Try Before You Buy With TryPhone

When I first purchased a cell phone, the one thing I really wanted to know was how the phone would actually work. The phones I wanted were not often displayed so I just had to read up on it and hope for the best.

There is now a service that lets you do this and it is called TryPhone. For most users, the buying experience of cell phones has always been frustratingly full of unknowns: You don’t have a good idea of what the service coverage will be like before switching plans, you don’t know what reception your specific phone will get, and you are usually stuck with a “free”  phone  store that gives you little idea how it will actually work.

That is one reason why cell phone companies display their most popular phones, but only in the area in which a 6 foot cord (or 3′ to none depending on what store you are located) can stretch. This doesn’t give anyone the ability to test out in an area where civilization is little to none. Not yet…

This new Web site has come into beta that aims to please. TryPhone provides onscreen simulations of handsets and shows how different button presses let you navigate through the user interface. Right now the phone selection is limited to four hot models (iPhone, BlackBerry Pearl, Verizon Juke, and Sprint Muziq), and not all functions can be tried out, but it’s certainly a big help.

You can do your own freeform actions (within the limits of the functions simulated), including important ones like making a call, taking a photo, adding contacts, or sending text messages. You can also try out some of the customization options, but they do not  actually take effect on the phone demo itself. This would have been perfect around the time the iPhone was first introduced because AT&T did not display the iPhone for a long while for you to actually play with.

I will warn you that it is a beta, so it is a bit buggy at times. However, I applaud TryPhone for attempting to battle what carriers and retailers themselves have been slow in addressing. Perhaps one day, they will figure out how to simulate a phone in a particular area so one could see how signal would be in their area.