Well, I’m not really without a phone, but I have had to revert back to my old one since the charger plug on my current phone broke. Good thing I kept it around. It really makes me realize how much I used (and now miss) all the cool features of my current phone, though.
The main parts that are difficult to adjust to are not having really usable internet access on the device, the lack of “power-user” media playback capabilities, and various other benefits to having a computer that you can install your own apps on with you at all times.
The Symbian phone I went back to using does have IMAP e-mail and basic web browsing, but it’s nowhere near the same as what I had on my HTC.
The media playback thing is a big one, since I listen to a lot of podcasts (including radio shows released as podcasts). I’ve had to resort to using a cheapo MP3 player just to get by with listening to stuff, but it’s nowhere near the same. The biggest thing I miss in that regard involves functionality when dealing with large files.
It seems like a pretty small thing, initially, but when some podcasts are over an hour (sometimes even two), it is pretty important to be able to (1) turn off the player and come back later and automatically pick back up right where you were, AND (2) also be able to skip to an arbitrary point within a given file (using the touch screen), without having to fast forward or rewind to get there.
There’s lots of other stuff like the sleep timer, etc. that are nice to haves as well - probably too many to mention in this post.
Before anyone suggests an iPhone as a suitable replacement on both counts, let me say that I’ve used it (along with pretty much every other “high-end” phone device), and while it probably has the best browser on the market, for overall internet capability I still prefer the phone I had for the unlimited capabilities it provided that are noticeably lacking in every other platform I’ve seen.
Same goes for the media playback capabilities, actually. The particular software I was using on my phone has all the features of the iPod plus a whole lot more, several of which I found quite useful.
I don’t want to turn this into an anti-Apple post (or anti-anything, really), so I’ll stop there; all that was just to say that my eventual replacement will most likely be an HTC device, based on my experiences up until this point.
I am, however, going to be waiting a while to see how things play out - give Android a little time to take off, etc. I’d love to go with OpenMoko too, but I don’t think it’s going to be “ready enough” soon enough for me.
