by Sascha Segan, pcmagAs of July 6th, I'll have been working in this job at PCMag.com for five years, and I'll have reviewed more than 500 devices and apps. I was hired on in 2004 to be the first full-time cell phone guy here. Well, not exactly: I was the cell phone and PDA guy. (Remember PDAs?) At the time, mobile devices were becoming PCs worthy of note, and it's been my job to champion handhelds as tiny personal computers, not just as extensions of the 130-year-old telephone system.
That used to be a fringe idea. Now it's mainstream. The objects formerly known as cell phones are, increasingly, handheld computers with a voice phone tacked on to them—take the iPhone 3GS, for instance. The next generation of "cell phones" I see coming out soon may finally do away with the traditional, circuit-switched voice calls that we've used for more than 100 years, replacing them with some sort of VoIP capability. In some ways, my first five years as a phone analyst may be my last five years as a "phone" analyst.
I haven't gotten all of my calls right. In 2006 and 2007, I shouted that "The unlocked cell-phone revolution begins now!" and tried to get people to break free of their carriers. Total failure. People love cheap phones. They're fine with iron-clad contracts and carriers holding them in a vice-grip, as long as they can have cheap phones.
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