What type of phone do you have?

[HearseHaunter]

Samsung instinct here.
I think a mobile skin would be great.

[Otto Baron]

Two tin cans and 50 feet of string!

[Psychoholic]

Two tin cans and 50 feet of string!

You gots interwebs on that?

[Otto Baron]

You gots interwebs on that? No, but a black widow has used the line to anchor a spiderweb!

[Scary Guy]

No, but a black widow has used the line to anchor a spiderweb!

Black widow works for the FBI, you've got a tap.

[StrayCat]

Just ordered our Blackberry Tours. Now that I have my credit cleaned up I can throw the fucking metro P.O.S out the window....




.....or take it to the range like I did my last one.

[Morella]

I don't even know everything that my phone does. It has a camera, and a cable that plugs into a USB port, which charges it, but it also creates a serial port, a modem, and a bunch of other stuff that there aren't any instructions on how to use, or any way to get to. It has a camera, and a web browser, but I'm not willing to pay extra to use Internet on a tinyassed screen, and we disabled texting because we have a daughter, and it costs extra. For $15, I bought a 4gig memory card that slides out of the phone and into an SD adapter and makes a drive out of it. The pictures are 1024x768, and not bad if there is enough light, but the movies are small, and kind of suck.

What is nice is the Bluetooth. Tony uses an earpiece in his truck, and I don't hear any background noise from the road. It also works a whole lot better than Sprint. We dropped Sprint and went to Verizon because we couldn't even get a usable connection out of Sprint, even next to a cell phone tower, and with four bars. We also talk to any Verizon customer without using minutes, whereas Sprint was charging 80 cents a minute. We can yack all day now.

There is an active phone amplifier that you can put on top of your vehicle, and I know that they work well because we could sometimes get a Sprint connection with it, but the generic ones that they sell at truck stops fall apart within a week or two. Verizon sells their own for $250...a little spendy, but if you drive through the mountains, you always have a cell phone tower on top of your vehicle. We haven't even needed it with Verizon.

I'm mostly ranting now, so I'll leave you with some advice instead. Before you use any of the wonderful features on your phone, find out how much they're really going to cost you, for activation, monthly charge, charge per message or per web page, taxes, etc. Don't let your kids spend $500/month in ring tones, texting, music and pictures.

Also, I'm told that the 3G mobile connections are as bad as modems.

-denise

[Scary Guy]

3G is great if you want to sap your phone's battery life to nothing. I have mine "hacked" (meaning I looked it up on a forum somewhere) and found a way to switch it between 3G if I want to do data downloads and GSM which uses less power meaning I get even more battery life.

Even more than that if I turn off the bluetooth as well.

EDIT: This is older than dirt, but I have an android now and I'm pretty damn happy with it. Had it for a year and it works great.