New Cell phones

My very first cell phone was an early Motorola, purchased in 1993. It had an LED display, if I recall correctly. For the day, it was one of the smallest available. I replaced that a few years later with a (smaller) Ericson phone with LCD display. Then a few years after that, a Motorola StarTac, purchased shortly after the StarTac was released. I loved the little form factor and the great dial-from-memory interface.

It didn't take long to convince Spouse to get a StarTac too. This was the first phone he was willing to consider carrying on occasion. So, for quite a few years, we've had a pair of StarTacs. We've seen all the snazzy new phones, but the StarTacs still worked and they were small. Why upgrade again?

Recently, however, one of the StarTacs stopped working reliably out of town. I thought perhaps it was having difficulty reaching an Analog cell. Actually, that seems to be a good guess. It's an Analog only phone (not a dual mode) and apparently the Cellular providers are madly replacing the Analog cells with Digital. Time to upgrade.

So, today we went down to the Verizon store to see about replacing the phone. While we were there, we asked what it would cost to replace the other StarTac at the same time.

Although our other StarTac still worked in terms of making connections, the buttons had started to get "sticky". Sometimes I had to press a button several times at different angles to get the phone to recognize it. Other times (other buttons) would give me double digits. So, the phone was great when using the internal "phone book", not good for dialing from the keypad. In addition, the two StarTacs were with two different providers (two accounts, two plans, two statements...)

It turns out that it only costs half as much to have a second phone on the same account, so by replacing both StarTacs and moving to a single provider we could upgrade both phones, save money on the monthly bill, ensure an identical user interface in both cars, remove one statement / payment per month, etc. So, that's what we did.

We're now the owners of a pair of LG VX3200 flip phones. I love the glowing purple numbers ;-) With the service contract and a $50 rebate promotion they were fairly inexpensive as well!

It took a little while to convince the salesman that we are... unusual cell phone users. Apparently these days it is now possible to keep your number when you switch from one service provider to another. But we didn't care (and I didn't even know the number of the phones we'd be "switching").

Spouse and self treat cell phones as one-way (outgoing) personal communication devices. No one knows our numbers. The phones are only powered on when we're making a call.

For similar reasons, I had the salesman turn off the voicemail feature. The only voicemail we ever get is wrong numbers anyway.

I spent a little time this evening loading our most commonly dialed (seven :-) numbers into memory. I'm getting pretty good at doing letters on an numeric keypad.

The LG VX3200 is a little bit smaller than the StarTac. It's got glowing back-lit buttons and a full-color active matrix screen. It emits a cheerful warbling song when powered up or down (that is, until I set it to silent mode :-). The warble constitutes the totality of the bells and whistles - no MP3s, no camera, no web surfing... Although it will do "txt messaging" [sic] if I want to work that hard, to a first approximation this is simply a phone (for today's value of "simple").

New Cell phones ( in category Trivial Pursuits ) - posted at Sun, 26 Sep, 22:01 Pacific | «e»