I'm looking for a new phone in the next week or two and totally lost what to get. I have Sprint right now and a Samsung VGA1000. My contract is expiring July 3 and I have promised myself never to pay Sprint another dime. So my question is two part: what phone? and what provider?
Phone: Looking for speaker phone and bluetooth (for headset and syncing), 1MP camera would be nice. I like both the LG9800 and the various RAZRs. I know they're very different phones; I'm going to the store tomorrow to play around with both and figure out which I like better.
One thing I really don't like about my current phone is there's no way to get pictures onto or off of it without paying $10/mo. for the sprint pictures service. I'm not willing to pay that much money to occasionally transfer a few low-res, grainy photos. So I would like a phone where I can copy pictures onto my computer directly. If I could do the same with music and make a song my ringtone that would be great too.
Is this far-fetched? I know most companies lock down phones so much so that you're forced into paying the monthly fees for content. How safe is it to reflash a phone? Is it true that T-Mobile will let you unlock your phone after 90 days? Is that just as good as reflashing?
I'd also like good syncing with address book if possible (pictures syncing with address book would be *great*). Don't care about iCal.
QWERTY keyboard is good.
Lastly, I don't use internet on my phone very often, but a few times a month I'd like to be able to lookup scores or the yellow pages. My current phone/service is dreadfully slow, so if there any phones which are particularly faster or services to avoid, please share your experiences.
Provider: I live in No. Virginia, 30 min from DC. I know that Verizon works well at my apartment and at work, TMobile works okay. Don't know much about Cingular here. I'm leaning towards Verizon but really don't like how much they lock down the phones.
I'd like a plan no more than $50 a month, I usually use around 300 anytime minutes, but sometimes spike up to 500 so a plan with rollover minutes would be cool. I send text messages every now and then (less than 20 a month, usually 5-10), so I don't want to pay for a text message bundle but I also don't want to pay outrageous text messaging fees.
Any recommendations? I checked out howard forums but that place is so noisy it was hard to get a clear idea of what different providers/phones have to offer, so I'm hoping to get a clearer response here. Especially with respect to mac-compatibility.
Thanks all--
Phone: Looking for speaker phone and bluetooth (for headset and syncing), 1MP camera would be nice. I like both the LG9800 and the various RAZRs. I know they're very different phones; I'm going to the store tomorrow to play around with both and figure out which I like better.
One thing I really don't like about my current phone is there's no way to get pictures onto or off of it without paying $10/mo. for the sprint pictures service. I'm not willing to pay that much money to occasionally transfer a few low-res, grainy photos. So I would like a phone where I can copy pictures onto my computer directly. If I could do the same with music and make a song my ringtone that would be great too.
Is this far-fetched? I know most companies lock down phones so much so that you're forced into paying the monthly fees for content. How safe is it to reflash a phone? Is it true that T-Mobile will let you unlock your phone after 90 days? Is that just as good as reflashing?
I'd also like good syncing with address book if possible (pictures syncing with address book would be *great*). Don't care about iCal.
QWERTY keyboard is good.
Lastly, I don't use internet on my phone very often, but a few times a month I'd like to be able to lookup scores or the yellow pages. My current phone/service is dreadfully slow, so if there any phones which are particularly faster or services to avoid, please share your experiences.
Provider: I live in No. Virginia, 30 min from DC. I know that Verizon works well at my apartment and at work, TMobile works okay. Don't know much about Cingular here. I'm leaning towards Verizon but really don't like how much they lock down the phones.
I'd like a plan no more than $50 a month, I usually use around 300 anytime minutes, but sometimes spike up to 500 so a plan with rollover minutes would be cool. I send text messages every now and then (less than 20 a month, usually 5-10), so I don't want to pay for a text message bundle but I also don't want to pay outrageous text messaging fees.
Any recommendations? I checked out howard forums but that place is so noisy it was hard to get a clear idea of what different providers/phones have to offer, so I'm hoping to get a clearer response here. Especially with respect to mac-compatibility.
Thanks all--
) so it is well worth checking it out, or its siblings.
