The phone I use right now is my favourite phone I ever used. It's a Benq S68, and it's awesome because it's
just a phone. My philosophy with tech is that I'd rather have something that does one thing
well than something that tries to do a whole lot of thing and fails at one or more of them. For example, I always thought including an incredibly crappy camera in phones was stupid: The camera sucks, and the phone is bigger and more expensive as a result.
Of course I'd love to have a phone that can do more than the average phone, but I've never seen one that is still a good phone as a result, but now we're getting tantalizingly close:
Wil Wheaton mentioned in his SG column how much he liked his new
Helio Ocean, and I have to admit, that thing is already well on the way to being something I'd want to use. But, here's what my absolute ideal phone would be:
It would obviously still have to perform very well at its primary function, but I don't think we need to talk about this. The other features just shouldn't sap so much battery life from it that I need to recharge it every night, because that shit is tedious, yo.
It should be reasonably compact. Most "smartphones" I've seen are big enough that I'd have to buy a murse to lug it around (they don't even fit in my
Urban Tool holster.
It needs reasonable internet access with email integration (gmail would be great, pop3 would be fine) since I'm fucking tired of not being able to look up stuff on the go.
It needs a qwertz keyboard. This didn't used to be a major issue, because I never used SMS anyway, but I've been fiddling with twitter and other tumbleblogs recently, and I just hate hate hate having to write entries with ten measly buttons. I feel the Ocean has an awesome solution to this; that dual-slider thing is dead sexy.
IM integration. I never even considered this until I saw the Ocean does it, but IM integration would fucking rock. I'd just love having my contacts at my fingertips all the time. Only problem with the Ocean? It doesn't do fucking Jabber. Seriously, how can you miss Jabber? They do Windows Live IM - or whatever the fuck it's called - AIM and something else, I think. Not only is Jabber open and well-documented, so it can't be that hard to implement, it's also used by Google Talk, so they could have added another recognized brandname to their list. Well, hopefully they'll add that.
But the seriously mostest sexiest thing about the ocean is GPS with Google Maps integration. It's so brilliant I peed a little. Want. So. Much. I'm not buying another phone without this.
So basically, if Helio built the ocean without a camera (they can leave it in, but meh), Jabber capabilties and, you know made it available where I live, I'd be so all over that. Of course, I'd also have to get myself a cellphone plan with unlimited data transfer, because right now that stuff is fucking extortion in Germany.
