McGarvey’s Words

In my left hand is a brand new S 56 cell phone from Siemens and in my right hand I am holding a two year-old Samsung SCH-N150 and here is my word to you: If your phone is older than 24 months, don’t hesitate. Just junk it. Now. It’s old, clunky, and the proof is in my left hand.

Cell phones keep making steady progress and it’s not all just cosmetics. There’s size for one thing, or the lack thereof. The S56 is a diminutive 3 oz and 4 inches tall. The Samsung is 4.2 oz and 4.5 inches tall – but in a pocket it feels twice as big as the Siemens.

But what really dazzles with the S56 – what makes it special, desirable, a great phone – is a sparkling LCD color screen. I am a Baby Boomer and as we age we have found it tougher to see those dratted little screens on phones and PDAs, especially in poor lighting (a restaurant or in a taxi at night), but the sharpness of the Siemens phone jumps right out at you. It is easy to see and that makes it a phone I want to reach for. With it I dial fewer wrong numbers and, importantly, the clock feature is easy to read. Don’t know about you but I stopped wearing a watch a year ago – why carry one when a cell phone’s time is more accurate? – but the contortions I had to go through to tell time on the Samsung at night (hold it near the candle...) were leading me to question my no watch rule. Now I’m more persuaded that watches have become otiose baubles much favored by those for whom time is a confection, not an asset.

And yet...the S56 also prompts me to puzzle about where cell phones are heading and why. It’s a marvelous phone but it also is frustrating and, in some ways, simply dumb. This phone – available on the AT&T and Cingular networks for perhaps $100 to $150 – has more features than I would ever care to learn, and probably the silliest is the ability to interface with a tiny digital still camera. The saving graces here are that the camera is an option (for $100 more) and you needn’t always carry a camera with you (as owners of the competitive Sanyo 8100 must because that phone’s camera is built in). My demo unit of course came with a camera and after taking a few pictures – “wow, cool, look at this!” – the novelty worse off and the camera was detached and stashed in a distant desk corner. Perhaps I am dull-witted but I simply cannot imagine why a business traveler would want to bring a camera along. I can see it now – I shoot a picture of a steaming pasta plate at Babbo’s, email it to the significant other in Tucson, and leave a chirpy phone message for her to digest as she chews on a half-frozen Lean Cuisine – “Hi, love, Mario Batali is really outdoing himself. Great food, as you can tell in the picture. Wish you were here.” Nah, cannot picture that picture and, to my eyes, digital cameras are a non-starter for a business traveler.

(I know phone cameras are big among the Japanese who seem to like using them for everything from industrial espionage to impishly snapping candid photos in public bathrooms. But like most Japanese wireless fads somehow I see this camera fixation spreading throughout America about as rapidly as the Ginza a.m. staple niboshi, dried sardine flakes, has.)

And call me a troglodyte but I still am no fan of using a phone for messaging (SMS, MMS, or email, all of which are built into the S56 feature set). The Siemens unit features the predictive T9 text input tool and the result is comparatively fast and easy messaging – but the operative word is "comparatively.” It still took me several minutes to compose and address each of the nearly pre-literate test messages I concocted (“Meet me at Speedway & Stone. 4 pm”) and I will grant I am slow at this...but why bother? Isn’t it simpler, faster, easier to use the phone qua phone and speak into the thing? You bet.

A feature that does get me drooling is built-in Bluetooth, for easy connectivity with similarly equipped laptops and PDAs, but as I hunt around the office I am not finding any gear with compatible Bluetooth. No matter. I'd get a suitable PDA if I owned the S56 because the ease of interface with Bluetooth would be so great.

One positive surprise for me in testing out this phone: the AT&T GSM network, at least around Tucson, performs such much better than AT&T’s TDMA network did. The old network was so shoddy that I had an AT&T demo phone that I left in a desk drawer for perhaps a year. It didn’t work reliably. Once a month or so I’d make a test call, the signal would drop, and back the phone went in the drawer. Performance on the GSM AT&T network is much, much improved.

But back to the S56: my verdict is that this is a dandy phone. I don’t quite get why it is only a dual band phone (850 and 1900 MHz, compared to the three bands found on, e.g., the Moto V66 which also has the 1800 MHz band). I’ll never use the camera and probably won’t use the messaging tools. But the voice quality is good, the screen is a beauty, and the size-weight make this a phone you want to carry.

It’s a winner – so when you decide to ditch that two year-old phone that’s cluttering your carry-on, keep the S56 in mind.

What phone do you favor? Tell us what and why and the best emails will go here.

What to do with an old phone? Sell it on eBay. I sold my SCH-N150 in a jiff (for $19.99 if I recall correctly). Yet another reason I remain a loud eBay fan.

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About Robert McGarvey

Author of How to Dotcom (Entrepreneur Press), McGarvey is writing a book on Brain Wars, the rise of cognitive science and the search for truths about thinking. A onetime columnist for BizTravel.com, he is a frequent contributor to dozens of magazines, ranging from American Legion to Selling Power, American Way, and Rutgers. He has also contributed to Harvard Business Review. For the past five years, he has served as "The Ombudsman" for PORTHOLE Cruise Magazine. Still curious about McGarvey? Read up on him here.

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