Droidful to the Touch
It seems like it was just two years ago when the girls and I went looking for their first cell phones in America - and it was. The landscape of cell phones has sure changed since then. So yesterday we had a perfectly Droidful day when we went cell phone shopping again. Well, not quite perfectly, because Ping went for the LG Chocolate Touch. She just didn't like the look or feel of the Droid, but Cici sure loves her new Droid. I feel the same way about mine.
I dreaded the cell phone shopping almost as much as shopping for a new car, but Costco made it easy. We caught them with an unbelievable promotion on the phones and we were able to switch to Verizon so we can finally get a signal most everywhere. The Droids were only $100 each, and the LG was less than that. With Costco there were also no activation fees, so that saved us another hundred bucks. We had just left the Verizon store and were so turned off by their pricing and sales pitches that we didn't know which way to turn. Cici calculated that it cost us about $400 less by getting the phones and setting up the Verizon service at Costco.
I am not saying these phones are smart, but my Droid knew exactly where I was located when we got home. I decided to use its Google maps feature to see if it could give me directions to the office like a GPS works. I put in the building number and only the first two letters of the street name before the phone brought up exactly the address I was looking for, and it guided me street by street just like a GPS would work.
I was an accidental hero for Cici because she ended up with a phone that is connected to the internet. Once Ping learned that by their very nature, smart phones require payment for internet service even if you block the reception, she relented on her rule about no phone with internet service for Cici because of the incredible bargain that we were able to get on the phones at Costco. But Cici will take her old phone with her to China and put a chip in it so she can use it while she is there.
The way things have been going with technology, there is likely to be another huge advance in cell phones or their replacements by the time our two year contract expires. For the moment, though, we are pretty much state of the art.
The internet connection on smart phones is very useful. I have a regular cell phone, which is fine for me and what I use it for, but a friend has an iPhone, and it's very useful for finding out some very relevant information while on the go. Sometimes I pine for an iPhone, but not the data bill!
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I am afraid that the AT&T choice that comes with the iphone took it out of the running for us. That would have been a good phone for Cici, though she is very happy with the Droid, which is a much better choice than the iphone for business emails, so I am also happy with that choice.
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I'm no fan of AT&T so that's another reason to not get an iPhone for me. Then again, that George Lucas owns(trademarked) the word 'droid' kind of makes me not want to get one of those either...
Simple phones for me it looks like!
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Smitty, I saw a real simple phone advertised in the Old Farmer's Almanac. All it does is make and receive calls. No camera, no music, etc. It has great big buttons with numbers on them.
My next order of business is to figure out how to stop the phone from saying Droid every time I turn it on or off.
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Sounds like the Jitterbug. Nice idea too! The one thing I dislike about it is that I would like it for the phone number to only be on one line, but since they use a large font, the phone number wraps around, and it doesn't do it where it should wrap at the traditional break in between the first three numbers and the last four numbers.
I can't have a phone that has a camera at work, at least I'm not supposed to, but I wish I had bought the next camera up, as it had a camera and bluetooth.
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The jitterbug is it. We have Bluetooth on our home phones and I have it on my cell phone but I haven't used it. Too lazy to hook it up.
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Maybe this would work for you?
http://tinyurl.com/25kgosh
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Nice idea but it doesn't respond to my efforts to uncheck the one suggested. I will give it another try when I am not heading out the door for school. Thanks Smitty.
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