I know I’m not the typical consumer electronics consumer. I’m an early adopter. Specifically, I’m a relatively low budget early adopter, which really means I want to adopt early and really tend to purchase things that are mostly new. For example, I’ve posted before about my collection, ahem, addiction to PDA’s. The first one I bought was the Apple Newton which I didn’t buy new. In fact I purchased it from my friend Carl. Later, I also purchased my first 3COM Palm Pilot from him as well. (Thanks again Carl!) So… although I may save a buck here and there, I still consider myself somewhat of an early adopter if not an excellent early fan or admirer of new technology. Now all that being said, I’m not one to follow fashion when a technology can be adopted. So when I tell you that my new RAZR phone (Black) from the good folks at Motorola is pleasing to the eye and mostly to the techie in me… well then please listen to the unforgivable piece of crippled crud that is THIS PHONE!!!! My phone which was purchase as my aging Sony-Ericson T616 was slowly dying. Taking into account how I USE/ABUSE my tech, one can certainly give the makers of the T616 some serious credit in the robust design category. Now the wonderful guy at Best Buy who was able to put me in my new phone in about 12 minutes neglected to inform me of a small but critical FLAW in this phone. Nope, it wasn’t the 1.2 MP camera, with video. Check. It wasn’t the support for MP3 ringtones (I prefer MIDI). No.. it wasn’t the cool dual LCD screens. Check. It was.. THE BLUETOOTH. See folks, I’m a fan of this little wireless technology named after an ancient Danish King who was able to bring together the Danes. I have Bluetooth adapters on all my PC’s and have setup all sorts of nifty things to work with this nice piece of almost universal technology. Ya see, it all started with the Mac. A friend of mine who will be refered to as Mr. Murphy showed off a cool as heck application called Salling Clicker to me a long, long time ago. With his cool Salling Clicker software, his T616 (seeing the connection?) he was able to lock and unlock his Mac, control iTunes, use his phone as a mouse, etc…etc… With this one piece of software and it’s incredible scripting capabilities, he could do almost anything. I wanted it bad…. my Precsssssssssous! Alas my love of tech was easily foiled by dumb fatsy stupid MACKSIES. We HATES THEM! So.. I waited.. and found other software to work in my Bill Gates dominated PC world. Then my phone died. Then Salling Clicker for Windows was launched. Can you not see where this story is going? Is the tragic foreshadowing not getting through here? See. The horror of it all. The plain, sick fact is….
THE STUPID PHONE DOES NOT SUPPORT THE BLUETOOTH SERIAL PORT PROFILE.
I have not given up. There will be a solution be it, a new phone, new firm ware or.. or…
something! So, in all this…. why am I not pulling my hair out? Because Salling Clicker supports 802.11b. That’s right folks. My Dell AXIM is rockin the house! Now the title of this post is “Digital Expectations” and I’ve used it before in my professional career to mean something different. Here, it represents my angst when I (that’s me) have certain REALISTIC expectations that my new phone has the same BASE capabilites as my dying OLD phone. It’s software bits folks. This is NOT a big cost. So…why would a company or carrier as I’m told whose fault it may me (CINGULAR!!!!!!) do such a silly thing!?!?!?!?! Maybe. Just maybe it has to do with the fact that with BLUETOOTH… you don’t need to pay for a monthy service to upload your pics and vids.. you can simply send them through the ether to your PC. How long is this going to go on? I mean it. How long? I don’t think much longer because I’m not the only one with “digital expectations”. Things should work and getting something new that doesn’t do as much as the old device just won’t cut it.
So for all you folks out there with a RAZR, lil help?
