phones
I need a new cell phone. Mine is really old at this point, and has recently been having problems. In particular, the battery falls off too easily, and it shuts itself off at random times. The shutting itself off may be related to the battery thing, because if the battery comes off it will shut down. So it may be that when it’s shutting down it’s because the battery has shifted slightly and isn’t touching the connectors or something. But, anyway, the point is that I need a new phone. So we went to the Sprint store today to look at phones. The ones I liked were almost $300. Back when I got the phone I have, it was only $150. The Sprint store only had 1 phone that was that cheap, and it wasn’t a very good phone. So we went to CompUSA and Best Buy to compare. At Best Buy, we discovered that comparable Cingular phones were quite a bit cheaper than their Sprint counterparts. So we went to the mall to look at all the other different cell phones and their relative prices and service plans. Looking at phones is annoying. The places all like to list the prices if you get their stupid 2-year serivce plan, so it’s hard to tell what the actual phone prices are like. Plus, the people are all desperately trying to get you to buy their phones, so every time you walk up to a kiosk or into a store they start hovering around you like annoying little insects that you want to swat away. It makes it difficult to just look at the phones by yourself. So here’s the deal: I could get a Sprint phone for a lot of money. Or we could switch to a different company, and we could both get phones for less than the price of 1 phone for me, plus get lower monthly payments. We’re thinking we’re going to get Cingular, since they seem to have good national coverage (they are the largest provider in the country, after all), it would be cheaper than our current plan by about $5 a month, and they have some nice phones that do not cost $300 apiece. Does anyone who reads my blog have Cingular/AT&T? One funny thing about the phone seller people: they love to ask you who your current provider is and how many minutes you have. When we tell them that we have only 500 minutes between us they stare at us in shock and horror, as if this is the most traumatic thing they’ve ever heard of. I don’t think people believe us when we tell them that we don’t ever use up all our minutes. I think they have a hard time comprehending how little we actually talk on the phone. Of course, any new plan will most likely have free calling between our phones and large numbers of (or unlimited) night and weekend minutes. So, then we’d use even less of our minutes than we do now.
