How much for the data only plan?

How long will it be until you can buy a cell phone with nothing but a 3G (or 4G) data plan? Or more realistically how long before it becomes practical? Why pay for minutes when you can just buy unlimited data and do everything over that. Data is so versatile I don't know why they ever bother with voice.

Scratch that, I know perfectly why. First is money, they can make a whole lot more by charging you for each text message and each minute. Second is technology, phones only recently have become fast enough to do the proccessing for VoIP. Wireless technology is just starting to catch up in the US to the point where you have enough bandwidth to make VoIP calls without resorting to WiFi.

We've seen it happen with landlines so it's only inevitable that it will happen with wireless phones. It's not gonna happen anytime soon, I predict it happening in ten years at the earliest but I would put my money on it.

MOXI brings back the 30 second skip!

Yesterday I started watching TV with my Motorola MOXI DVR and something was different, the menus were flipping in and out in an animated way that they haven't before. I look closer, and OMG!@!, I got the 4.1 updated firmware!! My Moxi is flying along like it never has, menus are super responsive and have a new shiny look to them. I start digging around and find two more surprises.

First, they brought back the 30 second skip!! It has always been a 15 minute skip which is pretty much worthless.

Second, they enabled external hard drive support!! That's right, now I can plug in a USB hard drive and expand the storage of my Moxi.

I am extremely pleased in the performance of the menus, before they were so god awful slow. The 30 second skip and external drive support is just icing on the cake. I'm still planning on ditching the Moxi in favor of a multi room MythTV setup but at least the Moxi will be easier to live with until I get it setup.

Do I want an iPhone?

Do I want an iPhone? It's a question I've been asking myself for a while and I'm still not sure. On one hand it's gonna be a pretty fancy phone that's sure to get oohs and aahs whenever I take it out, on the other hand it's not really that extensible of a platform.

By that I mean I won't really have full control over what the phone can and can't do. Not that I have complete control now with Windows Mobile Platform but so far it seems like I will have more control than with the iPhone.

Right now I have the tools to write a program
myself that I could run on my phone. If Apple doesn't let me do that then I don't think I want an iPhone, no matter how fancy and slick it is.

I'm out of contract and I've had my current phone for quite a while so I'm in the perfect position to upgrade to an iPhone but I guess I'll have to wait until I can get my hands on one before I decide.

I'm really tempted to wait for the HTC Kaiser. All the same features as my Cingular 8125 but with GPS, High speed data and the display flips(!!).