Texting while driving – a definite NO NO!!

OK, so cell phones are everywhere, and some voice calls cannot be avoided. But, now texting phones and smartphones are taking over the landscape, and becoming a big part of our mobile lives. While talking is unavoidable sometimes, texting is a temptation that should be avoided 100% of the time - no exceptions. Reading and responding to written material on your phones is adding too much risk to an already risky driving situation. Laws are being implemented, and it looks like people favor these precautions/fines...Surprise! Most Americans Support Texting While Driving Bans. We close this note with a couple of our fav user-tested hands-free products – a lightweight & styling Bluetooth headset; a user-friendly Bluetooth speaker (great for soccer moms!); and a universal, portable phone holder (this one can take a small flip phone all the way up to iPhone & smartphone screen sizes).

New Rules (smartphone edition): Stop naming phones!

To borrow a great title from Bill Maher's HBO comedy routine, we have a NEW RULE for U.S. wireless service providers and vendors.

New Rule: Do not name a mobile phone unless it's something truly special/unique/iconic.

What's up with the sudden onslaught of strange and often irrelevant names for every mobile phone launched in the U.S.? It seems the vendors & carriers are trying too hard to impress, and taking themselves too seriously (imagine that?!) We understand their marketing departments have to do their thing, but they could save a lot of time and money by stopping this ridiculous fad.

It is a fad, and very cyclical when you look at what car manufacturers have been doing for the past few years. Acura Integra & Legend became TL & RL, and Infinity went through their own naming to numbering and lettering thing. For products such as these, which go through annual or even semi-annual revisions with slights improvements, we prefer numbers & letters over names. Letters & numbers, if well-planned and followed up by relevant reinforcement marketing, offer clean and more memorable design or model types. Sticking with the automotive comparison, look at how a couple of the most recognizable luxury car manufacturers have maintained one, clean system for decades. BMW focuses on revisions of its famous 3, 5, & 7 series, just as Audi continuously refines its A4, A6, A8 models.

Now, back to mobile phones. If these companies are (each!) going to churn out 20-30 phones every year then they should get real and not pretend that each model is as special as the next.

Does anyone out there really care if your phone is called the Blue Earth, Rant, or Gravity (Samsung)?

Does anyone out there really care if your phone is called the Xenon, Opera, or Rumor (LG)?

Does anyone out there really care if your phone is called the Clutch, Morrison, or Q (Motorola)?

Does anyone out there really care if your phone is called the Snap, Magic, or Ozone (HTC)?

Ahhh. No. These names do not mean anything to us, are not relevant or correlated with the phones' design or features, and certainly do not help us decide which one to buy.

We have a suggestion - use the first letter of the carrier name (currently A, S, T, V), pick out three levels of numbers to attach, and keep revising as you wish. So, AT&T could have the A201, A401, & A601, followed by A202, A402, & A602. This way, we consumers get what you really want us to know - that you have a good/better/best alignment of your portfolio, and that better (at least newer) versions have higher numbers.

So, carriers, please keep the cool names for the rare iPhone model, Blackberry, or Palm, and for other rare models from OEMs that can actually compete with these big three.

Verizon Wireless offers help on smartphones, but...

Some buzz that Verizon Wireless is launching something called Smartphone Resource Center. This Center on their site is supposed to include smartphone specs, training videos, FAQs, and comments from other VZ customers. This is a step in the right direction. We hope that customers find it useful. It is so important to simplify and 'decode' what the carriers say in their mass media campaigns. The way carriers and their phone vendors pump out barely improved and slightly modified 'new' phones every month is peculiar, and more helpful to the companies than to their customers. Until we see it, we have reservations about whether a company-owned site with such info will offer an improved way for its customers to figure out what they want. Without such understanding & decision making criteria, customers walk away thinking they got a cool latest/greatest phone at some sweet deal, and the carriers accomplish their true goal of either taking someone away from a competitor or renewing a contract that locks you in for another two years.

Of course, one of the good things with the explosion of information on the internet is that there are some good 3rd party (non-carrier/manufacturer) sites/blogs that can help you catch up to everything service providers throw at you. There are many 'established' blogs and info centers online that pump and dump information, but search for some new ones that offer a fresh perspective without sounding overly technical or complicated, and always get more than one side to every topic.

Tell us what sites you use and we will add them to our list of "recommended" sites.

RIM falling into same 'ol trap? Get Fresh!

C'mon RIM! Why waste more development resources and customers' limited attention spans on 'new' smartphones that are not much different from recently launched versions?

A recent blog entry on phonearena.com about a new Blackberry 9700 coming to TMobile prompted this note.

What I find intolerable is when device manufacturers start pumping out similar-looking models with very few tweaks and changes in form factor and/or feature set. This 9700 seems to basically replace the trackball with the trackpad, and offer WiFi. This is hardly different from the 8900 Bold, and Tour form factors (though the Tour does have global network support).

Each new smartphone should be developed to address either a new segment, or appeal to upgraders with updated form factors, feature sets, and marketing splash. Otherwise, what made RIM & Apple's smartphones unique will give way to similarities with customers' current perception of me-too handset manufacturers like Samsung & LG. Analogy to reference and learn from within the Automotive industry - we just don't want yet another Camry or Ford Taurus where nothing much is different except the model year.

As always, regardless of which popular smartphone you select, save time & money by getting hand-picked accessories at pdacart.com.

Please let me know if other customers agree with my POV on smartphones and what we expect from manufacturers.

Sidekick Sync - is it too late???

