cell phone mofia.....Follow

wanted to upgrade my wifes cell phone to one with a pda. they said because my two year contract wasnt up yet, i had to pay full retail, about 350 bucks.

mind you, i dont have a cell phone. so, i added a third line to my familey plan. we keep a spare in the house for when one of the kids has a sleep over. they wont get their own untill mabe highschool, and even then text messaging will be blocked. certainly they will have one in college, and MABE text messaging.

so, i now have 3 of them for a month. next month, im going to drop the house cell and eat the 40 bucks penalty. it was a cheap pos. those money grabbing vermin will not get a dime more out of me no matter how much my wife kicks and screams. BTW the daughter has threatened to run away and go live with the grand parents because they would give her one.

i was quick to call first dibbs on her room for a computer room..........

i-phones now for the low low price of $199.00

If I were King cell phones would be not only outlawed but un-invented.

i think cell phones have there place. but people, especially teens and younger, treat them as toys. and because that is their bigget market, that is who they are marketing them too. thats why you have a whole lot of features that really have nothing to do with a phone on them.

for instance, the stupidity of the "blackberry" phones. 30 dollars a month for the blackberry service in addition to whatever else you have. do people realize that ANY phone with internet capability and service already has FREE e-mail?

yet, they are a big seller. we are a country of consumerism. even our own government pushes us to spend spend spend. gota have it.

i get tired of working my butt off for verison...........

Most service plans charge you per minute for internet access (or at least to use their internet portal).

You've also got to remember that the blackberry was the first phone service/system to offer that capability on a large scale. It may seem wastefully today with every other phone capable of plugging right into a standard wireless network, but back when it was introduced that was a huge feature.

It's still also competitive if you actually want to do more then just send and receive email. Some people *gasp* do silly things like sync up their meeting schedules onto their phones, and having a service that does this for you can be pretty handy. Not that I use a blackberry, but then I use a company phone and get a boatload of stuff "free" (most of which I have no use for... darn kids!). ;)



No one's forcing you to spend anything though. Guess this is where I don't get the whole "consumerism is evil!" type of argument. At the risk of injecting a bit of political ideology into this, I'd much rather live in a world where there's tons of stuff out there to buy and lots of people trying to get each private citizens to spend their money on their product, then one where we hand most of our cash to a government who just provides us with what we need. I can always choose not to buy something if I don't want. I'm much much much more concerned about all the things my money gets spent on that I don't have any say about...

Edited, Jul 11th 2008 1:10pm by gbaji

its true, im cheap. i personally dont carry a cell phone. its not the concept im against, its the "one more bill every month" that irks me not to mention the "69 dollar plan" that somehow ends up being the 95 to 100 dollar bill every month.

i expressly asked them not to install onstar on my vehical. they did anyway. for free. lucky me. coarse, its 9 bucks a month if you want them to monitor it, or 20 bucks a month if you actually want to talk to someone on it. and im sure it would also end up a 35 to 40 dollar a month bill. needless to say, im not paying for it and never will.

the bell south 109 dollar plan that includes home phone service, internet, and direct tv? yep, its a 160 dollar bill every month. not a single dime cheaper than buying it al la cart from their perspective companies. glad i didnt get the cell phone service too.

my daughters braces? 4500 bucks. and worth every penny. the 1200 bucks a year i pay verizon? wasted money, every penny. and if it wasnt for my wife and kids, i would tell direct tv to kiss my **** too. 200 channels of pay for view and home shopping channels mixed in with a hand full of movie and kids channels.

cheap? yep. but tired of getting robbed. for the 1200 bucks a year i pay verison, the phones should be free. any of them.

You know, I went with just antenna about 3 months ago and we haven't looked back. I invested $100 in a rooftop TV antenna and we get something in the neighborhood of 20-25 channels, and all of them are in digital format and many have 2nd and 3rd bands with additional programming on them. They come in crystal clear on my 42" plasma TV, and we get all of the major networks which is really all the TV my wife watches anyway. Sure she misses Food Network and I miss the Discovery channel, but we have broadband internet and can watch most shows we miss online anyway. Netflix takes care of the movies we used to get through the cable box as well, and cheaper I might add.

We sacrificed it so we could continue to send our kids to our daycare center which in my mind is worth it, it's amazing what Aedyn knows how to do already at the age of 3, and I give at least some credit to the teachers there. We really don't miss cable, and I know I don't miss that bill at the end of the month.

As far as phones go, I just got one of the new iPhones and I'm really impressed. I've already synced it with my work calendar and contacts list, and I'm able to access my Gmail account although for now it seems that my Road Runner account is off limits since they don't support relaying. To get around that issue I just started forwarding all that mail to Gmail. The app store has a lot of useful stuff too.

I think for the 5 of us with unlimited everything is around 200 a month.