First off, my apologies for lack of photos. I thought about documenting it while I worked, but it was late last night. However, I do need to replace some of my handiwork with proper stuff like heat shrink and insulated wires to cut down on some radio interference.

First, I cut the iPod/iPhone adapter from the Pixxo unit, and saw that there were 8 wires (red, black, white, green, yellow, brown, purple and orange). Next, I cut a micro USB cable and saw that while it was well shielded on the outside, inside the foil insulator were only four wires (red, black, white and green). I twisted the matching wires together, taped it up enough that nothing was shorted, and tested it in the car, and my Nexus One started charging. w00t

Only thing left was to trim the wires back as far as I felt comfortable, shorten up the micro USB plug, and get everything taped up better. Which worked like a champ, except that I had no electrical tape, and I’m sure that as good as blue 3M Painter tape is, actual electrical tape or heat shrink would do a much better job.

Then, I shortened and spliced a stereo 3.5mm audio cable, as the one that shipped with the Pixxo unit was about two inches two short.

The net result:

(hosted at picasa)

In a quest last night to find a cheaper alternative to giving AT&T $180 of my hard-earned cash every month for our two cell phones, I decided to take a page from BillShrink, and include some of the other phones that their users were requesting, along with additional phone features.

I’ll add more to the list as I have time, but this was my evening project last night. It’s ugly, it’s not written well, but it gets the point across. I’ll work on the overall look of it if enough people find it useful. Specs were gathered from several sites including the carriers, the phone manufacturers, a site called “pdadb” and a few items from the BillShrink chart.

http://iandouglas.com/cellphones.php

My chart will let you view specs from a single phone in the list, or multiple phones side-by-side so you can see their capabilities. I thought it would be interesting to list screen resolutions and DPI (calculated from the diagonal size), internal vs external storage, USB connector types, and more details about what the minimum/maximum carrier plans would include for the money you’ll pay for the phone over two years of ownership.

I decided the Nokia E71x is a great little smartphone if you use IMAP for your Email, and general overall support for the phone is decent. Unfortunately, the “Mail for Exchange” client didn’t work well for me, and I wonder if there’s something funky with the Exchange server at work because I had trouble using two separate apps to sync my work mail on the Nokia, and also had issues with work Email on the Blackjack II which prompted me to ‘upgrade’ to the Nokia.

So I went to an AT&T store, and asked them to exchange the phone. Oops, sorry, been more than 30 days, you’ll have to pay full retail price for a new phone because you’re not eligible for extending your two-year contract for another 21 months. Oh, and we’re out of stock for the iPhone you asked for. The rest of the conversation went something like:

Assistant Manager: You could try another AT&T store, see if they have any in stock.
Me: I don’t really know the area, can you check for me?
AM: (sighs) Yeah.
(searches and types enough on his keyboard to make me wonder if he was writing a blog article about the guy who went past his 30-day exchange period etc)
AM: The Beverly store has lots in stock.
Me: Okay, where’s that?
AM: On Beverly. Do you need the address?
Me: Considering I don’t know where on “Beverly”, yes, I need the address.

I get to the Beverly store, and took me 10 minutes to realize there’s a “sign in here” sign that isn’t close enough to the door for me to realize there’s a waiting list of about 8 people in front of me that are tying up sales reps.

An hour later, I got Brett (very friendly guy, super service) to find a 32GB iPhone 3GS for me, bought a neat dark red “luxe” shell from iFrogz, upsell me on the upgraded warranty, and sell me an overpriced car charger.

Oh, the best part. I didn’t have to pay full retail price after all. Turns out there’s a nifty little loophole in AT&T’s terms.

For $9.99, I can “add” a new line on my existing account. After telling him my wife was complaining about me adding a new line which would require her to memorize a new phone number when I’ve had this old number for like 7 years, he switched my old number to the new phone, and put some random 310-area code number on the Nokia. New data plan (business class, unlimited data plan, (hooyay for expense reports). New year 2-year contract with the iPhone saved me $400 on the retail price.

So now I can just cancel my Nokia line, which will charge me the $175 cancellation fee, which means I’m still ahead $225 on the retail cost of the iPhone.

And I’ve spent about $20 on apps and a few catchy tunes (like Natasha Beddingfield’s Pocketful of Sunshine).

The drag, I’ve come to realize after a little bit of Google searching, is that I can’t develop any apps for my iPhone without having Mac hardware. Bleh. Apple needs to release some Windows/Linux tools to develop iPhone apps on other platforms. Restricting it to Apple-only hardware seems ridiculous. Anyone got a used Mac Mini for sale?

Aion closed beta was fun. I got a Scout/Ranger to level 11, a Priest to level 6 and a Warrior to level 5. I think I enjoy the pure warrior class, to be honest. Usually I’m a ranged-DPS kind of guy, but the Ranger class seems overly complex. Found a bug in the game, dutifully reported it to NCSoft, and put the game away. Too bad the open beta doesn’t start up for a while.

