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The thing about cell phones is that you just have to buy them on impulse. There can’t be waiting. Not at the pace that cell phone providers go through the process of certifying them. In an ideal world, I will just wait for the Apple iPhone, but if I bought a cell phone today, and the iPhone came out tomorrow, I would buy that too, because it’s there.

So in the meantime, I just replaced my trusty Siemens S66 with the Samsung SGH-D807 (Phonescoop info on the Samsung SGH-D807).

So far, so good. It has a real 1.3 megapixel camera, which should make pictures a little more clear than the Siemens (which also had a 1.3 megapixel camera, but I think the software inside made things look not so good). It’s a slider, which I am getting used to, and works just fine. It’s easy to lock and unlock the phone using the hardware. It has EDGE, so it’s faster on the upload and download, and it works much better on bluetooth than the Siemens did.

I think there are a few bugs, like you can’t really change the key tone to anything else but a loud beep, even though the menus indicate that you’ve done so. You can only have one e-mail address per contact (but you can have multiple phone numbers per contact).

At this point, short of having a full fledged smartphone, cell phone functionality is pretty mature, and this does it all. Maybe the one thing it is missing is bluetooth A2DP, but really, when am I going to use this as a music player when I have my iPod? I’ll just wait for the iPhone….

Update: I have now been using the phone for about 2 weeks and I have a better sense of the plusses and minuses. The camera is pretty good, not perfect, but much better than my last phone. This phone is EDGE enabled, so e-mailing photos is much faster. That’s really important to me. I love the voice command feature - it is pretty accurate and it helps me dial and send text messages to people. Oh, and the bluetooth implementation with the headset is really good. Very satisfied with that.

Now, the downsides. I haven’t used the MP3 player, and not sure that I ever will. I suppose I would have gotten iTunes RAZR if I thought I was buying the phone as a music player. The biggest bummer is the incomplete bluetooth implementation around sync with Mac OS X. Samsung phones as a class are not as compatible for things like sending SMS and caller ID on bluetooth, as say, Nokia (hmmm…wonder who Apple might be partnering for the iPhone). Maybe the other thing is that the vibration strength is not as great, which makes it harder to tell if a call has come in in a noisy environment.

These cons do not outweigh the pros.

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