Life Without a Cell Phone
I haven’t had a cellphone for a year now.
It’s a crazy admission. Something I actually avoided telling people for a while because it seemed so… so… crazy. When I tell someone in Hong Kong, a modern city with a mobile phone subscriber rate above 100%, that I don’t have a mobile number, they give me that “I don’t know if I believe you or not” look.
I did give up my Treo, the one I had for years, when I moved to China. No sense in taking a CDMA phone around the globe. When we landed in Beijing, I bought a Motorola Pebl because it was reasonably priced and I knew no smartphone could satisfy me. The Pebl worked great for a few months until it was lost (probably stolen actually) in a subway.
But by the time the phone was stolen, we had already moved to Hong Kong and I wasn’t traveling around nearly as much. I was rarely without my laptop, so if I was out in the city and needed to make a call, I could usually jump onto a PCCW wifi hotspot and use Skype. And I’ve relied on Skype almost exclusively for a year now.
A year ago I would have never believed that I’d be living without a cellphone while my wife Jenny dutifully carries her with her each day. Yet here I am. And honestly, it’s not that bad. Sometimes I even relish my disconnected moments (heretical, I know).
But one of the biggest reasons I haven’t bought a new phone is that I haven’t found a phone I’m interested in purchasing. The Treo was a great phone. Not perfect, but reasonably functional. But over the years, Palm has dropped the ball (wow, that’s an understatement) and I never want a phone that I have to reboot (I’m looking at you Windows Mobile). I’ve been tempted by some of the Symbian phones, particularly the Nokia 95 or even an internet tablet like the Nokia N800. Even more than a smartphone, I’ve often pined for a decent e-book reader, particularly one that can handle PDFs. So my ultimate device could function as phone, email client, web browser, pdf/ebook reader and music player all with, of course, exceptional battery life. See? I’ll never have a phone again.
One device that has come close is the iPhone. I’ve been tempted time and again to purchase one, but I refuse to rely on a device that I must hack in order to use. Even the perfect device is not worth complete lock-in, which is the iPhone’s devil’s pact. And if provider lock-in wasn’t bad enough, there’s system lock-in as well. The SDK license is draconian (see 1, 2, 3, and 4 for just a few commentaries on this). I find it astounding that the iPhone has received as much developer support as it has. “Russell Beattie,”http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/my-comment-on-yet-another-oreilly-iphone-post commenting on O’Reilly Radar a few days ago, put it very well:
I completely understand that you guys have an iPhone Hacks book to hawk, but honestly, your continued promotion of developing for the iPhone using unofficial APIs is harming other TRULY OPEN projects more worthy of finite developer time like Maemo, OpenMoko or even Android.
Instead of encouraging your readers to break the law (the DMCA however loathsome covers the sort of stuff you have to do to get code running on the iPhone), I wish you’d recognize that Apple doesn’t deserve this sort of attention from you or developers. Apple has decided to keep their device – however cool and interesting – to themselves and sandboxed developers out of doing innovative things. That’s their choice, and they should suffer the consequences of it.
So I’m much more likely to hold out until a decent Android or OpenMoko based phone is ready. In the meantime, I suppose I’ll just have to enjoy the silence.