New Phone at Last

I finally got a new cell phone after 4 years with my old Nokia 5250. Although I was never a huge fan of AT+T wireless who made me into a customer by purchasing LA Cellular, I decided to go with Cingular now that they've acquired AT+T and I have to admit that at least as far as phones are concerned, they had a nice selection compared to Verizon. I wanted a blue tooth phone, and decided to go with the Motorola v551. It's a camera phone, and while we were in the Cingular store getting my new phone, and filling out the service transfer pages, Tracy snapped this photo of Niamh.

The v551 is a Java based phone, which means that games or software written in Java have a chance of running on the v551. It's already able to do things like run an AOL instant messenger client. It also seems that now that I'm on the GSM network I finally have some coverage in the house which is also nice. The most exciting thing for me is getting Bluetooth support working, which so far, is an exercise in diddling around, googling, and trying things repeatedly without much success so far.

Bluetooth is a short-range radio frequency (RF) technology that operates at 2.4 GHz and is capable of transmitting voice and data. At 2.4 GHz, it interferes nicely with those 2.4GHz phones not to mention your typical 802.11 b/g WiFi network. That little detail aside, Bluetooth was designed for short distance zero configuration networking, as the effective range of a Bluetooth devices is 32 feet (10 meters). The Bluetooth data transfer speed is a robust 1 Mbps, making it perfect for things like synching your address book and your Bluetooth phone, or using a "wireless" headset with your phone. My dream scenario is using the handfree headset, which has buttons on the ear piece to initiate calls, and allows you to turn the volume up and down. With the v551's voice recognition dialing capability, I should be able to make and receive calls without ever touching the phone. Now if I can just get the v551 to recognize the headset I might actually be able to do some of this stuff.