It just keeps getting better

I’m starting to sound like a shill for Android phones but I can’t help myself.  I’m down here in Nebraska in a Sasktel cellular black hole. 

That big white state pretty well in the middle is Nebraska.  Somebody in Sasktel doesn’t get along with somebody in Nebraska as far as I can see.  However all is not lost.  I have really good wifi at my motel so every night I can get caught up.  But it gets better.

My phone can use the wifi – no big deal there – my Blackberry could have done that too although it would have been much more difficult to set up on the BB.  The big deal came last night when I thought I’d try accessing Skype on the phone.  As I’ve become accustomed to, as soon as I browsed to Skype.com the phone asked me if I wanted to install the Skype app.  And seconds later, once the app was installed, there I was holding the phone up to my ear just like it is supposed to be used and talking on a crystal clear connection to SWMBO.

So that was a big deal and I was pretty excited about that last night but what pushed me over the top tonight was the realization that I would rather enter trades on my phone than my computer.  Not that I’m any great wizard of the stock market but I do keep some active trades pretty well all the time and I’m really strict about entering trailing stops immediately after any new purchase.  I like to place the stop roughly 3 x the average true range below the close on the day that I purchase.  So tonight I needed to place a stop for the Cheesecake Factory stock I bought yesterday and it turned out that it was easier to do that on my phone than it would have been to use the computer.  I use Questrade for online trading and there’s some neat features to their new IQ platform that are really only available on the computer but for simple trade entry I don’t think it gets much easier than doing it with the app on the phone. 

I keep waiting for the day when I’ll think “well that’s a bad feature” (of my new phone) but so far that day hasn’t come.  I was a little concerned about the battery life but I think that was just me spending so much time looking at it.  The screen definitely chews up power when its turned on and its such a nice screen to look at that its tempting to browse or play on it.  However, unlike my Blackberry which would chew through a battery in half a day trying to connect where no connection was available, this phone seems smart enough to know that it can’t connect down here and it hasn’t been eating up its battery in a futile search for a connection.