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My Nokia 6101 just died after 2.5 years of faithful, inexpensive service, so I was in the market for a new phone in a hurry. When I originally bought this phone, I hoped that Google would have revolutionized the cell phone industry in America, making smart phone service more flexible and inexpensive. Well, the changes that I want still haven’t materialized yet, so I went looking for a new phone that was as similar as possible to my old trusty Nokia.

Another requirement that I had was that I wanted the phone to work with the T-Mobile pre-paid service. I’m actually a really big fan of T-Mobile’s price and network coverage

The closest thing I could find was the Nokia 2760. On occasion, it would be available on th T-Mobile web site, but it couldn’t be found when my phone died. I therefore checked the Walgreens and Radio Shack stores in my town until I found one at “The Shack” (as the employees seem to be forced to call it). It was $40 plus tax, which means that I won’t lose any sleep if my daughter tries to flush it down the toilet.

To “activate” the phone, I simply took the SIM card out of my old phone and placed it in the new one. 20 seconds later, I was able to receive calls using my mobile number. I didn’t have to contact T-Mobile even once, and my old “plan” seems to work with the new phone very well.

The biggest questions that I had when I bought this phone were “what was missing from my old phone” and “what did I need to buy”. Here’s the results:

Missing

• This phone doesn’t have any buttons on the outside like my old one did. I really liked having a volume and F-you button on the outside of the phone. The 2760 forces you to open the button to silence an incoming call, and I have yet to figure out how to adjust call volume without 5 button clicks.
• I can’t record video on this phone like I could with the old phone. This isn’t really a bad thing, however, since the old phone’s videos were just god-awful.
• Apparently, Nokia phones no longer come with a ringtone that sounds like a phone ringing. And I guess noticing that makes me some type of old fogie who can’t figure out why stores no longer carry Lawrence Welk LP’s. I tried to buy one from T-Mobile’s ringtone shop, but I couldn’t find one.
• The 2760 doesn’t have a little antenna nub sticking out of the top.

Different & New

• Bluetooth! I know I am the last person in America to buy a bluetooth-enabled phone, but I’m really enjoying it so far. On my 6101, I actually purchased the compatible serial cable from Nokia, which was around $50 if I remember correctly. I hate that I have to basically throw away that investment, but I am loving how easy it is to use bluetooth. Also, I purchased this bluetooth adapter from Newegg for $15, and it works very well on both XP and Ubuntu 9.04.
• The software interface has changed a little bit, but it’s nothing too revolutionary. If you’re used to your old phone’s interface, then this one should be very intuitive.
• I can now add MP3 ringtones from my MP3 collection. Sweet! Now I just need to find an MP3 of a phone ringing
• I can log into Gmail with this phone, which I couldn’t do on my old phone for some reason. That’s nice, but the interface and network speed are nothing to write home about.
• The battery model changed. My old phone’s battery model was BL-4C, and my new phone’s battery model is BL-4B. I don’t yet know if the two models are interchangeable, but I doubt they are.

What Hasn’t Changed

• The wall AC adapter looks like it’s identical. Based on that, it doesn’t look like I need to buy another car charger.
• The photo quality appears to be identical.
• The phone still has a ridiculously small amount of storage. I think the official amount is 11 MB. Oh well, I already have a digital camera and an MP3 player, so I guess I don’t need a phone that does all of that too.

Conclusion

If you like little Nokia flip phones, then this one seems to be as good as its predecessors. I’m pretty happy with it so far, and it’s hard to beat the price.

I read a great article on the Freakonomics Blog today regarding the opportunity costs associated with financially free software updates:

• How Much Does a Free iPhone Update Cost?

In it, the author basically points out that his financially free iPhone update cost him one hour of his life when the update broke his phone. A lot of the commentors on the blog stated that exchanging an unexpected hour of your time for an up-to-date iPhone is totally worth it, but most of those people are, in my opinion, probably either lonely and sad or too young to properly value their time.

