My Blackberry has been really acting up over the past few weeks…last weekend especially. I was trying to last into January because for one, money is a little tight right now and secondly because I'm not supposed to be eligible for an upgrade until December 27th.

But it got so bad over the weekend that I decided that I had to do something about it. I went down to the AT&T Store last night expecting to have to wage an epic battle to maybe get an early upgrade because my phone was quickly headed into the realm of the unuseable. Surprisngly, they didn't really have a problem with it. Ready for battle, I was thrown off balance by the response of "Ok, sure, we can do that". Very nice.

Because money was tight, I had been thinking about dropping back from my Blackberry/smartphone idea and instead of getting an iPhone or another blackberry like I was going to go back to a normal camera phone. Having all the smart phone stuff available was handy but the data plan was $30 a month and I really didn't use it that often. So while I will miss having my e-mail in my pocket 24/7, I'll just have to live with it.

LG Shine

LG Shine

I ended up going with the LG Shine. Wassy has one and it takes really nice pictures for a camera phone which is something I was looking for. Also I had played around with it a bit and liked the layout and the form factor. I was thinking about going sans data plan entirely but I realized I couldn't do that…but luckily the camera phone data plans are cheaper ($15/month for unlimited) so I went with that. The guy tried to get me to add a 200 message text message plan for $5 a month more. The following conversation resulted:

Him: Are you sure you don't want a messaging plan for $5 more per month?
Me: Yep, I only really get 5-10 text messages a month, on a good month. I can pay 20 cents per message for that
Him: But that's $2.
Me: …Exactly.

So far I'm really liking the Shine. It's taking some getting used to typing on a phone keypad again instead of a full keyboard. Also it has 3G service and this area just got 3G turned on, so..ironically, I used more data last night than I ever did on my blackberry streaming videos and doing a little web browsing. I realized that pretty much every site I visited on my blackberry was a mobile version, so why should I waste money on a more expensive setup when I could really be doing just the same things I was doing before?

So the upshot is, I'm saving about $20 a month on my phone bill, getting much faster data service for when I do use it and the only thing I'm giving up is instant access to e-mail. So far so good. Hopefully I'll be in a better position when my next upgrade comes up and I can get myself an iPhone or something like that then.

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