Chris Szurgot's Blog

By this time tomorrow (Monday at the latest), I will have gotten my 4th new cellular phone in less than 3 months. First, I bought a Sony Ericsson from SunCom. The bluetooth on that doesn't work properly, so the swapped it out for another Sony Ericsson. So I get that all set up, then Cingular comes in, and SunCom won't support the phone, and Cingular won't support it either, so they require us to switch over and get new phone. Ugh... There was $200 down the drain.

So my wife and I picked new phones from Cingular. I picked a Motorola V551 because it's got Bluetooth, and custom ring tones. (We picked them out end of last month, but just got around to ordering them end of last week (this is important) ) and got them this week. The Motorola is a nice solid phone, good weight, good size, bluetooth earpiece works great, but... the custom ring tones don't work when you're connected to a bluetooth earpiece. (I griped about this earlier) What's the point of a wireless earpiece if you can't tell who's calling without picking up the phone.

Well, if I'm going to have a phone, and be locked into a two year agreement, I want it to have key features that work, so it's back to find another bluetooth phone. And lo and behold, Cingular now carries the Audiovox SMT 5600. (This is the device I've been looking for for quite some time now. PDA functionality, mp3 player (I just bought a nomad, too... I'll keep the nomad cause I can keep all my music on it, but the phone will be used for Audiobooks) and phone. And it's only $100 more than the motorola) The only reason I didn't get this phone in the first place was that it wasn't available when my wife and I first picked out our phones.So an hour on the phone trying to get to the right person to sell me the new phone (seems it had to be a particular department) and $400 held on my credit card, I've finally got an Audiovox SMT 5600 on the way.

Hopefully, this will finally be a phone I can like and stick with (every cell phone I've ever had has been irritating in some regard) All the signs point to Yes, and everybody else seems to like it, so wish me luck.

Update: Yes, I'm aware that I can't use the Bluetooth earpiece to listen to music/audiobooks, which is ok... I can handle the wired earpieces when I'm not working.