When I returned from my deployment last year, my beloved Nokia 6120 cell phone could not be resurrected. As I went out the door in May, I turned it off and laid it on the bookshelf in the office. When I returned in September, I plugged it in, but it would not charge, turn on, or indicate in any way its electrons were anything other than inert. Sadly, I called ATT and ordered a new phone, which arrived in a couple days. A Nokia 3560, it had a color screen, but it just wasn’t my 6120. I’m now preparing to switch from TDMA to GSM, which requires a new phone (yes, I should have made THAT switch last fall–I just wasn’t thinking coherently). That may be more backstory than you care about, but since September, I’ve discovered a few neat things this 3560 can do.<\/p>\n
Almost immediately, I discovered the stopwatch feature. I no longer needed a sports watch–the phone keeps lap or split timing (not waterproof, though, so I don’t recommend it for aquatic sports). And I have the cell phone with me–an added safety feature. The phone will store my times as well. It has other organizer functions, which I use from time to time, but the stopwatch has been the most usable for me. <\/p>\n
Want to see the month at a glance? The calendar will do that–very handy if you don’t have a paper calendar handy and need to see what day of the week a particular date falls on (for instance).<\/p>\n
This week, I discovered it can record voice messages–like a tape recorder, not the voicemail kind. It’s a really cool way to capture the name of that recording artist or song I just heard on the radio while driving without becoming too dangerous on the road.<\/p>\n
And, of course, auto date\/time set is a dream. Drive or fly into a new time zone? No problem. The phone offers to reset the date and time (you can program it not to ask permission if you like, but I like my electronic devices to at least pretend I’m in charge) for you.<\/p>\n
Of course, talk time and battery life are critical. I don’t talk on the phone that much, but I don’t want to always be looking for an outlet either. 6.5 hours talk time and 17 days standby are hard to beat. (Same reason I like a 5 gallon tank on the motorcycle I can’t ride more than 50 miles on without turning numb–I hate stopping at gas stations, too.)<\/p>\n
It does a host of other things I haven’t gotten around to using yet, either. I could teach it voice commands, but I usually only dial two numbers. One is on speed dial and the other is the first one in the contacts scroll, so why bother?<\/p>\n
Another feature I haven’t used yet is profile scheduling. I can schedule my profile to expire at a predetermined time. This might be a good way to avoid forgetting changing it from Meeting to Normal.<\/p>\n
It seems harder to find a complete feature list for prospective cell phones than it was a few years ago. I’ve discovered these “lesser” features are becoming more valuable to me. I’d hate to get a new phone and lose some of these features. Seemingly simple tasks just aren’t as simple as they should be.<\/p>\n
The Sony 710 appears to have all these things. Now if I can just hold out until the StarWars promo is over…I don’t do Star Wars. And maybe the price will drop. Like a bunch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I returned from my deployment last year, my beloved Nokia 6120 cell phone could not be resurrected. As I went out the door in May, I turned it off and laid it on the bookshelf in the office. When I returned in September, I plugged it in, but it …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech-stuff"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10445"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10445\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16103,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10445\/revisions\/16103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}