"Cell Phone"
I have been giving this project a lot of thought, and its probably going to be the first project that I will actually complete only because I don't have a cell phone now, and because I feel that it would be more valuable to me as a replacement to a phone because devices like the iPhone kind of base the internet and all these other features on a phone. But I want it to be where its a computer with the internet anywhere, that can be used to make phone calls.
Now however awesome or inconvenient this may sound to you, it would have its advantages and disadvantages. The advantages would be you would pretty much that the ability to have the internet anywhere, so anything you do on the internet, you would have the potential to do that anywhere. Another advantage is that it would be cheaper per month compared to an iPhone with unlimited minutes, because for one of those mobile broadband cards, it costs $60 per month, and less then $3 for an internet calling program like Skype. Now one of the disadvantages would obviously be convenience, because it would be less convenient to be lugging around a laptop everywhere you go. And another disadvantage is that with the mobile broadband cards, the $60 is only for 5 GBs of data, and if you were to go over the 5GBs, there would be overages. Another disadvantage would be that laptops can't really last very long on just its battery, maybe an hour or two. But for me these wouldn't be a problem, because I used to carry my laptop around with me pretty much everywhere anyway, and almost everywhere I was, becides in the car, I was around wireless internet networks and electrical outlets, so I would pretty much only need to have the mobile broadband card on when I would be in the car, or some random place out in the middle of nowhere, so I doubt I would ever get close to using more then 5GBs on the card.
The laptop I was looking towards getting is the Gateway P-7811FX.
This has a dual core 2.26 GHz laptop with 4 GB DDR3 SDRAM installed and a 200GB harddrive and a Nvidia GeForce 9800 graphics card. This is pretty much a portable gaming computer, so why wouldn't I want something like this. The only bad thing about this computer is that it doesn't have bluetooth, so I would probably end up using the XBOX360 wireless headset and receiver from my entertainment center.
These would give the ability to talk on the phone like a bluetooth headset, and also talk on voice communication programs like ventrilo and such.
The next thing would be to decide what service provider and device to use. I chose AT&T because it looks like their stuff is a little bit faster and I would want a USB device, because it has the potential to work on more then just my laptop, if i needed it for something else.
This one looks good, AT&T, USB, but also on their website it said it would be free to get a refurbished one of these.
The next thing is to pick a program to use for making calls.
This is Skype. I chose this program because they offer unlimited calls to and from anyone in the United States for under $3. Also with this program, as you can see, there is the ability to have video calls. But other then that, if I were to have an account and they gave me a phone number, people would be able to text me for free and such.
So this is basically my idea of a cell phone only because I really feel kind of disconnected from the world when I am not within hearing range from my computer, because I have Ventrilo on my computer 24/7, and I sleep like right under the computer that ventrilo is on, so if someone were to talk while I was asleep, I'd probably wake up. So this would enable me to go anywhere and still be connected to ventrilo, aswell as use it as a functional cell phone.