Not so fast...

I said in my last entry that I didn't need a new phone and that I was happy with the Evo. That was well and true until I got my hands on the Samsung Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch on Sprint (WHO thinks up these long names?!?!). I guess what I didn't know didn't hurt me until I knew it.

I now have a new phone.

The Samsung Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch (hereafter known as the GS2) is an amazing phone with incredible speed, beautiful screen, and great battery life (in my experience; I'm getting over 24 hours with normal use).

I thought the Evo 4G was all I needed. I still believe that. It is still a great phone with great features and can still do pretty much everything I needed it to do. So why get the new phone? Well, I guess it's because it does everything the Evo does, but better. The biggest kicker for me was the screen. Super AMOLED is AMAZING as compared to the Evo's backlit screen. Especially in daylight. Everything else is just smoother, prettier, or faster.

Oh, and there's the fact that it's pretty much the coolest phone on the market right now. That's a big one that a worst kind of geek would place high value on.

Over a Year with the Same Phone

I'm slipping.

One area in which I'm not the worst kind of geek is that of the cellular, or mobile phone. In this area, I typically do what most other true geeks do: I get a new phone every year (or sometimes sooner). Fortunately, we have enough phones on our account to facilitate this early changing, and I've taken advantage of that over the past seven or eight years annually. This has changed with my last phone purchase.

Now, when it comes to cell phones, I'm once again the worst kind of geek.

On June 6th last year, I waited at the counter of Best Buy for nearly four hours while they struggled with their failing system to activate my Sprint Evo 4G. Fortunately I had an appointment and a nice, padded seat to sit on through the process. However, it didn't negate the fact that I waited and waited and waited.

Once the process was complete, however, it became apparent to me very quickly that the Evo 4G was a different smartphone than the others I had before it. This phone was actually SMART. It worked the way I expected it to. It was fast. It had a big app market. It made great phone calls. It had a beautiful screen. In short, it was everything I ever wanted in a phone.

And it still is all those things and more.

With Cyanogen Mod, the Evo 4G is even faster, smoother, and more responsive than ever. A year later, the phone still feels fresh and new, something no other phone I've had has been able to do. It still satisfies.

So, while there are new phones coming out all the time to include the Evo Shift and Evo 3D, none of them have been able to draw me away from the Evo 4G. It really is the perfect phone. For me, at least.

Amazing technology

Image via Wikipedia

For my kids, electronic high technology is something that just *is*. It's been around their entire lives, so it's nothing really amazing to them. Amazing would be levitation, or perhaps invisibility, but things like smart phones, X-Box, netbooks, iPods, and even satellite or cable TV are about as commonplace to them as a toilet and air conditioning are to me. My, how the times have changed.

I feel fortunate to be alive right now. Aside from the obvious reasons (being addicted to breathing being foremost on that list), it's because in my lifetime, I have seen truly amazing things and have watched mankind transition from terrestrial technology to true space-age tech. Heck, we went to the moon in 1969 when I was two years old!

I am always amazed by technology. Even stuff I use every day like cell phones or the Internet; it still makes me smile like a loon. Why? Aside from the aforementioned, it's because I remember what it was like to imagine a lot of this stuff before it was available. To be able to realize and experience the technology I used to read about in sci-fi books is like finally getting to open presents on Christmas morning. Yeah, it's that flippin' awesome!

Let's take the Kindle as an example. This item is something that, to me, is most similar to what Douglas Adams wrote about as The Hitchhiker's Guide. The similarity was not lost on the writer of XKCD.

Click on the comic for a larger view

I love reading, and now that I have a Kindle 2, I read all the time. Every day. For the past few years, most of my reading has been limited to Foreign Affairs magazine, TIME, Entertainment Weekly, or the odd newspaper that would somehow cross my path as well as a bunch of Internet browsing. Now, I'm reading sci-fi again, reading newspapers every morning, and I've got a bunch of books on it waiting for me to read. All that in a device that's about 1/3" thick and the size of a large paperback.

GeekWife said it reminded her a bit of the PADD's in Star Trek, but ended up naming her's Hitchhiker's Guide while mine is named Trillian.

As I read the Kindle, I marvel at the technology within the device: 3G wireless network, epaper, 2GB storage, and decent speed in a form factor that would be laughably impossible only 5 years ago. Heck, I remember when epaper was first being discussed as anew technology over 10 years ago when I worked at Egghead Software in Irvine, CA (part-time while I was stationed at MCAS Tustin in Orange County). It was future-talk; stuff that sounded cool and had great promise, but that we wouldn't see for a long time.

Well, here it is.

I could list for days the number of technologies that make me smile, but the list would get boring after the first few pages. Suffice it to say that when it comes to tech, I'm still like a kid at heart, and I bask in all it's wondrous glory.

I wouldn't have it any other way.