new phone, moblog/photoblog, and textamerica.com

So i recently upgraded my mobile from a small Samsung phone to a thin flip form-factor Motorola Razor model. This is only the third ever phone model that I've had, starting with the smallish Nokia back in 2001. I forget the samsung and nokia model numbers... maybe ill look them up. Nah.

My first Nokia was awesome. The software interface was very intuitive and kept track of everything in a very proper and sensical manner. Up/Down buttons accessed what I wanted things to access and menus were easy to navigate and things just worked(unless I didn't know better, and just assumed that was the way things worked for all phones). I bought the Samsung because it was the only phone that Cingular was offering in 2003 that was a non-clamshell small enough to be comparable to my nokia. It wasn't so good.

There was an LED on the phone that would blink. All. The. Time.(1) Granted, you could change the color that it would blink from blue to orange and back to blue, but still, it was annoying sleeping with a bright blue blinking LCD in the corner of your room. And to make matters worse, the software interface was bad. Up/Down buttons didnt work right, the phone didnt split dialed/received/incoming-but-not-picked-up calls. Nor did the phone save outgoing text messages (which means I had no record of drunk messaging you that one time!(2)). And text messaging was a chore: there was no auto-complete feature, and no fast and easy way to enter two consecutive letters from the same key. I wasn't happy, but I coped.

Now I got this RAZR phone. It is kinda funny. The interface is customizable, but in a way that I can't get it to do *exactly* what I want. Just kinda close to what I want. The motorola UI is good though, colors are skinnable and the menu items and address book are in 'proper order' and make some sense. I've never really had a camera phone before, and it only takes low resolution images 480x600 jpegs. I was hoping for larger images, that are clearer when viewed on something other than a phone.

The picture quality really start to bother me when I tried to set up a moblog. MoBlog, I assume, stands for mobile blog or photoblog but i dont know how photo condensed down to 'mo'. It is an automated service to publish the photos that you take on your phone onto the intrarweb. And, like all good things, it is free. The one that I set up, http://tmarthal.textamerica.com needs a bit of CSS customization (and flaming gifs), but it is handy when I take a picture of where I live and want to share it with other people.

I think that blogger.com offers the same sort of photo upload service (like you can send your pictures to an email address to upload them) but I'll stick with textamerica well, just because.


(1) The unorthodox internet writer sh0uld never use writing techniques overzealously. This period stopping emphasis, while neccessary, should not be tried by the average blogger.
(2) Which means that it never happened.

Comments

Matthew said…
I think I have seen this view before, but only when I was very drunk.
Anonymous said…
i too have seen that view. but i did not know what it was at the time. i thought it was pornographic at first, but then it caused my cell phone to do weird things like display a little green triangle. the picture was lost forever after that. i am holding out for the SLVR from motorola.. my cell phone is dying a slow death...
Matthew said…
Will not the SLVR's interface be nearly identical to the RAZR?
tmarthal said…
the SLVR seems to be a non-clamshell RAZR phone. it won't last, since there is nothing protecting the keys and the screen.

where is bowler? has he uploaded any firmware updates to his phone?
Anonymous said…
bowler doesn't read blogs.

the selling points for the SLVR for me are it is smaller than the razr (thinner) and it has a removable transflash memory card. otherwise they are probably identical. and, i prefer the candybar phones to the clamshells.

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