Thursday, July 22, 2010

The MASSIVE Upgrade

This morning I woke up feeling sick and nauseated and generally really unwell. So I stayed home from work and rested a lot and skulked around the house.

Then this afternoon the UPS truck came. Everything I have been waiting for in the mail arrived! I swear it was like Christmas!


Okay I will get to what was in those big boxes in another post, but I will tell you that suddenly I was thinking, "Oh to hell with feeling like I'm going to vomit, it's time to assemble some stuff!"

Nope, today I'm going to write about technology. Bear with me. I know that this is out of the norm for me but I am so bowled over that I had to share. And if you have a super snazzy smart phone you're just going to shake your head and wonder how I've been stuck in the dark ages for so long.

2 years ago this was my phone. I used it for phonecalls.


Then I got this phone about 22 months ago:
It's the enV2 and it felt like a MASSIVE upgrade because it had a qwerty keyboard. Suddenly all of my friends were texting like crazy, so I used it for phonecalls and texting.

THEN I moved into my lovely little condo and the one real downside is that I get a terrible signal here from Verizon. I called and opened a trouble ticket and the result? "Well, it seems like you don't live in an optimal service area."

No shit. Really?

He helpfully told me that I could buy some sort of signal booster for my place for $250.

So ever since November I have been making calls from either right in front of my living room window, bedroom window, or just sitting on the front steps to talk. Even then my signal would cut out all the time. So a couple of weeks ago I called about getting a (GASP) landline phone, which was going to cost $130 to install. At the suggestion of a very smart friend of mine I called to see what the contract termination fee would be on my Verizon plan, and it was only going to be $90.

My friends, the time had come.

I switched to AT&T today.

I didn't get an iphone- it's sold out everywhere and the disconnected call issue bugged me. Besides I really wanted an Android phone because I am a Google girl and I'm already on gmail and I like that it's giving Apple some competition. Competition is always good!

Behold, the Samsung Captivate from AT&T. This is such a huge upgrade I don't even know where to start. The buttons vibrate slightly when you hit them so you know you did something without a lot of beeping. Phone calls sound good from every room in the house. People can HEAR ME. And then there's the text messaging- wow. It keeps them all together so I can see the conversation. And I can use google talk for my gmail contacts (which it magically imported when I signed in to Google). And I have all kinds of apps and widgets I can install- I get New York Times headlines and the weather channel will send instant alerts. TO MY PHONE. Now my old phones seem really clunky and my computer is soooo sloooowwww compared to this.


It's a whole new technology world out there. I can text, tweet, facebook, navigate, email.... All from one device that is smaller than an index card.


It's been 7 hours and I'm wondering how I lived without it. I feel like I'm living in a Sci-Fi movie.

PS wireless.amazon.com is running a really amazing deal on this phone right now. Beats the price at AT&T hands-down, and you can even keep your old phone number.

No comments: