My poor old nokia 8265 has given its all. It has performed well for 2 years, but is at the end of its life. The zero and end buttons work about 20% of the time. But more frustrating, it randomly drops calls from certain cell towers. Including the one near my house.
While Verizon seems to still have the best coverage, they are expensive, technophobes, and extremely greedy. They must be the sole provider of technology to you, and you to pay for everything. Email, photos, ring tones, Bluetooth, programs, etc. If your phone lets you get around this – say by transferring photos to your computer via Bluetooth, a memory card, or using your own internet services, you can expect Verizon to disable those parts of your phone. Needless to say, I don’t like this attitude towards customers. Sure you can get around parts of that (read up on the v710 for more background), but should you really have to flash a new bios to your cell to get it to work properly?
We decided to go with Cingular (AT&T GSM) for now. If their reception sucks, we have 30 days to drop them. For the time being we will keep our existing cell accounts, incase we decide to drop them. I was tempted to get a V3 Razr, or the s710, but spending 600 bucks on two cells wasn’t high on my list. We decided to go with 2 Siemens S66 phones. Bit on the large side, but a nice screen, email client, IM client, Bluetooth, 32mb flash card, and 1.3 camera sounded like a good deal for 99 bucks. Being able to sync to my computer and use puppetmaster sound handy. Don’t believe it has a headphone jack, so it is BT headsets only.
One thing that surprised me was Cingular’s phone rate to Canada. 59c per minute, Mexico is only 49c. Unreal. Of course, if you subscribe to their plan that price drops to 19c, which is still too much. So I think I will just have to phone card their asses. I’ll take 4c per minute on a Tier 1 carrier (with no fees) any day over their crap plan.