FUN WITH PHONES

Continuing my non-political posting, I wanted to mention that I just bought a new cell phone that I'm really digging. It's the Motorola SLVR. It's an iTunes phone so that's a nifty feature (alright, it's the main feature I bought it for; I have no idea why I'm such a gadget junkie). It's got the Bluetooth thing going on in addition to other bells and whistles. Unfortunately I still have to do the whole phone number transferral as this is a Cingular exclusive phone and my current carrier is Verizon.

It's what they call a "candy bar" phone in that it's not a flip phone or one of those slider phones (which I cannot stand for some reason). It's about a 1/4" thick so it'll slide right into my pocket and relieve me the need to wear the thing on my belt, which I've long since grown tired of.

Can someone explain this to me - I went into the Cingular store and their price was about $200. Add to the fact that I needed to get my wife a new phone since we're on one of those family plans and that would have jacked up the price even more at the Cingular store - to the tune of $100 (she got one of those RAZRs). Boom, $300 right there and that's with the new customer discount (I'm sure they probably had some sort of rebate but that requires additional work on my part).

I check out Best Buy and I can get the my phone for $50 and my wife's phone for FREE. So, $300 or $50. I took the latter. The only downside I can see at this point is that I'll have to go to the Cingular store in order to get them to "port" my old number over, which I guess isn't that big of a deal. Can someone explain why the actual store would have such high prices for the same phones I can get much cheaper at Best Buy? Is it some sort of big box store discount like Wal-Mart benefits from? Just curious.

Anyway, the phone's really sharp. I've got it playing, sans earpiece, right now and the built-in speaker is pretty good. Of course, it sounds even better with an earpiece. It took me about 10 minutes to upload about 30 songs (my computer crashed earlier this year taking much of my 200+ song music collection with it), which is enough for right now.

So for anyone even remotely interested, and in the spirit of overly inquisitive reporters to politicians, I give you a sample of what's on my iPod. Right now, I've got some Stones playing (Sympathy for the Devil); a handful of U2 songs (much Joshua Tree), some Johnny Cash (mostly covers he did - One, Hurt, Personal Jesus) and a single apiece from Foo Fighters, Pearl Jam and Dixie Chicks, among several others. One of my personal favorites is by The Offspring called Spare Me the Details. Track it down; freaking hilarious.

Anyway, thanks for sticking with me on my meandering and pointless post. I think I've got some early holiday lethargy. I'm sure before we all know it, we'll be back in the thick of some partisan battle, but for now a break isn't a bad thing. To paraphrase, all politics and no fun make Paul a something something (thank you, Homer).