So it is finally here. An app that supports real-time push email, synchronization (contacts, email, calendar, etc) and attachment viewing on the T-Mobile SideKick. The question I ask is this - is it too late for us Sidekick fans.

The Sidekick was the original "must-have" device. It had the buzz, the design and the coolness (Hey..Paris Hilton owned one). It did a lot of things for us, office email was not one of them. As we grew older, this device lost it's charm when we had to consider carrying 2 devices, one for personal use (ie Sidekick) and one for office emails (Blackberry/Treo). In the end, the Sidekick became a dinosaur.

After all these years, they finally come up with a third-party app "that allows Microsoft Outlook and Exchange users to wirelessly synchronize their Sidekick address book contacts, calendar, tasks (to dos), and provides full two-way synchronization including conflict resolution, field mapping, and data filtering." Costs $4.99 a month to boot.

We just don't see the Sidekick doing well, with or without the app. The Sidekick is not hip enough for the younger generation and not feature-rich enough for the older crowd. It is what it is..a once popular handset that won't go away because the carrier (TMobile) won't let it die. Kinda reminds us of Brett Favre (la Sidekick) and the Vikings (la TMobile). Atleast Brett retired. It is time to do the same with the Sidekick.

Our top 5 Fav features and things to do with smartphones

Phones do more than talk and text. That's what makes them smartphones. Most people call, email, and now texting is huge. But, keep an eye on this list and catch up on what a small minority of smartphone users already know - some fantastic features that truly enhance your mobile life, making the smartphone THE ONLY communication, entertainment, & productivity device you will carry around all the time.

6. Just talking
…with your phone pressed against your face (therefore not really using your smartphone features)

This is old school! If this is you, read #5, and then keep coming back as we outline #4 through #1.

5. Hands-free
Keeping your hands-free to either drive safely, or view your smartphone screen to check your calendar, look up numbers, and use the data service that you probably pay for. Don’t let a call stop you from doing it all!

Yes, you can use the phone speaker, but sound is average and sometimes with echo, you get no noise cancellation, and it drains your battery.

Almost every phone & every smartphone includes Bluetooth® technology, which as you may know, enables headsets w/o dangling/tangling wires.

Our recommendations on mono (voice only) Bluetooth headsets are based on the following ‘C’riteria – we call it the 5 C’s:

• Clarity (quality/performance)
• Coolness factor (design/style)
• Comfort (fit/size)
• Convenience (chargers, storage, etc.)
• Cost (price to value ratio)

If cost is the least important of all these criteria for you, our current favorite is this Bluetooth Headset. But, there are plenty of more choices, so we offer our selection, and also “Our Review” of each, which breaks through the noise and tries to give you info & price-to-value ratio in laymen terms.

Next up: #4 on our list (hint: this may make you leave the iPod at home!)

4. Music Player
That's right. We said it. Get rid of that iPOD, that Zune, that Sansa, that generic mp3 player. Most smartphones come with a good music player and either built-in memory or an external memory card slot. We like external memory card slots for the simple reason that we expand memory when we want and change cards for different applications. We highly recommend this 16GB card. The "ultra" series speeds up data transfer. This makes a huge difference when you have a bunch of songs and want to shuffle songs or take multiple pictures.

Talk about device integration. Smartphones let you listen to music (using wired headsets or stereo Bluetooth) and when a call comes in, the music is paused allowing you to take the call and then go back to the song without missing a beat. No more carrying 2 devices to the gym.

3. GPS
The Internet (Mapquest, Yahoo/Google Maps) made paper maps & AAA old school.
Then, new portable GPS units from Garmin, Tom Tom & others rendered print-outs from the Internet obsolete.

Now, your smartphone can basically do all of the above - and make things not only affordable, but even more convenient.

The only prerequisites are decent wireless coverage and a data plan - both of which are now more universally available & affordable.

Many smartphones come preloaded with Google Maps & likely another mapping/nav application from your service provider (Sprint NAV, etc.).

If you enable your phone to specify your location, Google Maps:

Quickly shows your exact location on a map,
let's you zoom in/out & pan around as you wish,
displays traffic congestion
tracks your location on the map as you move,
offers search of a location or destination,
provides directions to your destination,
and gives turn-by-turn directions until you reach.

So, exactly why would you pay $300+ for a GPS-only black box that can be a target for theft? (question is obviously moot if you've already purchased one - very handy, those GPS things!)
So, maps, locators, directions, traffic indicators are the cool features available on many smartphones. This is why GPS functionality is rated #3 on our top 5 list of fav features & ways to use our smartphones.

Of course, you can't see anything or do anything if the smartphone is on your belt, in your pocket, in a cup holder, on in your purse!

We like to just pop it into a very affordable, highly adjustable universal dash/windshield mount, and go go go. By the way, side benefits of this hands-free enabling mount - better safety, caller-ID, voice dialing, voice-based Google searches, etc.

Next up, #2 offers a "don't try this at home!" feature (actually, you can, and should!!)

Palm Pre will no longer sync with iTunes...

Apple went and did it. Updated their iTunes (version 8.2.1) so that a Palm Pre can no longer sync with iTunes. We are ambivalent about this move. Apple had to do it to protect their ecosystem, but we liked it that Palm had created a little pathway into Apple's ecosystem empire. On the other hand, we liked Palm allowing customers to sync with iTunes, but couldn't they come up with something similar rather than the cumbersome media sync or hard drive method to move files between a computer and the Pre.

We like the Apple – Palm cage fight though. If Palm can make it through these rough times, their arsenal of ex-Apple folks should give a good fight to the reigning smartphone king. Good times!!!