A Smart weekend
MANILA, Philippines - Call me an old soul, but I don’t own a single touchscreen gadget. I like the dial that must be turned, the button that has to be pressed. So imagine my shock when, a few days into testing the Netphone, I tried to start an app on my non-touchscreen cell phone by thumbing the screen. It was like trying to dim the lights in a room by swiping the window.
On the outside, the Netphone701 from Smart is the supermodel of Android phones: tall and skinny with curves in the right places. Ninety percent of front real estate is dedicated to a 3.5-inch touchscreen that allows for a vibrant viewing experience, especially of Facebook photos and YouTube videos.
Buttons surrounding the phone are the bare essentials: on the front, the Home, Menu and Back buttons, the power/unlock button beside a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top and volume rockers on the right-hand side. The rear features a 3.5MP camera that is capable of large crisp photos that up the ante on TwitPics and Mobile Uploads.
However, hardware isn’t the game changer for the Netphone. The Smartnet application, nested firmly into the Android-platform home screen, is the crowning glory of the Netphone. It is a direct link into Smart’s global network through the Smart Inbox, Messages, Netphone CHAT and Social Stream.
For just P1 available load balance, the Smart Network is yours to use and abuse. The application stands as a dedicated user panel that displays load balance in real time and allows users to Pasaload without the hassle of the texting process. Social networking fanatics have unlimited access to their Twitter and Facebook accounts as well as chat via Yahoo! Messenger, Facebook Chat or Netphone Messenger.
This is when I realized that using a touchscreen isn’t the only habit the Netphone had formed; I had exponentially increased the number of times I tweet and update my status on Facebook. I was a new candidate for the annoying tweet-everything-I-do award. Every meal I had that week was in my Mobile Uploads album. I was trying to press the screens on cell phones, televisions, elevators, cameras. Everything but the window.
