The Latest...

I've been resisting the temptation to get a smartphone for some time now. After all, I don't really use my cellphone much at all. Apart from around 45 minutes per month of talking, a bit of texting, and the calculator, the only thing I really use it for is to play Scrabble (on a postage stamp sized screen). Our current phones were pretty old, and they had a pretty nice plan that considered calls to Canada (to Jess's family) to be normal air time. One of the reasons I resisted changing phones is because the new phones won't work with this plan, so we were somewhat stuck with our old phones.

As time has worn on, I've sort of changed my mind about what I should, or could be using my phone for. I see people at the train station in the morning checking the status of the train. Sometimes I get to the station and find no one there, because since they get updates to their phones, they know the trains are running late (or canceled) and I don't. For Jessica, she is constantly needing to text, and doing so on the standard phone keypad is... challenging. Also, she's going to be starting her own business soon, and she'll want to be able to check and send email from her phone.

Fortunately, I have a friend who's a Verizon guy, and he's always figuring out ways to get us decent deals. So we went and paid him a visit this weekend. We came away with a pair of Motorola Droid 2 phones, and an unlimited data plan for each. To sweeten the deal, he found out that I get a discount through my agency (15% on all service, 25% on accessories), so the bottom line in the end won't be too horribly much more than we were paying with the old phones (once you consider Jess's texting overages).

I think once we get used to the phones, we'll be able to do a lot with them. I've already signed up for train updates, and I've ordered a 16GB micro SD card so I can load up some tunes. Now I can get busy writing that app I've been thinking about.