GregHowley.com

Last week, after having been halfheartedly looking for the better part of a year, I finally got a new phone. I'd had my Nextel i90 since 2003, and I was ready to get a cell phone with color. I figured a camera would be nice, albeit not necessary, and I really wanted to get a bluetooth capable phone so as to use a wireless headset.

So last Wednesday, I picked up a LG lx150. It was tiny, very shiny, and was bluetooth capable. But on Thursday I called my friend Mark, and the phone dropped connection five times. I brought it back to the Sprint store Friday, and they updated the software, assuring me that the connection would now be better. Monday, I gave it another try and the connection wasn't really much better.

So I decided to go back to Nextel. Tonight I went back to the Sprint store with all the packaging for the lx150 and told them I wasn't happy with it. I'd done my research, and I knew what phone I wanted instead.

I got the i580. It's got bluetooth, a camera, and a mp3 player I'll never use. Best of all, it seems to be even more unbreakable than my old i90. I dropped that old phone more times than I can count. Once, outside the Colt building in Hartford, I dropped it into a puddle more than an inch deep, and the phone had no problems. Here's what one reviewer has to say about the i580.

I decided to find out just how rugged the i580 really is. Dropping it on concrete and even spiking it on a tile floor like a football didn't seem to hurt it any, though the phone does flip open when it hits the ground. Then I stuck the handset in the freezer for about 3 hours. It turned on, slowly, and reported that it had no battery. Amazingly, the phone returned to normal operation when the battery thawed. Next, I took it outside into 100-degree heat and then threw it from a second-story window onto concrete. The battery door popped off, but other than that, the phone was okay. Once I put the battery back in, the phone worked fine, with only a minor scratch in the corner of the case. Since it had hit the ground pretty hard, I decided to wash it off in the sink. The water-resistant i580 shrugged the cool spray off like a duck.

Okay, what can actually kill the i580? To make a point, I stuck the tough little phone under the wheel of a Saturn Sky roadster, which weighs about 2,680 pounds. Eight wheels later (two rolls forward and back), I'd managed to crack the i580's LCD screens-but astonishingly, the phone still worked! I could make calls, Direct Connect, and even use the camera.

I've been playing with the phone tonight, and I'm pretty happy with it. I can even take pictures with it, then pop out the microSD card and plug it into my Wii, importing the pictures into the Wii photo channel! What use would that be? No idea. But I still think it's cool.