Sometimes being a blogger has its advantages. For example, people looking for cheap advertising occasionally think you’re important and give you free stuff in the hopes that you will promote it…
It’s with this in mind that the folks at Sprint invited me to join their Ambassador Program, in which they give free cell phones to people for six months in exchange for feedback on their usability. When Sprint contacted me, they told me all about the Sprint NFL Mobile package — live game stats, post-game highlights, fantasy stats, etc.
Of course, I said yes. Sure, I won’t be able to use the phone at home, as Sprint signal near my house is nearly non-existant, but I don’t stay home to watch games, and one of the things that annoys me about my current liveblogging setup is that my Treo 650 can’t multitask. I have to exit out of mo:blog, load up the web browser, run NFL.com through Skweezer, hunt down the game stats, memorize them before they change, then go back into mo:blog and start writing. It’s a kludge. Theoretically, with this little Sprint phone, I can look up stats and update the blog at the same time. Sounded like an upgrade to me.
So Sprint sent me an LG Fusic, which is a fairly standard cell phone in their lineup — high-speed data, 1.3-megapixel camera, built-in MP3 player, Bluetooth, and a microSD slot for storing MP3s and snapshots. (I already went out and bought a 1GB memory card so that I can carry some tunes and podcasts with me.) This phone also has an FM transmitter, which means you can theoretically set this up to play through your car stereo, eliminating the need for a cassette deck adapter.
Sadly, that feature still appears to be theoretical. As I was driving down the highway last night, the FM transmitter would cut in an out like a bad AM station in an electrical storm. That made it near impossible to listen to Mighty MJD’s picks for the week on Sports Bloggers Live.
What’s more, this MP3 player isn’t going to replace anyone’s iPod nano anytime soon. The controls on the outside are way too sensitive, so I try to pause what I’m listening to, only to hit the forward button by accident — not a big deal if you’re listening to music, but when you’re listening to an hour-long podcast, you instantly lose your place and have to go back and search for the place where you left off. There doesn’t appear to be a bookmarking function, either, so I can’t just pause a podcast, mark it, and resume listening from that spot later. I literally have to fast forward through the whole file to find the spot where I left off. That’s annoying.
I haven’t played with the phone’s data features yet — mostly because it’s refusing to connect to the Internet, which is a very bad sign. I hope those features will be a little more user-friendly than the MP3 player. That’s all coming in good time, though. I have a whole football season to geek out with this thing, and as you can tell by this post, I plan to be dead honest about my experiences. So far, though, the bar’s been set pretty low…
