Lately I've been wanting to upgrade, but the plans are expensive. However, I finally found something through Virgin Mobile that really works for me. It's a non-contract plan, so I'm not tied in for a two-year period if for some reason I want to switch. Their "Beyond Talk" plans include unlimited text, web, email, IM. The plan I chose is $25.00 per month for 300 anytime minutes -- I should never go over that in a month. The only catch is I had to buy one of their cell phones, and the options were limited. BlackBerry was out of my price range (and the plan is an extra $10.00 per month if you get a BlackBerry).
So I bought the LG Rumor Touch. Still a bit of money but more within my budget. Factoring in the cost of the plan and the cost of the phone, on average (assuming I stick with it for, say, two years) I'll be paying a little more per month than I do now but getting much more for my money, and it'll cost less than comparable contract plans from other providers.
Unfortunately, while the FAQ at the Virgin Mobile website said I could keep my old number, when I went through the activation process online it didn't give me that option, it just assigned a new number. When I tried to go back to the prior screens and check out whether I missed something, it wouldn't let me -- it took me back to the beginning. I tried calling their customer service line but was waiting too long on hold while the lines were busy, so I gave up. I eventually somehow managed to finish the activation process, but now I have a new cell number and I have to let T-Mobile know to cancel the old one. Kind of annoying, but I'll get over it.
The phone itself, as you can imagine, is much more complicated than I've ever had before, so I'm trying to get used to how it works. The manual -- which was online, and not printed and packaged with the phone; it only has a "Quick Start" guide -- isn't as helpful as it should be. The menu options seem to differ at times between the phone and the manual. So I just took the phone out today (I get no service inside my house) and was playing around with it, and I'm starting to figure it out a little.
The biggest issue I have right now is scrolling. Whether on the menu items or if I've got a web browser up, scrolling down the touch screen is very difficult. Either it doesn't move, or it moves too much, or on occasion if my finger touches a link or a menu item, that link/item opens. Yesterday, while I was putting people's numbers into the new phone, I nearly called or texted three different people by accident because of this. Today, I was on Twitter and trying to scroll down, and at times I opened up links people had posted. It's really frustrating. And websites seem to take a little while to load. I don't really know the difference between 3G (which my phone is supposed to be) and 4G and whatever, but it's annoying when I'm used to going online at home and having pages open up quickly.
The phone has other features -- digital camera (and a video camera!), music player and such. It has a 3-inch diagonal LCD display and a sliding full QWERTY keyboard (the thing that, right now, I love the most), and a bunch of other stuff. If you're at a restaurant with me and we need to figure the tip, there's a tip calculator -- you enter the bill total, the percentage you want to tip and the number of people splitting the bill to get the amount to tip. Awesome!
So, when it comes to cell phones, I think I'm close to being almost caught up to everyone else for a change.
No comments:
Post a Comment