{"id":562,"date":"2007-01-14T00:19:47","date_gmt":"2007-01-14T08:19:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/?p=562"},"modified":"2007-02-18T02:13:35","modified_gmt":"2007-02-18T10:13:35","slug":"the-phone-is-dead-long-live-the-phone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/2007\/01\/14\/the-phone-is-dead-long-live-the-phone\/","title":{"rendered":"The phone is dead! Long live the phone!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So the Ratboy, after breaking his third phone, called me up the other night from <acronym title=\"our cellular provider \">CellCo&#8217;s<\/acronym> store at the Mall.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Hey Dad &#8211; tell this sales clerk that you agree to extend our phone contract for 2 years, and they will give me a deal on a new phone!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Is it going to be cooler than mine?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Well yeah, you just have that plain little flippy. I gotta have something cooler than that!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;So let me get this straight: you want <em>me<\/em> to assume an extra two years of legal contract so that <strong>you<\/strong> can have cooler gadgetry than me<strong>?<\/strong>&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Uhm&#8230;yeah.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I think not. We&#8217;ll go down there this weekend and get <em>me<\/em> a cool new phone, and you can have my plain little flippy, which will tide you over until you can afford to buy a cooler phone.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Man, you suck.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Or I could just keep my phone, not sign a contract, and you can wait until your next payday&#8230;&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Okay! You win.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Woohoo! Write that down in the calendar! Rod, tell the man what he has won:<\/p>\n<p>Well, I looked online first, and CellCo is hawking the Samsung T609 for free after instant rebate (why do they say that shit? If it&#8217;s free, say &#8220;free&#8221; and be done with it.) The phone includes a 1.3 megapixel cam, bluetooth and speakerphone. (It has MP3 playing power too, but who gives a rat&#8217;s ass. I already have one.) Cool, huh? Well, apparently not very, as Samsung has already discontinued that model and CellCo doesn&#8217;t carry it in the store anymore.<\/p>\n<p>So, what else is there? A close facsimile: the MotoRAZR V3. No 1.3MP cam, but it has everything else, and I got it for only $30. (The V3t has the better camera, for $70 more. Not enough in the piggy bank for that.) Not a bad deal on a pretty good phone. Extending the contract was a no-brainer: CellCo has the best pricing for calling plans I have found, so it isn&#8217;t like they had to twist my arm. (So why am I obscuring their name? <acronym title=\"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. No free advertising.\">TANSTAAFL.<\/acronym>)<\/p>\n<p>Immediate trip-ups: Moto inverts the functions of the # and * keys while entering text, so I will be changing typing modes instead of hitting a space until I get used to it. The phone is too slim to be held to the ear with your shoulder &#8211; as B found out when he got his and dropped it in a bucket. Unlike my Sammy, the RAZR takes decent 1-inch pictures. (The Sammy took almost-viewable regular-sized ones.)<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, basically picking nits here. I liked the Sammy, but now I can get a bluetooth headset, which will come in darn handy.<\/p>\n<p>On a side note, I was tripping through CellCo&#8217;s website looking for a new ringtone, and I came across one from Oingo Boingo that I never thought I would see: &#8220;I love little girls&#8221;. For those of you who may not know, this song came out of Boingo&#8217;s full-on sarcastic social commentary phase and is sung from the perspective of a pedophile.<\/p>\n<p>Yeah &#8211; not really the song you would think to pick as a ringtone. Unless, of course, you happen to have a phone with cutomize-able rings, and a buddy that married a gal ten years younger than him&#8230; Muahahahaha!<\/p>\n<p>Of course, the EMC was sonly 18 when we got hitched, so pot-and-kettle wot?<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So the Ratboy, after breaking his third phone, called me up the other night from CellCo&#8217;s store at the Mall. &#8220;Hey Dad &#8211; tell this sales clerk that you agree <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/2007\/01\/14\/the-phone-is-dead-long-live-the-phone\/\">Continue Reading &rarr;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geekery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecyberwolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}