New Town, New Cellphones

Yesterday, I moved the our cell phone plans from the Fort Worth locale to the Austin locale. It was fairly painless. AT&T Wireless has been my cellular provider of choice for about 5 years now. I’ve been happy with their service from day one and have never looked back (though some of those unlimited family plans look enticing sometimes). I’m sure we’ve paid a little more than we needed to because we were lazy or stupid, but overall, I’ve been very happy with the service, and Service is King™, or so they say.

Anyways, with the switch in service, and my need for greater contact with other folks, we started looking at new calling plans with more minutes and/or flexiblity, as well as new phones (I had a severe case of phone envy for some reason). Also, my new employer actually covers some cell phone costs without a lot of hassle, so I figured I’d take advantage of that, if it made sense.

We’ve been using old Nokia phones and I really, really wanted a Bluetooth enabled phone, so that I could easily sync my data and always have it with me (I am a sales person after all, and entering client info more than once or twice starts to suck around the 500 contacts mark, and I’m well past that).

So, I investigated the Sony Ericsson T68i, primarily because it looked like it’d do everything I wanted now, and would live through two or three product revisions without loosing too much of its luster. The wife however wanted a new flip-phone, so something from Motorola was in the works for her (also she needed coverage while driving no matter where she was, so GSM was out for her). The only problem with the T68i is that its a GSM only phone, and that means reduced coverage areas, but all of the major metros in the country are covered, and I’ll likely be flying between them, so coverage isn’t that big of a concern for me.

This evening we visited the local AT&T Wireless storefront so we could get a better feel for the phones and the new plans and bought a Motorola V60i for the wife and a Ericsson T68i for myself. I signed up for the $99 unlimited + no long distance “in network” plan that’s available for GSM users. The wife signed up for the $35 National Network plan that came with 200 free minutes, and unlimited night and weekend minutes, so she should be covered. We dropped $500 odd dollars on the phones and will get $100 back (allow 6-8 weeks for processing, please).

Overall, I’m happy about the phones and the plans that we got, and just ordered a D-Link DWB-120M Bluetooth USB Adapter for Macintosh Computers (D-Link’s page) from Apple so that I can iSync my data sometime in the coming week or two.