I have more than a few electronic devices in my home that require periodic updates, so I’m very familiar with this type of story. I’ve gotten to the point where I just automatically budget time for any type of update that I do. This time budgeting is important because it allows me to truly contemplate how much each little update will “cost” both myself and my family.

What I’ve found to be even more important when it comes to valuing my time, however, is budgeting for updates and other administrative overhead before I acquire a new gadget or piece of software. And since the amount of time performing ongoing maintenance can quickly dwarf the amount of time required to set up a new gadget, you need to account for them both along with financial costs when you consider acquiring new hardware or software.

Let’s look at cell phone choices as an example. I use a Nokia 6101, which I purchased without any phone contract-related subsidies for around $50. It’s small, is incredibly simple to administer (no explicit patching and very little configuration), can receive e-mail, and can also be synced with my calendar and contacts. There are some things that I wish it had, like a larger display, and there are a few things I wish I could do with it, such as send e-mail. However, even though I’m a very connected person from a communications perspective, I find that this phone really meets all of my functional requirements very well. The icing on the cake is that it just works (to borrow a line from Apple): I turn it on, put it in my pocket, and forget about it.

Now, there’s no denying that the iPhone is a significantly nicer piece of hardware, and it contains significantly nicer software. It has a large display, a powerful and extensible user interface, and is web-enabled. It truly appears to be the future of smart phones.

The problem is that, with enhanced functionality comes increased complexity, and this grouping usually ends up costing you time. The iPhone OS, core, and third-party applications must all be explicitly updated, and sometimes this action requires multiple interfaces. More “moving parts” (from a software perspective of course) means more points of failure, which means you spend more time troubleshooting and fixing your phone.

Ideally, something as important and integral to our daily lives as a cell phone should transcend its status as a electronic gadget. It should be so reliable and idiot proof, that you focus on what you want to do, not on how it will be accomplished. If your phone satisfies this requirement, then you should be able to say something like “if I need you while I’m at the store, I’ll call you using my cell phone”. Notice that I didn’t specify my phone’s brand, it’s communication protocol, or whether last night’s iTunes update deleted all of my ringer profiles.

Of course, I’m looking forward to the day when it will be practical for me to own a smart phone, and, from a functional perspective, the iPhone seems like a great piece of engineering. I’m just going to wait until it’s financial and opportunity costs are more in line with my budget.

Well, I finally purchased a MediaMVP yesterday from Newegg. If you haven’t seen one of these before, it’s basically a little box that streams videos and music from a networked server to your television. I’m hoping to use it to do the following:

• Play back recordings that I have stored within my MythTv system
• Pause and rewind live TV (again, with a little help from MythTv)
• Watch home videos stored as MPEG’s
• Watch “archived” movies that I have converted into non-MPEG 2 codecs, such as Xvid and Ogg Theora
• Access my extensive MP3 collection through my television set

On top of all of these great features, the MediaMVP is relatively inexpensive (< $90), small, silent, and energy-efficient. The only real downside that I see is that it’s a non-trivial project to configure the MediaMVP to do all of the things listed above using a Linux server. Thank goodness that I play with computers for a living

Purchases like this can be a little difficult to rationalize from a frugal perspective, but I thought about it for a while and am pretty happy with the decision. Yes, it’s $90 more that I’ll have to earn before I can retire, but the following points made sense to me:

1. It’s something that I’ve wanted for years.
2. It’s definitely cheaper than the alternatives. Tivo is $100 + $12/month for as long as you want to use it. Cable-based DVR’s are $14 a month and not nearly as flexible.
3. I’m a big fan of the idea that there is such a thing as “good TV”. Whether it’s a PBS documentary or prime-time “Price Is Right”, TV can be a wonderful form of entertainment. The problem that I have with TV is that when I do have time to watch it, I rarely have easy access to anything that I would actually want to watch. Hopefully, this device will change that.

In the end, I hope that it ends up being an inexpensive, flexible, and easy-to-maintain. Please keep watching this space if you would like to follow my progress.