Monday, April 7, 2008

Cell phone adventures

My birthday is coming up, and I had hinted to DH that I would really like a new cell phone. My current one had a crack in the face, and since I have a job where I work from my computer, I thought it would be oh so handy to be able to check my email and work even when away from my desk. Of course, the thing that is getting all the rave right now is the i*phone, so I had initially mentioned my interest in that. I knew that DH had done some research on the i*phone, so I wanted to make sure that it was actually the thing I wanted. Well, to make a long story short, I found through much research that the i*phone is really cool, and great as an i*pod, but not so great as a phone and not as great with the features I was looking for. So, basically I found the best deal on a family plan (what the DH had been researching), and basically handed the paperwork to my DH for him to order :)

I got my new phone (my birthday present)...I picked the AT*T Tilt...

Initially,I spent about 2 hours working on my contact list. You connect your phone to your computer and it downloads all your contacts from your email system. Well I had a ton of duplicate contacts.....contacts I didn't even recognize, and contacts I would never need on my phone. I also discovered a whole article on things you should do to your phone to make it more user friendly.... remove unwanted "bloatware" aka...software on the phone that you don't need...like trials of games etc, software you should add to your phone in order to modify some of the settings, etc. Well, turns out in order to get rid of all the "bloatware" you have to do a hard reset of the phone which gets rid of anything you've saved to the phone :) So all my contacts that I had modified were lost.
Yesterday DH and I spent most of the day working on the phone...not because it was hard...but it was slightly technically challenging to add/remove/modify programs and software, and I'm sure we did everything the hard way because neither of us completely understood what we were doing (I'm sure DH will disagree). Anyway, today, everything is working smoothly, and I'm really enjoying the phone. Being able to receive emails while I'm out and about is just so fun. Also having the ability to check the ratings on Ama*zon before buying a book at Target will relieve a great deal of anxiety!! Last week I had to call my dear sister from Target and ask her if she could look some books up for me on Amazon because I just couldn't buy a book without knowing what it rated...or how well other people liked it. (as a side note, I'm the same with recipes...I almost exclusively use allrecipes because people rate the recipes after they make them...so I only make recipes rated 5 stars). Anyway, I can think of so many things that this phone is going to be useful for when I'm out and about.....maps/directions, movie times, amazon ratings and prices, phone numbers for restaurants, and a myriad of other things.

Yes, I am addicted to the internet. I don't know how people live without it!!

2 comments:

Lindsay said...

Cool phone. But I now realize I am severely techno challenged cause I started getting a headache just reading about whet you had to do. My phone is over 2 years old and I have about 8 numbers in it cause I am too lazy and annoyed to put them in. Lame, I know.

I love allrecipes, too!!

Anonymous said...

Glad you got to get a fun new toy! It'll come in handy in so many ways.