doesn't appear in PC Connect. Little glitches like that keep coming up and I've basically given up on using this expensive smartphone for anything but the most simple tasks that I could accomplish with a $20 cellphone. I like it and intend to keep it, but consider it a waste of money.

With the iPhone, everything just works; it's intuitive and simple enough to figure out on your own. And that's what people need: nobody has time to sit down and read through pages of instructions.

 

[brad]

The iphone has some pretty amazing apps, although I disabled data and only use the WiFi. Which is good because otherwise I wouldn't get any work done during the days...

My plan was to use a simple cheap cellphone for calls, and my iPod Touch for data over WiFi. That worked out pretty well, but then one day my home DSL line crapped out and it took two days for Bell to figure out what was going wrong. I work at home and can't work without an internet connection, so I added a data package to my phone plan to allow me to at least read my email and do some limited web browsing in emergencies like this.

3G access is nice to have (and Google mobile is awesome, especially with the GPS capabilities), but now I'm paying the price. I started out with a $20/month plan from Fido; now my bills are $70/month (including taxes) just because I added a data package. I only make three or four cellphone calls per month and I use the data feature maybe twice a month. So I'm going to stop the data plan and go back to $20/month. If my DSL dies again I'll just go work in the library.