18 Jan 2003
Sat, 18 Jan 2003
Sanyo SCP-4900
After changing work locations I discovered that my cell service was getting pretty bad. After a bit of debugging, I came to the conclusion that it wasn't my cell service that sucked but my phone was getting progressively worse. Since I don't own a land line but instead use cell as my primary phone service, it's gotta work reliably.
I had used the Kyocera 6035 for a while and while it provided a plethora of features and did some things well, the things it did poorly it did very poorly. I would describe the user experience with this phone as just plain quirky.
That's kinda funny since I had seen Scott Weiss speaking on handheld usability this week at HCII. Scott's made quite a career out of condemning handheld devices. His talk was quite funny and informative. You'll find the slides from Scott's talk here.
Anyhow, I decided to replace the kyocera, and since I had good experiences with Sanyo's previous generation phone, after considerable research, I decided to go with the Sanyo SCP-4900. The primary concern in my decision making was how well the phone supported the fundamental phone functions, not all the bells and whistles that Sprint's pushing via it's 3G service. I'm pleased to report that reception (I live in a weak cellular coverage area with lots of hills and few towers) and the look and feel that I missed from the old Sanyo are fantastic and the color display really improves the readability of the screen in most lighting conditions, particularly for folks with bad eyes.
While I was primarily concerned with the phone's reception performance and usability, I have to admit that it browses this site better than my old phone.
That's about all I have time for right now, but watch this space for more on the sanyo 4900 in the future. I have to admit, I am enthusiastic about this report from Nate Carlson on using the wireless internet service with linux!
Posted at: 10:11 | permalink
