I'm sitting here looking at my cell phone and thinking about how they've changed over the years, just since I first got one. My first phone was a no-frills freebie Nokia candy-bar phone that you could swap out the faceplates on to jazz it up a bit. It could make calls, receive calls, and that was about it. Move forward ten years and I'm looking at a Motorola Q9m. It's not the latest and greatest mobile phone, and considering it's running WinMo 6.0 it's not even all that great as a smartphone. But at least it still makes calls and can send texts halfway decent. But it's getting on in years and I'll be up for my New Every Two upgrade from Verizon in December. That'll probably lead to me getting an Android phone, because I refuse to wait until 2011 for when they get the iPhone and I doubly refuse to put any more money in Apple's pocket than I already have (I bought an iPod back in '04, shortly before they released the new ones with the color screens).
The thing that really galls me is the required data package that Verizon forces on its users if they have a smartphone. I managed to squeak in under the wire with my Q just before they reclassified it as a smartphone device so I've been going the last two years without a data package, which suits me just fine. I don't surf the internet on my phone. I just barely use the calendar integration to keep track of appointments. Up until this point I figured, "Why the hell should I pay for a data package I'm not going to use?" so I hadn't upgraded my package. But now I'm looking at the next generation of smartphones and I'm seriously lusting after an Android-based phone. And every single one of those is going to require a data package. So I'm seriously considering biting the bullet ahead of the phone upgrade and going ahead and upgrading my data package. It just chaps my hams that I'm going to be shelling out an extra $360 per year for it on top of the $100/month that the phone package already costs to have two lines on my account. Freakin' Verizon.
