Hi-Mobile :: Excellent Mobile Phone Prices
A guy I work with at iSkoot used to work on the team that was designing and building the Motorola A1200 (”Ming”) device. If you haven’t seen it before, it’s wicked cool looking AND feels great in the hand. Plus, it’s a decent phone all around. I read earlier this year that the Motorola CEO had said they were thinking of bringing the phone to the US. Let’s hope so!
When I found out that he used to be on the device program, drool began running down the side of my mouth. I soooo wanted one, but it’s a China-only phone (though recently launched in Latin America, too). I’m such a gadget freak!
Well, my co-worker asked his contacts to ship one from China. I was thrilled to finally have one in my grubby little hands! So I put my Cingular SIM card in and easily made a call. Nice!
Unfortunately, I had no idea what the settings were to get the browser to work. The Ming had all of these extra fields in the APN setup screen that I haven’t seen on other devices. It was way too complicated, and unlike other modern-day handset manufacturers (read: Nokia and Sony-Ericsson, among others), Motorola doesn’t offer a web-based service for me to order settings directly from their web site for my phone. Duh, Motorola! Wake up and smell the 21st Century!
Anyways, I did some snooping online and found this web site called Hi-Mobile that sells the Ming at a great price — and they have information on the settings for popular GSM-based carriers, including Cingular (er, I mean “the new AT&T”).
Hi-Mobile Motorola Ming Info Page
What I didn’t realize at the time is that Hi-Mobile also has great prices on phones in general. Their price for the Moto Ming is a bit cheaper than most other web sites I saw.
Last week, I had to buy a Sony-Ericsson M600i for work. We went to one web site and paid a lot for it — somewhere north of $400. About an hour or two after ordering it, I went to Hi-Mobile on a lark and saw that they have the same device — in both white and black — for about half the going rate. Just $200!!
Hi-Mobile Sony-Ericsson M600i Info Page
Next time we need a device without a plan, I’m definitely starting at Hi-Mobile. (I hope they have reliable service, too…)
For those who have never heard of the M600i (because Sony-Ericsson never sells its cool UIQ3-based phones in America), the device is a PDA-style phone, kind of like a Palm Treo except cooler and with a much more modern OS (UIQ 3.0). I love the keypad, too, though it’s drawn a lot of negative comments in some corners. (The brand new Sony-Ericsson P1i has the same keyboard, which seems to get a love it/hate it kind of reaction.)
By the way, I’m really digging the M600i, which I didn’t think I would. I love the qwerty keypad. It’s pretty fast. It plays music and video. You can even open Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files using DataViz. The only real negatives are that it has no camera and uses the damned Sony M2 Micro memory card. Why can’t Sony acknowledge reality and move to the SD memory card standard like everyone else??
One more plug for the M600i. If you’re looking for an inexpensive PDA phone, and you prefer qwerty keypads (rather than the 0-9*# keypads), and don’t mind the fact that the phone doesn’t have a camera, then you should consider this device. In the US, it’ll work on Cingular/AT&T and T-Mobile. $200 is a really tough price to beat — phones less capable than this one sell for a lot more. Get the 2 GB M2 memory card for about $31 at NewEgg.com. (Hold off on the 4 GB M2 cards which are still around $70.)
