New cellphone

Since I couldn’t make up my mind about cellphone plans, my parents just renewed with AT&T (yes, kinda evil, oops).  The upside is that they sent me a new phone to replace my old broken phone, so I am now once again able to receive phone calls after a couple weeks of phonelessness. (Sorry if I missed your call!)

My new cellphone is a Nokia 6126, which is a pretty decent phone… it’s a clamshell design with bluetooth and speakerphone, and it was cheap, and that’s all I really wanted. Annoyingly, the Nokia 6126 is not officially supported by iSync on Mac OS X! There isn’t even an iSync plugin that you can download from Nokia, although there are plugins for plenty of other Nokia phones on the Nokia website. Ultimately I had to go and hack iSync’s config files by hand, pasting in some gibberish from these directions for making the Nokia 6126 work with iSync.  I’m sorry, Apple, but that’s really lame.  I’m using a Mac because I want it to just work… if I have to go copying and pasting gibberish from blogs / bulletin boards into my config files in order to get things done on my computer, then I might as well be using Linux.  (Incidentally, I’ve had some success with dual-booting Ubuntu on my new Macbook Pro, but I screwed it up by attempting to update to the latest alpha release.  Oops, time to wipe and re-install.)

My next phone will probably be the OpenMoko Neo 1973, which is kind of like the iPhone except it runs on Linux / open source software, and is designed to be friendly to hardware/software hackers who want to play around with its insides. The consumer model is due out in October, so I’ll be saving up for that… it’ll have wifi and GPS built-in, which makes up for the initial version not having 3G (same problem the iPhone currently has).

2 thoughts on “New cellphone

  1. I’m sorry, Apple, but that’s really lame. I’m using a Mac because I want it to just work… if I have to go copying and pasting gibberish from blogs / bulletin boards into my config files in order to get things done on my computer, then I might as well be using Linux.

    I kind of gave up on Macs after having WAY too many hardware problems (yes, the OS is possibly the most user friendsly if less-than-open thing ever, but still.)

    I’ve been dual-booting Ubuntu myself though (on my AMD-based notebook, with, I admit it, Windows) and I love it except that I can’t get my wireless card to work in spite of months of tinkering with NDISwrapper and various drivers.

    When it actually works, the copying and pasting gibberish is actually kind of fun though!

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