My RANT on phones! Cell phones that is…

The common cell phone. Think about that statement for a minute. Cell phones are common now. Fifteen years ago I got my own cell phone. I had carried around a client’s bag phone for about 6 months, but that was never my phone.

At the time, the popular phone was a Motorolla, nicknamed the Brick. Well I picked up a little Mitsubishi DiamondTel that was tiny. In fact, I found it in a drawer a few years ago and while it isn’t tiny by today’s standards, it still wasn’t that big. Now the battery sucked, and I certainly couldn’t do text messaging or email, but in general it wasn’t a bad phone for the day. Remember the day? When your phone would ring in a restaurant and everyone would stare at YOU?

Well, the next phone I had remains to this day my favorite phone. It was a Sony phone that ran on the then brand spanking new CDMA network that would become Verizon after much consolidation. What made that my favorite phone ever? Well, when you stored a phone number into your contacts, there was no esoteric interface to find them. you just began entering their phone number, or a snippet, and it would begin narrowing your list of contacts (displayed in real time) as you hit the 3rd digit. The fourth digit narrowed the list even further. And remember, you didn’t have to start with the area code, you could start anywhere.

Now that was brilliant. How do I know? Because it was infinitely simple. It worked EVERY TIME. And I still miss it. Remember, I’ve had almost every fancy phone there is in the last 15 years. You want a list? How about a subset? Treo, 650, 700. VX6700, 8525, Motorolla Q, Blackberry… OK, I’ve had lots of them. I ran a mobility practice at a large consulting firm. I care about these things.

So what makes a great phone?

1. I need a great dialer
2. I need dead simple contact integration with EXCHANGE SERVER
3. I need dead simple contact integration with GMAIL, ETC
4. I need dead simple calendar integration with EXCHANGE SERVER

So what makes a good phone? Everything it offers should basically make me happy and I should not want to throw it out the window twice a day! If you give me a touch sensitive screen it should NOT SCRATCH EASILY!!!!!!!! At $500 a pop, that 8525 screen should be harder than the stylus!!!!!

OK, so we all know that this is about the iPhone right? You bet it is! While the iPhone doesn’t hit everything on my list it sure does a few things right, and I bet I can guess why.

I bet Steve Jobs has the same list that I do, except I bet he doesn’t manage his own calendar, so he doesn’t care about that part.

You know what? Either do I! But I sure wish those idiots over at HTC would start using their own phones! And I sure wish…

Well actually, I’m pretty happy with Steve right now, so I’ll leave it at that!