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I tried to ignore the iPhone, since I’m sick of hearing about it myself (a Google search for “June 29, 2007” had the iPhone as the 2nd and 3rd results), but I can’t help but acknowledge its design. I have no desire to have one for any real reason, as I don’t like phones or mobile technology. However, I am fascinated by good design. If you read 37signals, you’ve probably already seen the iPhone keyboard movie. Despite all of the hype, it really does look brilliant. I’m not willing to pay $500 for a phone (that’s a new lens), but I’d pay $5 to use it for a day. That’s a fair trade, I think. I’m also curious to see AT&T customer base/revenue before and after 6:00 pm this evening.

The $250+ savings sucked me in. I needed a new battery for my existing phone, which was about six years old. Since I was a long-time Sprint customer, I had $175 off a new phone, plus any rebate offered by the phone itself. When compared to the cost of a new battery, a new phone was potentially cheaper. So I chose the new phone and got the Motorola Razr V3M. My reasoning for this phone was mainly because of how thin it was. I don’t care about camera/video, I don’t care about music on my phone, and I don’t care about text-messaging (although, anymore, I think I’d like that more than talking). The reviews came back positive, so that’s what I got.

In this day and age, we all want things to happen now. It’s more of an expectation than a convenience, and it goes down to the milliseconds. Which leads me to the main issue I have with my phone: it’s too slow. I open it up, it hesitates to show me a screen. I hit “contacts”, I have to wait a second before my contacts show up. Speed dial takes about 2 seconds longer than my last phone, which is what I use the most. It’s hard to make an argument that waiting an extra second (or less) for something is irritating, but it is. A few other annoyances include:

• The camera button is placed precisely where the thumb needs to be when flipping the phone open. What’s that mean? I usually turn on the camera (which takes about 4 seconds) just so I can turn it back off (another 2 seconds) before making a call.
• If I miss a call, it will display “dismiss” or “dial” until I answer one or the other. I can just hit “end” to clear it, but it shows back up the next time I open the phone. This issue compares to the cancel or allow Mac commercial—it’s just annoying.
• The ring tones suck, and I’m not the type to download new ones. I just keep it on vibrate all the time.
• There are only two options for including vibration: “high and vibrate” or “vibrate only”. This may be too picky, but ideally, “low and vibrate” would be my choice when I’m not at work.

So there you have it. And just so you know, I’m probably the last person to review a cell phone, because I’m biased toward not having one at all. I just know I’d probably get something else if I could do it over.