On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me...
4 calling phones
3 final tests
2 Praxis scores
And a mid-Atlantic winter snow storm
As far as cellular service is concerned, I've been with T-Mobile for five years now. And it has been adequate. I've had my share of faulty phones replaced, but who hasn't? Well, my contract with them expired last week. Lewis and I were planning on having me pay month to month until April when his contract expired and then join AT&T together so we can (eventually) get iPhones. But then circumstances facilitated the need to save as much money as possible, so we decided that the best thing to do would be for me to join the cellular telephone plan belonging to Lewis and his mother when my contract was up (they're with Verizon).
As a bonus, Verizon said it was time to let Lewis upgrade with a new agreement, so we could get it so our time in their hands expires together.
So today, we headed over to our neighborhood Verizon Wireless store to check out the phones. While there, I narrowed my selection down to these four:
Lewis and I actually walked into the store with the plan to each get this phone. It's a pretty basic phone, no special bells and whistles (which is all we really need). It has a slide out qwerty keyboard, which is cool. However, as we discovered when we got the chance to actually hold it rather than just look at a picture online, it feels flimsy and like it will break with one fall. And if you know me, I have a bad habit of either dropping my phone on accident or throwing it across the room when I'm angry. Although I don't do that as often as I used to.
Plus it was hard to type on the keys at the top of the keyboard.
We spent a lot of time looking at this phone. It's what Verizon wishes was the iPhone. It's a touch screen with lots of applications (or "apps" as the kids call them). Overall, it's a pretty sweet phone. However, it's a smartphone, which adds 30 bucks a pop onto our bill, and that just didn't seem too practical considering the whole point of this is to save money. And the good graces of Lewis' mom. So that was a no.
I looked at this one mostly just because I found it to be intriguing. If you open it like a regular flip phone, the keys are one way, but if you open it on its side, the keys change. And then they change again if you want to send a text. It's pretty neat. (And if none of that made sense, just watch the video from the link). In the end, though, I decided that the changing keys were just too confusing. Cool idea, but meh.
4. The LG enV3
This one was our winner. Lewis has an enV right now, which he admitted is a quality phone in spite of the fact that it likes to shut itself off randomly and without notice. As far as design is concerned, the enV3 seems to be a good improvement from the original enV, so that's good.
The only trouble now is how we are going to tell our phones apart. We both picked the phone in slate blue because the other option was red and well, you know... red. Blech.
So that's that. Actually, we ended up stressing ourselves out about the lack of desirable phones while we were actually at the store, so we ended up going home and just ordering our phones over the phone, interestingly enough (I'm convinced that the reason we didn't just end up getting the enV3 in the store is because the one they had on display was of the red variety. That and the fact that you had to mail in a rebate to get the upgrade discount at the store whereas it's instant online or over the phone). They will be here on Friday. Which is great news for me especially because I haven't been texting since October, so basically my phone has not been used much at all. I realized that I don't get very many calls. But that's okay. It's been a busy few months at school, so the lack of cell phone usage is probably a very good thing.
Happy fourth day, everyone!
