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Motorola's i95cl
thefalconer writes "MSNBC has a very detailed article about Motorola's new all-in-wonder phone offered by Nextel. It is a PDA, has a Walkie-Talkie, phone, web browser, instant messaging, addressbook, it has a high resolution Color LCD screen, and it's running on a Java Based OS! It even comes in a variety of styles and colors just to your taste. There is so much to this phone that it makes you ask "how'd they get all that, into this tiny little thing?" Makes me want to ditch my old phone for one of these right now!"
The problem with adding a real keyboard (I'll take that to mean a thumb-type QWERTY) is that it takes up too much space on a phone. It seems that Motorola is going for phone more than PDA with this thing, and phones nowadays are getting smaller and smaller. Even the Nokia 51xx series, which is on the larger end of phones now, wouldn't be able to accommodate a keyboard. The fact of the matter is that manufacturers realise that most people want a small size, and that means no keyboard.
Also consider that very few people in North America actually use features like text and email messaging.
My other sig is funny!
Having seen it, I must say it is a nice phone. I fixes must of my biggest complaints against the i90c. (Overall, an excellent phone)
I find text entry isn't that bad when using T9. For quick replies, it is quite nice.
It should also be mentioned some of the features Nextel can give you. If you sign up for the developer plan (http://developer.nextel.com) you get 5 MB worth of data and a ROUTABLE IP for the phone. Neat stuff.
Just a thought...
Why are US cell phones so large compared to those in Europe? Why do people in the US put up with paying to receive phone calls?