It’s time for a new phone. After repeated drops on concrete and tile floors, my Palm Treo is starting to act up a bit. I haven’t been able to surf the web in a reasonable fashion since Palm and IBM had a falling out over the Java program the Treo needs to run Opera Mini. And with my AT&T contract up next month, it was time to figure out what my next phone would be.
After spending hours online and after playing with the available smartphones at both the Verizon and AT&T stores, I’ve concluded that the best touchscreen smartphone available, at least for my needs and wants, is not the iPhone. It’s the Palm Pre Plus.
In order to understand my reasoning, you need to something about me and why I bought my Treo in the first place.
I’m a trained electrical engineer with an advanced degree. That should suggest a number of stereotypes – nerdy, overweight, socially inept, and so on. While not all of the stereotypes apply, a couple of them do, and one more so than most. The stereotypical engineer is known for being able to focus on a task at hand to the exclusion of all external stimuli, a condition generally referred to as “tunnel vision” (and entirely distinct from the medical condition of the same name). I generally consider my tunnel vision as an asset because it enables me to focus and work very efficiently on one thing at at time. Tunnel vision makes multitasking more difficult, however, and so I rely on external stimuli to break into my concentration when I need to break out of my tunnel vision. So when I have to get to a meeting, I rely on my pop-up reminders on my Outlook calendar. Full story »
