Here's one in the what were they thinking department...

I have an AudioVox SMT 5600 SmartPhone which I finally upgraded from 5 years plus old phone a few months back. Overall I've been very pleased with this phone.I'm not a big gadget freak, so I couldn't care less about some of the more flashy features. The main features beyond simple phone services, that I needed was synching with my Outlook address book and calendar and this process is wonderfully easy with ActiveSync. I also really like T9 search mode which lets you look up contacts in incremental search mode which makes me actually use my phonebook unlike my old phone <g>.

I also have a couple of applications that I'm in need of enabling through the SmartPhone and I'm in the process of putting these together, which was the other reason I got this phone to start with.

I recently picked up a 512meg mini-SD card for the phone in hopes of being able to store a bunch of MP3 content on the phone and use the phone as a quick and dirty music player so I can leave the IPod at home.

But I found out today that the phone doesn't use a standard ear phone plug. It uses some proprietary thin plug with it's headphone set. All I can say is WTF? Why would anybody do this - I mean beyond good old misplaced capitalist greed and lock in? So you're basically stuck with the mediocre headphones that come with the phone. That's Ok, except now I'm carrying around two sets of wiry headphones that can get nice and tangled up in my bag <g>. This is really silly.

Speaking of Audio and SmartPhone, this experience is a pretty sad one anyway. Media Player on the phone is pretty crappy to start with to the point where it's next to unusable. Sure it plays music but managing playlists and simply navigating songs is ridiculously unintuitive.

It seems to me it should be possible to combine a decent music player and phone into a single device and it's kind of odd that none of the phone providers have jumped on this opportunity. There are a couple of other players out there that are a little better than MP, but it's still very unintuitive to pick and play songs. If it isn't easy to do this it's not going to get used, so I think for me anyway this feature isn't going to fly especially combined with the headphone lock-in. I guess the IPods still always coming along.

Some of this is surely hardware. The phones controls don't lend themselves very well to a music player although come to think of it's not so far off from what most music players have today. Memory is getting cheap enough where you can have a gig of memory in a phone - more if there were multiple slots to hold a significant chunk of a music library.

It's surely coming, but I still wonder why it's taking so long...