Ugh. My Nexus One seems to have stopped working tonight. Quite suddenly, too – I was using it on the way home from aikido, then when I pulled it out to plan routes for going downtown to cheer the first gay couples getting marriage licenses, it wasn’t working and wouldn’t boot properly. It’s slightly less than three years old and this makes me pretty unhappy.
There is a possibility it’s just the SD card; it kindasorta works with it out. Or it could be the card socket, or who knows? I may try to troubleshoot this but honestly I’m tempted to just throw money at the problem to make it go away.
The big temptation, if I’m going to get a new phone ANYWAY, is to ditch Android and go to iOS. I’ve been threatening to do this for a while because I’m really sick of dealing with Android’s quirks. Although on the other hand iOS is now lacking a crucial piece of functionality since I really rely on my phone for bus routing, and that got thoroughly broken when Apple ditched Google Maps. (Looks like I want the “HopStop” app to plug that hole.)
My current plan with T-Mobile is $60/mo plus tax. Which I think is for 500 minutes, no text, and unlimited data. If I got an iPhone with a plan, the best I can get (of what’s listed on Apple’s site) is AT&T: $70/mo plus tax for 450 minutes, no text, and 3Gb data. (I could maybe get away with $60/mo for 300M – it looks like I used about 150M this past month – but T-Mobile’s site refuses to show me any data on previous months, and I want to be sure.)
I probably also want to run the numbers on buying an unlocked one outright, and going with a non-iPhone plan.
I will also need to figure out how much it’ll cost me to break my contract. Which may suck because I recently started a new one.
(The Internet also points out that, though Apple doesn’t have a deal with T-Mobile, you can get an AT&T-compatible unlocked iPhone and get a micro-sim from T-mo to use it, albiet at slower “2G” speeds. 16G iP5: $650, 16G iP4s: $550, 8G iP4: $450 – also apparently they’re upgrading to iPhone-compatible 4g, and Seattle already has it.)
And then there’s getting a new Android. I asked /r/android what I should get, since I really don’t keep track of the panopoly of phones out there, and we’ll see if there are any suggestions besides “get a [sold out since about 30min after the initial release] Nexus 4!” Which is gonna be kind of a problem when I’m going on a trip a week from now and tend to rely on my phone a lot when doing that…
If anyone in the Seattle area happens to have an old unloved T-mo compatible Android phone I could borrow until around Christmas I would be very thankful, as it’ll let me put off dealing with this until I’m back from my trip home!
edit. yeah um if nobody in the area has a spare T-mo Android phone I think I may have just talked myself into a iPhone 4s. I can go solve this problem tomorrow and get on with my life, modulo a couple hours setting up a new phone, minus Android wrangling forever. (But plus some Google Voice hassle until the 4s is jailbroken. You win some, you lose some.)