Post 28: New Cell Phone Gets Awesomer

About a month ago I bought myself a new cell phone to replace my old but faithful Motorola W376G. My new phone is a Samsung SGH-T404G with service provided by StraightTalk. It is a prepaid phone like its predecessor however it has a bucketload of more features.

The things that really got my attention were the unlimited texting and Internet access. With my old phone I did not text many people very often because I needed to preserve the units that I had. Even then I would routinely exhaust all of them before the 90-day extension period was complete. However now I have the ability to text as much as I want without worrying about running out of minutes. I have gone from texting basically one person to as many as three or four some days.

Unlimited Internet is what also caught me. If it weren't already known about me, I'm a big user of the Internet. I spend several hours a day surfing the Web. So to get this phone with the unlimited Internet access enables me to do this when I'm on the go. I can use my cell phone as an alternate to my home computer. This is good for two reasons: first, we have a limited amount of bandwidth we're allotted each month by the phone company. I want to try and move most of my browsing to my cell phone, which doesn't quite have this restriction. Secondly, whenever I turn on my computer, there is almost always a period when I will lose Internet connection. This affects at least one other computer in the house. Plus the occasional instance when signal is randomly lost for no reason. My cell phone has much stabler connection.

As it turns out, though, there is actually a cap to how much data I can use. Uploading, downloading, and streaming of audio, video, and games is prohibited. This cap is essentially designed so that people do not bog down the wireless network by using so much bandwidth that they slow down the overall network. What does this mean to an epic Internet user to me? Not much as long as I am not constantly surfing the Web and downloading games all the time.

I haven't done much downloading since I bought the phone. I tried a couple games but they would not work right so I deleted those. I also acquired a couple free Daft Punk ringtones. But there is one gem that I've found which has totally changed the way I surf the Web on my phone: Opera Mini. Now mind you, I'm already a devout user of the regular Opera browser. It runs pretty fast and at this point I'm used to it. I knew that Opera had a mobile browser and I decided to check it out.

I was not disappointed. After a quick few minutes of fully adjusting to the interface I was able to start browsing the Web. It's truly amazing how much faster sites load and how they are easier to navigate. The browser seems to automatically detect what sites have mobile versions for people like me and use those. For sites that don't it displays them zoomed out and has a little mouse I can move around and zoom in with. Combined with the landscape mode for displaying things, which works conveniently with my slider phone, it makes things much easier to navigate. I have a list of bookmarks that I can use to quickly find my more frequent destinations. The beauty of Opera Mini that makes it run so fast, as I've found out, is that it compresses the data it received to lower the amount of data transfered, thereby increasing speed. It all runs through a dedicated Opera Mini server which does the magic. Some may see this as a security issue but I don't really mind Opera knowing my surfing habit. It's not like they'll really care anyway. The site claims that Opera Mini uses a mere 10% of the bandwidth of other browsers. I don't know the exact percentage for my phone but I imagine it's way less than what the built-in browser was using.

So here I am, a text messaging, Web surfing phone lover. I pay $45 a month for unlimited features on a nice phone. I've only found three downsides:

1. No YouTube. Flash is not supported on my cell phone.
2. No Internet radio.
3. I can't find a way to get my music from my computer to the cell phone.

Nonetheless, with the addition of Opera my phone is aweeeesome.