Background

It was time for new phones, and a new kind of phone.  My wife and I had been using a couple of old flip phones that were at least three years old, and were of the free variety even then.  They had served admirably, but it was time to enter the 21st century.

The starting point...

Despite working at a technology company that makes computer network test equipment, we're not very adventurous when it comes to new technology.  We don't need the latest and greatest, we need something that works well and helps us get our jobs done quickly with a minimal amount of effort. Neither of us talk on the cell phone much, but spend much of our waking hours doing email.

My minimum requirements were for a phone that would be good for web browsing and reading/writing email to be able to stay in touch with the office and customers without having to lug around the PC.  And tethering for the times when I do need to write quotes, review sales reports, or do more than simple email from the road. And it needs to be able to handle Japanese text.  Which brings me to my wife's requirements.

She's originally from Japan. Reading menus and instructions that are often cryptic enough in your own language are close to impossible in a second language ("error 57: too many arguments to function call in line 786" had my wife asking who was arguing, why that wouldn't allow the phone to function, and she never called line 786 anyway. Did the phone have a sensor to prevent arguments on calls to area code 786?)  So she wanted a Japanese phone.  More importantly, I wanted her to have a Japanese phone so she wouldn't call me every ten minutes in the middle of customer meetings asking me how to use the phone. (Of course, the downside is that she'll call me and say, "The phone says 'genzai network ni tsunagaranai kara shibaraku matte kudasai.' What should I do?" And all I'll be able to answer is, "Huh? I don't know, do what the phone tells you do do.") But we're getting ahead of ourselves...

At a minimum, she needed a phone that could read and write Japanese email and web. After weeks of researching phones online, the only conclusion I could come to was that it was impossible to tell what language features were supported by which phones, other than the iPhone.  Apparently, with the release of the iPhone in Japan, the phone is multi-lingual and can change from being an English language smart phone to a Japanese smart phone with the touch of a button. (Including things like putting contacts in Japanese language order instead of ABC order.)  And there are plenty of resources online in Japanese, not to mention whole how-to books there on using the iPhone. (Japanese love how-to books, complete with manga illustrations, but that's a story of another blog.)

With all the bad publicity around AT&T coverage, I was sceptical, but she asked three different friends using iPhones, and they all loved their iPhones and said that coverage was good enough.  (We live and work in West LA, the area between Santa Monica and Beverly Hills near UCLA, so there's a good chance that coverage is better here than elsewhere.) Her decision was made. She wanted the iPhone 4 with the better screen quality, and so it was decided.  I know better than to argue with her.

I thought about getting an iPhone for myself, but I travel frequently and was still sceptical enough about AT&T that I wanted to hedge my bets.  I kept looking and decided on Verizon's Samsung Fascinate (Galaxy Z) an Android phone, which seemed to be the only phone comparable to the iPhone in features and screen quality. Despite my lack of adventurousness and the added hassle of having to set up and learn how to use two different phones, it seemed like an interesting experiment to compare the two, and as soon as I got the Android phone, everyone kept asking me how I like ti and how it compared to the iPhone.  So I thought a blog might be useful to everyone else out there considering their phone options.  Certainly, my own online resource had found only "experts" bantering about terms like amoled and retina technology screens, and other things that meant nothing to me.

We'd been using Sprint for something like ten years, and despite their reputation for so-so overage, I've had no major complaints, so that would have been the easiest choice.  Unfortunately, they didn't have any phones that appealed to me.  In particular, I was still hoping for a way to read and write emails in Japanese, and that meant a virtual keyboard instead of a physical one, ruling out most of their phones. the 4G coverage that they spend millions advertising, within California is only available in Fresno. And there is a general impression, fairly or not, that Spring might not survive the two years of the phone contract. (Note to Sprint - think about getting away from 2 year contracts if you want to keep customers and sign up new ones. It's time to get creative.)

Having ruled out Sprint and AT&T, that left Verizon as the obvious choice, and their reputation as having the best network was promising.  Still, my past experience with Verizon's wired service was not encouraging. We moved a few months back, with both the old home and new home inside Verizon territory and just wanted to move the phone service and set up FIOS. I won't go into detail here, but their incompetence left us without Internet access for more than two weeks, then took another two weeks, countless hours on the phone, and three technician visits (which means my wife has to take half a day off work each time) to get FIOS TV service turned on, all of which turned out to be caused by a typo in my name on the billing address that caused their system to fail a credit check on me, and my account to be silently cancelled time after time. For weeks. Still... we hope of the best and prepare for the worst.

A few final notes - the impression and recommendations are based on our particular needs, locations, and situation. Our phone usage is probably typical of a middle-aged (???) couple with busy work lives, but very different from the younger generation. In other words, your mileage may vary. Second, I am receiving nothing from any of the players - Apple, AT&T, Verizon, Samsung, Sprint, etc. for this.  They don't know I exist. I'm just a regular consumer.  And though I may be something of an expert in computer networking, I'm a complete amateur in cell phones and a newbie to smart phones. 

I hope this turns out to be useful to other people out there...