The Quest for the Perfect Phone

This started as a bit of a tantrum before becoming a blog post at my other blog.
My dear Husband goes to work, five days a week, as a customer service rep at a telecommunications call center. He's very good at his job, loves it for reasons which entirely escape me, but when he leaves the call center, work follows him home like a friendly stray puppy. This is because I am his pickiest customer.
I am very nearly impossible to please. The first phone I LOVED was the Nokia 6010. It's perfect - basic, simple, a good size, a nice weight in your hand, held a call all the way into the hospital parking garage, made the TV flicker from across the room when it rang, and was $10 on Ebay. I adored it. Husband got me using a Motorola Razr for a time, because he was repairing and selling them, and so he had me make sure they worked - I was SO indignant when one dropped a call as I walked into a parking garage. How dare it! The Razr was nice, but it was no 6010.
I cannot remember how many phones I have had. Husband hasn't gotten annoyed with me, but rather sees me as a challenge. I think he actually enjoys memorizing my every finicky reason for not being perfectly satisfied with what I have, and trying to find which weird model that was sold for five minutes in Canada could possibly be my perfect phone. I have gotten something techie for Valentine's, birthday, anniversary, Christmas, Valentine's, birthday... I have had a phone with a full keyboard split by a screen in the middle (Nokia 3300). Only problem with that was that I'm accustomed to typing across the whole keyboard - and it made me look like I was holding a Gameboy to the side of my head. BUT, what I love about Nokia is that they DO make weird and interesting and cool-looking phones. I had a Nokia 6800 that flips up for a full keyboard, that was pretty sweet. I had one with a metal case that slid shut with a click like a Zippo lighter (Nokia 8801). That was cool except for the abysmal battery life. I had an HTC Wizard, which is about 3/4 of an inch thick, is Windows Mobile (I like Windows, but when it comes down to it, I'm not so much a Microsoft fan as I am a Mac-hater). That introduced me to the concept of a phone that could keep notes and appointments easily, but it also barely missed being flung under a city bus in a moment of unimaginable stress when I needed to access a number keypad while listening to my voicemail and couldn't. I THINK it was after that that I got a Pantech Matrix. Full keyboard for office functions, and a separate number pad, because I was NOT making the Wizard mistake again. Matrix and I got along pretty well.
Husband has been addicted to his iPhone for about a year now, and last fall he broke the screen. He got a second one, but then fixed the screen in the first, and persuaded me to play with it. Well, mine was hacked out the wazoo because scrolling through pages of apps is more trouble than the apps are worth, to me at least. Like I said, hard to please. So mine were all in little folders. Downside of hacking your iPhone is that you become your own tech support, because Apple has a major problem with that. It's great for when my son and I are on a bus at the height of ladybug season and having him stare at the screen for an hour is much, much better than him screaming for an hour - he is/was terrified of insects - but the glitches started getting really old about a month ago (ironic considering I thought Apple products were supposed to "just work"). One lovely little "glitch" froze the phone function - as in, I couldn't dial. Turned the phone off and back on several times without fixing it. Husband popped the sim card out and back in and THAT fixed it, but that was enough for me. As I told my long-suffering IT person/spouse, your car's engine may only blow up once, but I'll wager you think twice about buying that model of car again.
But at this point, we've actually canceled our Internet provider because of our phones' tethering capabilities, so my phone needs to be a smart phone or I have no Internet when Husband is gone.
So. My perfect phone would:
1. have the life-organizing chops of a Blackberry or iPhone
2. have a real number pad
3. NOT be a touch screen
4. have a real keyboard
5. have good call quality (it's a PHONE, first and foremost)
6. have enough internet/email capabilities to keep me non-computer dependent
7. have great battery life
8. and if I need to just make a call quickly, I shouldn't have to jump any hoops. If the phone function is a program or app you have to open, it's not a phone, it's more just a PDA thing that coincidentally can also make calls, or so goes my thinking.
Blackberries are great but come with 300-page user manuals (I'm not exaggerating - each model comes with 300 pages of how to use it, which I would guess means it's WAY too much phone for me). Also, the fact that the number keys are off to one side would eventually get bothersome - I like being able to dial without looking. This is why I am hard to please. For basic phone functions, that 6010 spoiled me rotten.
I want a 6010 smart phone.
So I saw this demo phone at Walmart, of all places. Blackberry-looking, but with the numbers in the center of the keypad!! Right there where if I spent some time with the phone, I'd be able to dial by feel. I was so excited! And, drum roll please - made by Nokia. Rock ON. The E71x.
So I went home and googled the phone to read reviews, forgetting the "x" when I typed it in - and that x is very important. The E71 (released in Europe) has VERY good reviews. Emailed Husband at work saying "Eee, I want this phone!" and he reminded me about the x, saying that's the US version, so I looked it up. Not so good. Grr. Said it ran slowly, was bogged down with programs you couldn't uninstall, it just wasn't that great. Same site that reviewed the European model. Husband came home from work AGAIN to answer a barrage of questions about the nagging little differences between this model and that model and "why does the US version stink??" He's so patient. He says I give him practice for certain customers he encounters at work.
Well, the E71x is the phone supported and subsidized by our carrier. The x stands for "branded to the max" - it has Nokia's navigation program AND the carrier's navigation program, same for music and email and so on. You can't get rid of any of it, and so it runs slower and isn't as good. Hmph. And now I had a bee in my bonnet - golly gee, did I want a Nokia again.
I checked out the other E-series Nokias, they're okay. E72 has a smaller space bar. One of them, I forget which, has a half keyboard (every key has two letters on it), which in my book is the strangest concept since Pepsi Blue. The N-series are all touch screens. And besides I was looking for something to get used on Ebay like all our other phones (with the exception of iPhones) have been. We have quite the collection, but they've all been cheap.
Husband reminded me it's tax season. (Ooo, goosebumps! But no, I should be good...) And that you can order phones directly from Nokia. Okay, but the E71 is still my favorite and still a European phone (uses different bandwidth). Ah, but not exactly, Husband Dearest says (at this point he looks a lot like Santa Claus, picture him 200 pounds heavier and a lot older). Nokia has an E71, no x, that uses the US 3G bandwidth and can be bought directly from them. No carrier-based extras, no branding. The exact same phone as the one I got excited about, just with the ability to use US towers.
Oh, and he knew someone at work who would buy my iPhone, which would help cover the price.
I did a LOT more reading. We found a store that had an actual working model I could play with to try out the keyboard and menus. I typed "How hard is it to type without typos on this phone?" and "The quick brown fox..." and some other stuff. Apple made me a worse typist, Nokia will make me a better one. So the keyboard is cool. On the number pad, I dialed quickly the numbers I call the most without too much trouble. Menus will take getting used to again because, well, the iPhone doesn't have any. But they're not complicated.
I THINK I have found my "forever" phone. It's a Blackberry-sort-of-thing but not a Blackberry, it will do everything I need and precious little that I won't, and it's as close as I will find to a "6010 smart phone".
And this probably brands me as a total geek, but I'm so excited about going back to Nokia - it's kind of like coming home! (Hey, some women have favorite clothing brands, favorite shoe brands, favorite make-up lines... I have a favorite cellphone manufacturer...)
And tomorrow, we pile into the car and drive to the Nokia flagship store in Chicago, so I can actually PICK OUT my phone! Totally psyched!