For Christmas, intrigued by the concept of it, we decided to buy a Polaroid PoGo Printer for the family to use. We hadn’t really heard of it before, nor did we really know exactly what it did, but it was on sale on Black Friday and many of the members of our family are fanatical about printing out photos, so we decided to give it a shot.
I have to admit, it’s not really what we expected, but it is a neat little niche product.
As I mentioned last month, I took the plunge into Windows Phone 7 on the AT&T network. For me, this is the first smartphone I’ve owned on my personal cellular account. I’ve had two other smartphones in the past; a Samsung Windows Mobile device on Verizon about 8 years ago and an iPhone 3G on the AT&T network for the last two years; but I’ve never had to track my usage or pay for those, as they were provided by my employers at the time. With the iPhone, at least (I’m not sure about the Samsung device), the data plan was unlimited, so there was nothing to track.
However, with my new Windows Phone handset, I selected the lower-tier data plan on AT&T’s network (200 megabytes of data for $15/month).
One of the huge downsides of being an early adopter is the lack of features you generally get in the beginning. For me, the humongous difference between the number of iPhone apps currently available and the number of Windows Phone 7 apps available isn’t that big of a problem, but there are a few apps I really miss. Following is a brief list of those apps. Please feel free to add more in the comments if you have any thoughts on the matter.
It’s been a little over a month since I first started using the Virgin Mobile MiFi 2200 wifi hotspot. I used it almost exclusively as my Internet provider for most of the month of September, and I have to say I continued to be impressed by it throughout the month.
There were a handful of times that I had to reset the device because it stopped responding; and there were one or two instances when I actually had to reactivate it. Other than that, I very rarely had any issues with it at all.
About a week ago, Virgin Mobile USA announced a new unlimited cellular broadband package. For $40/month (no contract), you can use one of their mobile broadband devices to connect to the Internet and use as much bandwidth as you desire.
Since I am still stuck with satellite broadband service at home, I decided to try it out. I’ve been looking into mobile broadband packages for quite a while, but the thought of signing a new two-year contract, paying almost as much as I’m paying now (the satellite package I have is $79.95/month – most mobile broadband packages are around $60/month) and being limited to around 2 gigabytes of downloads each month (my current plan allows 17 gigs on a revolving 30-day basis) really didn’t appeal to me.
This new plan from Virgin, though, had me intrigued. No contracts, apparently no bandwidth limits (I have seen no official word from Virgin as to whether there will be “reasonable use” limits imposed at any point, but, right now, it doesn’t look like it) and a price point half of what I am paying now all really appealed to me.
Having used my HTC Surround Windows Phone 7 handset for a few months, now, I’ve come up with a few items to add to a user experience wishlist. If you have any other serious suggestions (i.e. not “make it an iPhone” or something like that), I’d be glad to hear them.