My Perfect Cell Phone

Even with all the cool features available on the latest handsets, there are three key factors that keep today's cell-phone development in check: size/weight, battery life, and cost. Sure, you can cram every feature possible into a single phone, but it'll be huge; shrink it down, and the battery (which you've just shrunk as well) will last you all of 30 minutes; and hovering over everything is the price tag: yes, that jack-of-all-trades Nokia N95 is amazing, but it costs $850.

But for my perfect cell phone, I'm tossing all those considerations out the window. Forget the constraints of size, weight, time and space—this is the phone that I'd plunk down, oh, $500 or so, with a smile on my face (and I'd even sign a two-year service agreement). I'll call it…the BenPhone. So what would it look like, and what's packed inside? Let's tick off the specs:

• Overall look: For the BenPhone, I'm not afraid to steal from the best, so I'm going to plunder that most anticipated of handsets…the iPhone. Yep, it'll be a touch-screen gem, complete with cool, animated menus, buttons that pop up when you need them, the whole bit. In terms of size, the basic iPhone specs sound good: 4.5 inches long, 2.4 inches wide. But I'm going to trim the phone a couple tenths of an inch…let's say 0.26 inches instead of nearly half an inch. For weight, I like something that's 3 ounces or less; the LG Prada phone was just a smidge under three ounces, and that felt just light enough without feeling cheap.
• Data: Gotta be 3G, of course. I'm also a big fan of six-party conference calls (what's a phone call without an audience, right?), so that rules out three-party-only CDMA networks. So let's say HSDPA for really speedy Web surfing and streaming audio/video. Oh, and Wi-Fi for tapping into my home wireless network.
• Music and video: A great media player that syncs with your PC-based music and video collection is a must. For me, that means mobile iTunes, but it could just as well be anything that syncs with, say, Windows Media Player, or a service like Rhapsody or Yahoo! Music. Memory-wise, I'd need at least 80GB for all those videos (remember—fantasy, people), which I'd have to watch in full-screen landscaped mode on my 3.5-inch display. A streaming video service like Verizon Wireless' Mobile TV would also be on board, as long as it lets me record shows for later viewing (either on the phone or remotely). Oh, and stereo Bluetooth support, plus a 3.5mm jack (not a 2.5mm plug with an adapter, please) for my high-end earbuds. Finally, the BenPhone will be able to play music in the background while I'm composing text messages, Web browsing, or otherwise tinkering away.
• Power wallet: One of the few things I liked about the Samsung UpStage was its awesome leather battery wallet—a slim, durable case with a built-in battery booster. Totally cool. So while the BenPhone will have a talk time of, oh, 10 hours and weeks of standby time, it'll also have the power wallet for those month-long hiking trips or for hours and hours of movie watching.
• VibeTonz: Speaking of the touch screen, there really needs to be some kind of tactile feedback to make typing on the display easier. After testing Immersion's VibeTonz—a vibration technology that, among other things, can trigger a "buzz" when you tap a key—on a few touch-screen phones, I'd definitely want this feature built into the BenPhone.
• Messaging: POP/IMAP and access to corporate e-mail is a given, plus the ability to render HTML-formatted e-mails in their full glory—and embedded links that jump right to the Web browser. Also, threaded SMS messaging, as on the Palm Treos (which groups SMS messages into back-and-forth conversations).
• Call quality: One of the things that drives me nuts about the wireless industry is that while data features advance by leaps and bounds, call quality is still miserable. The BenPhone, however, will come with a sound-quality enhancer of…some sort. Motorola just announced "Crystal Talk" on the RAZR2, which will supposedly adjust call volume according to background noise; hey, if it works, I'll take it.
• Web browser: I've lavished Nokia with praise many times for its top-notch Web browser, which does a fabulous job of rendering full HTML Web pages, along with a mini-map that shows your position relative to the page. It puts every other mobile Web browser to shame, and the BenPhone will have it.
• Ringer profiles: My old phone was the Sidekick II, and one of my favorite features on that phone was its set of ringer profiles, which you could put on a timer: from 10 PM to 8 AM on weekdays, it would switch from Normal to Silent mode, and on weekends it went to "vibrate" mode. I've yet to see a non-Sidekick phone that does this (I'm still puzzled as to why), but the BenPhone will.
• Third-party apps: The BenPhone should be ready and willing for all kinds of third-party productivity tools, ranging from document editors to RSS readers and IM clients—for example, I'd want DataViz's Documents To Go installed my phone.
• GPS and mapping: A mapping app like the mobile Google Maps would be nice, along with GPS for locating my position instantly (already available on the Helio Ocean).
• Camera: A 5-megapixel camera with auto-focus would be just fine—plus the ability to transmit snapshots via Bluetooth.

So, what features would be on your perfect cell phone? Fire away.