I need a new work cell phone (or “sellephone”, as the kids say). My carrier at work (Telus) doesn’t have any of the phones I want (Nokia Series 60), and I can’t find any useful information from sites that review cellphones on any of the phones it carries. That is a marketplace in need of some serious simplification. I won’t even go into the acronyms, incompatible standards, locale-restricted capabilities, etc.

I’ll almost certainly end up going cheap (thereby depriving someone of more margin) because I can’t trust the recommendations of peers, journalists etc. towards a particular phone, because phones have a shelf-life of 2 weeks, so reviews are obsolete before they’re published.

We don’t need twelve thousand models of phones. We really don’t.

Lazyweb, any suggestions? (For a phone, I mean — the “obvious” suggestion for fixing the industry is to combine VOIP, WLANs and a manufacturer with their head screwed on straight and provide Saturn/ING Direct type “simple” plans. Maybe can’t happen for regulatory reasons, but it should.).