I still have to move a bunch of sites from my old hosting provider. That’ll probably happen this weekend so I don’t get charged another $114/month. Although part of me wants to hold in until October which means my one year lease-to-own contract will be up, and I can go pick up the computer from them and cancel my plan… Decisions.

To do simple math, the 8GB iPhone 3G, versus the stock OpenMoko Freerunner, have very different up-front price tags. When you factor in that you need a voice/data plan for either phone, I started comparing the differences in the cost of a 2-year locked-in contract with AT&T for the iPhone versus the same service for a 24-month period of non-contract service for the Freerunner.

In the course of my research, it turns out that AT&T offers the same voice plans and data plans to iPhone users as well as other smartphone/pda users, so the minimum voice plan of $39.95 and unlimited data plan of $30, is identical for both phones. Over two years, you’d pay $69.95 per month, plus taxes, fees, and surcharges, maybe totaling as much as $80/month, for a total of $1,920. The only difference at the end of the two years is the cost of the phone.
iPhone: $199, only usable with AT&T
Freerunner: $399, international unlocked GSM phone, usable in the USA on both AT&T and TMobile networks. If you can get in on a group sale with others in your area you could get a Freerunner for $369.

Of course, if you purchase application software through iTunes that users create with the Apple SDK, your cost for the iPhone goes up even more.

Engadget also has an article outlining costs which they claim come from AT&T showing a total cost of about $2520 with a $79/month plan for the iPhone 1.0 back in 2007.

Winner: on price alone, the iPhone is about $200 cheaper over the two year span, less than $10/month.

When it comes to features, however, the iPhone has some pretty serious advantages over the Freerunner.

Phone/Data Capabilities:
iPhone: 2G/3G
Freerunner: 2G/EDGE only
Winner: iPhone
(it’s worth noting that 3G talk time on the iPhone is only 5 hours versus 10 hours in 2G mode, so maybe it’s better that the Freerunner is only 2G?)

GPS:
iPhone: AGPS, not true GPS, so only triangulation is possible, which in my experience is only accurate to about half a mile
Freerunner: actual GPS, capable of pinpointing your location to about 9 feet.
Winner: Freerunner

Accelerometers:
Both phones have it

WiFi:
Both phones have it, but only the Freerunner will let you do Voice-over-IP (VoIP) calls over WiFi.
Winner: Freerunner

Bluetooth:
Both phones have Bluetooth 2.0

Memory Capacity:
iPhone: 8GB or 16GB FLASH, plus adding an extra memory card (unsure of capacity capabilities)
Freerunner: 256MB Flash natively, can add up to 4GB in an extra micro SDHC memory card, someone is testing an 8GB SDHC card I believe.
Winner: I’d have it give it to the iPhone here, especially since the SD card bus on the Freerunner is on the same bus as the video display making it difficult to stream movies from the SDHC card — and the 256MB Flash in the phone is partly used up by the OS on the Freerunner, so it’ll be nearly impossible to copy a movie from the card to actually play well.

CPU:
I couldn’t find any recent articles about the new iPhone’s CPU, but the v1.0 iPhone had an ARM processor running over 600Mhz. I imagine the iPhone 3G runs even faster.
Freerunner: 500MHz ARM processor running at 400MHz due to bus speed constraints.
Winner: iPhone

Display:
Both phones are touch screen, only the iPhone is multi-touch capable
iPhone: 480×320, 163dpi
Freerunner: 480×640, 281dpi
Winner: Freerunner for extra screen real estate and *much* higher dpi.

Audio Playback Capabilities:
iPhone: all of the music formats you’ve grown to love in iTunes, like AAC and MP3
Freerunner: MP3, but also OGG, FLAC, and other formats (depending on the software stack ported to the phone) that the iPhone cannot play.
Winner Freerunner

Operating System:
iPhone: mobile version of Leopard, but application time slicing, as I understand it, is ‘shared’ like the old Palm OS where running a different task pauses the last application you were running and gives 100% of the CPU to the new task.
Freerunner: runs the OpenMoko OS, based on Linux, which is a true multi-tasking operating system to run multiple concurrent applications all sharing time slices on the CPU.
Winner: Freerunner

All in all, if I were given a free iPhone to review like I was graciously given a Freerunner to help with reviews and beta testing, I’d still choose the Freerunner unless I needed the camera on the iPhone. I’ve become very dependent on the full GPS capabilities in my Samsung Blackjack 2, and would have a hard time adjusting back to just having AGPS on the iPhone. Having a true multi-tasking phone plus an open-source platform for running Perl and Python code natively on the phone makes it the hands-down winner.

I won an iPod Touch (8GB model) at SCALE 6x in February 2008 from Shopzilla, but frankly only really use it for podcast audio while I walk to/from work or for scoring dart games using a web app that a coworker and I put together. If I were to get an iPhone, I’d simply give up the iPod Touch and use the iPhone as my podcast audio device and simply use the SIM card in the Freerunner instead.