The New Phone.

I got my first cell phone around two years ago. I know, how the hell did I manage to hold out so long without one of life’s seemingly ubiquitous essentials these days? It was nearly a year into my relationship with Candi. It was initially her idea, but I ended up going out on my own and getting a cheap pay-as-you-go phone. Did my research and got the cheapest, most basic phone I could find. A small flip-phone that could text. It had a $1 access fee, and naturally from there unlimited mobile to mobile. Being on AT&T, that was an obvious choice. I paid $5 a month for a 250 messaging package. Plenty of months, I could easily spend just ten dollars a month, while using progressively more and more texts, but never more than what I had bought. (Texts did roll over.) So for a long time, this was very economical and efficient at my communication needs.

Until about two weeks ago. After a 5 hour phone call with Jessica Emsley, I managed to burn through nearly $30 dollars. ($1 access fee, 10/c a minute for being off network, $6x5h = +$30) Miss Emsley is on T-Mobile. It was the dead of the night, so she was just burning through unlimited evening minutes. It was this moment that made me say, “Well! If I’m going to spend that much money anyway, I might as well GET AN ACTUAL PHONE.”

As an aside, I’ve never read an entry where someone talked about their phone, or the excitment that comes with a new phone as a toy-like device. Hence why I’m doing this. CUZ IT’S LIKE A NEW TOY!

Number one thing I wanted was a querty keyboard. Flip-phones are awesome, but not easy to text with. Don’t care about camera. Don’t care about any other crap, really. Browsed smartphones, but they seem like a gimic to make you pay more money to cell phone providers for things you don’t need. Seriously now. I spent over a thousand dollars to build Kelly Quark, why the fuck do I need full functional internet on a phone? There’s only a few things I’d ever want internet for on a phone, and 95% of the time it’s to look something stupid up. You don’t need fancy shmancy internet for that. You just need basic text to head to dictionary.com for a definition.

Concurrently, after handling Candi’s iPhone extensively, I hate touchscreens. If at any point I’m going to be dialing numbers, I want a physical way to do it. So requisite two was a physical 1-9 keypad on the outside. Remember the Hurricane last weekend? I had to call my entire day and night crew. Most of the time we call people in our contacts, but in this case, I just punched everything in manually. If I had to do that with a touchscreen, I might have killed someone. Maybe TWO someones.

As far as providers, I was concerned with one thing: What’s cheapest? I would have had no problem saying with AT&T, despite what I hear from some. Apparently, Candi’s the only one who has had a positive experience with them. I know I have nothing bad to say. Based on my usage, I got a deal from T-mobile for $45 a month. $40 for 500 minutes and unlimited text/picture/videos (with weekends/nights/etc), and $5 for 500MB of data. I guarantee I won’t go over the data. I may tear through hours with Miss Emsley, but I sincerely doubt I’ll manage to burn through 8 hours of time talking to people over the course of a month, let alone in the middle of the day. Trust me, not going to happen.

I decided upon this phone: Samsung Gravity TXT

Part of me will miss the whole aesthetic of flipping a phone open, but this also means I won’t have to open my phone to see who the hell is calling me. I know, there are flip-phones with an LCD on the outside, but whatever.

It’s going to take me a bit to get used to the qwerty input. But with two thumbs and a single strike for most keys, I should be significantly faster once I become proficient.

Relative size difference.

Screen’s also significantly bigger relative to the old phone.

Went to a T-mobile store. Got told they didn’t have it, referred me to another store. Amazingly, she had just gotten one in. It was the middle of the day and there was noone else in the store. Glad I did my research, but it was still nice talking to a human being. Set me up, went over to a nearby AT&T store to get my account number, and got the phone functional in my old phone number. Within a few hours, my old phone was bricked. I’ll keep it around for a little bit until I document all the contacts (I didn’t transfer them all), and write down some saved texts. I still have Cliff’s first text to me, “Welcome to the dark side.”

Guess this means I’m officially out of the stone age.