Actually both could be AT&T. Did a test once, and AT&T calls, using the same model phones between the same locations, can sound either better or worse than Sprint, at least.
So, I bought the Touch. Not from the provider tho, they wanted a contract signed with blood. Ordered it off amazon.de, unlocked and all. It's... tiny Very cool indeed. The touch aspect pretty much ends beyond the Home screen (there is word that is supports finger gestures, haven't found that yet), but I don't mind that much. Maybe I'll try one of the 'finger' keyboards, but I'm mostly on target with the stylus anyway. Feels very well manufactured and lightweight. Battery cover can only be removed by rather strong force, but you don't do that every day anyway. Device runs on Windows Mobile 6.0 with a special HTC Home screen slapped on that's very tasteful and useful. Huge clock, local weather, app starter, upcoming appointments are all there, making Spb's essential software suite useless. Integration with Vista is painless of course. Only letdown I discovered so far is the absence of a standard earphone jack, meaning you have to use HTC's headset when you don't have a Bluetooth one. Haven't tried it yet but the only earplugs I can wear painlessly for more than 10 minutes are in-ears so I guess I'll cough up some more money for a wireless stereo set. The CPU seems sluggish at times and internal memory isn't plentiful. There is a 1 GB microSD card in the box tho, I put in 2 GBs. It's really interesting that this really tiny 2 GB card costs less than €25.-, and yet the device's internal memory is the same 64 MB my first iPaq had around the turn of the millennium. Why don't they put in more? The expansion slot is fine but designed for Kingston or Sandisk to make some money. Nothing wrong with that but memory prices have plummeted so far that 64 megs seem like mocking. WLAN connection is fine and works fast. I don't use GPRS or any of the other 'mobile' connections as I'm too stingy for that. And WLAN hotspots pretty much cover the whole town anyway. I can't test the push mail function, but Pocket Outlook is fine. Really, where's the difference between having mail within 10 seconds or 5? Here's to not caring. It can make phone calls, too It's a nice little device for people who'd like the iPhone but are not willing to shell out €600 (Apple thinks that we don't know that $ are not equal to € so they simply change the currency sign but never the amount ) and have a 2 year contract with no guarantee that the iPhone will be unlocked after its run. Doesn't have the same 'cool' factor which is probably because HTC didn't have such a marketing blitz. I'm sure the iPhone will be integrated better and more consistently, but the Touch is the next best thing. I'm perfectly happy that I didn't wait for the iPhone.
Similar thing always happens with video games... they peg 1 yen = 1 cent. 2000 yen = $20, etc. Except really 1 yen is only about 0.82 cents. So really the same items in japan are about 18% cheaper.
Here in Americaland, it is almost never the case that sales tax is added onto a price tag. Who fucking knows why. I'd imagine that a lot of it comes from companies who want to just put "$599 (plus S&H and state sales tax)" on their commercials. It does give a certain sort of continuity, but I wish stores themselves would put sales tax onto shelf tags. Well, in other states. Oregon is sales tax-free! Also, regarding the system memory - just because it's flash memory doesn't mean that they basically ripped all the innards of an SD card out and glued it to the mainboard. There's a hell of a lot of engineering going on there, addressing to deal with processor-side, etc., etc. In short, it's pretty constant that the closer to the processor the memory is, the more expensive it is. I.E. on-chip cache is the most expensive, followed by flash memory on embedded devices, followed by RAM on traditional devices, followed by the hard drive.
Whats the sound quality like on the HTC (mp3's and phone sound) and does the media player support Xvid codex?
Sound quality is OK with the enclosed headset, would be quite good with better headphones (I'm picky so that counts for something). But they didn't include a standard headphone jack which is very sad. I can't wear earplugs painlessly, only in-ears. So using it as an MP3 player is out for me. Phone quality is normal. What can I say, they all sound the same to me. As for XVID... WM doesn't support it natively IMHO so you'll have to find a player that does. CorePlayer does, for example. There's also some version of VLC for WM.
I bought a new phone about three weeks ago. Motorola's ic902 However, I'm going to bite the bullet on my next phone. I'm tired of carrying around a PDA and phone. I'm finally going to break down and get a "smart phone" in a year or so.
Probably because sales tax varies not only from state to state, but from county to county. It's all of Oregon at 0%, to roughly half of California at 7.5%, to Ohio at 7.75% to the rest of California at 8.25%, to somewhere in Texas (IIRC) at 9.25%
State to state, county to county, and city to city. Alabama has a flat 4% sales tax that counties and municipalities add upon quite regularly. Depending on where you buy something, I've seen it vary from 4% to 11%.
The sales tax in Lake Tahoe was absolutely brutal on top of it's already insane prices . I like Oregon sometimes .
Is that button on the side a walkie-talkie feature??? I have the older Motorola Nextel (Nextel now Sprint I think) that has a walkie-talkie feature, because my family all have the same phone and we can keep in touch long-distance without racking up the minutes. But the phone is a bit clunky, and the internet capabilities are wanting to say the least. I want to upgrade to a clamshell, and I know Motorola makes a new phone for Sprint that looks just like the one you posted, with walkie-talkie and better web features. Same model I think. I was just wondering how you liked it?!?!?!? I want the black one two, but I am going to paint part of the front gold, because for my walkie-talkie "ringtone" I have the TOS communicator sound...now I just need a phone that *looks* more like a TOS communicator!!!
I've been a loyal customer of Nextel (now together with Sprint) for about eight years now. I started with the i1000, graduated to the i730, then the i830, then the i870, and now this ic902. Until very recently, I lived by the direct connect feature. However, in recent months, it's usefulness has dropped dramatically, hence the reason I'm considering a smartphone as my next purchase. But, to answer you question, yes. This is one of three new "dual-band" phones. The voice calls, data capabilities, and text messaging use Sprint's CDMA network and their PCS Power Vision (EV-DO) data plans while the direct connect feature uses Nextel's iDEN/WiDEN proprietary towers for that service. To date, I've had ten times the coverage area and sound quality for voice calls that I had with Nextel. In short, if you live in a major urban area, any cell provider is going to meet your needs, but those of us that purposefully live away from all that, out in the sticks, have our own issues to deal with when it comes to mobile service. While Nextel has been adequate, they only use proprietary towers and you cannot roam away from them, so you're just assed out in many place. There's also the issue in many, if not most, markets where Nextel has more users than bandwidth. For instance, before switching to this phone, I could not make an outgoing call between 1700-2100 local for four days because the system would be overloaded with calls during those hours.
Whatever happened to the days when phones were only made/used to make phone calls Personally I don't own a cellphone at all for the following reasons 1) The ony time people tend to call me is when they either want or need something. My relatives already think I'm some kind of walking ATM Machine as it is, and carrying something that will allow them to constantly find me is NOT good for my wallet 2) I can't see spending tons on money on something so small that if it gets lost or broken, Im Fucked! 3) I don't like getting beat up. I've heard too many stories abou people getting the smack down and phone jacked over those damn phones Cell phone conversation: cell phone owner: Hi Honey, I'm on the bus stop waiting for the bus person being called: Whats the heavy breathing I hear in the background? cell phone owner: Hey who are you? What? Get your hands off me... Aaahhhh!!! person being called hears wrestling in the background, phone goes dead person being called: Honey.. are you still there? Call drops person being called WTF? Man..Fuck that!
