June 13, 2007 at 9:59 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

I made a very adult purchase today, as you can see above. I didn’t set out with the intention of buying a phone, and I certainly didn’t set out with the intentions of buying a Blackberry , but I somehow got sucked in to the magic that is the all-in-one handheld device. I was at the dreaded mall, which I have managed to gleefully avoid since the holiday season, to get my new glasses at LensCrafters. I could have continued to avoid the mall by going to any number of other optical places but next week is going to be incredibly busy work-wise with a ridiculous amount of traveling and I figured I’d rather get my glasses in an hour than have to find time to pick them up later. To kill my hour I decided to take a nice walk around the mall for some exercise and maybe some frozen yogurt, but my first stop was a bathroom. On my way out of the bathroom and back into the main drag, I passed a Cingular/At & T stand and stopped for a minute to look at the phones on display. I had been checking the time, so my hands were fumbling with my own beat up cellphone when the salesman spotted me. I tried to thrust my phone back into the depths of my bag because not only does it looked like it survived a fall down the face of a rocky mountain, it’s also so archaic that I’m surprised I don’t need to pull up an antenna and attach it to a battery pack in order to make calls.

My attempt to avoid embarrassment wasn’t executed quickly enough, and the salesman gave me a look that kind of said “Oh my god, please let me help you,” as he said “I can tell you right now that you’re eligible for an upgrade. Come on over.” After a brief demonstration on the Blackberry, I was pretty much in. Hook, line – meet sinker. The salesman even went through our plans and was able to cut out almost $40 in extras – options that we had individually that were just duplicated when we merged. I wish that the representative who merged our plans would have done that. We would have saved almost $250 bucks. If you’re a Cingular/At&T customer, I’d suggest visiting a store and asking them to review your plan, even if it hasn’t recently changed or merged. When Cingular took over At&T two years ago and then recently became At&T again, some options seem to have changed slightly. For example, some mobile to mobile and text options that you’re paying extra for that may now be standard.

I called Jeremy and told him about my plan. He’s been using an equally ancient and kind of humongous Sony Ericsson that already has a place reserved for it in the Ugly Phones of the 21st Century exhibit at the Smithsonian. He wasn’t interested in a Blackberry, but I still picked him up a nicer (and slimmer) Nokia. By the time everything was all said and done, it was almost time to pick up my snazzy new glasses. So much for exercise!

I spent the better part of an hour fooling around with the Blackberry to get the settings the way I want them and to get comfortable with all the bells and whistles. I set up my homepage to give me local weather, news ticker, and updates on the Phillies game. I also started getting my emails on it, the only downside being that it doesn’t really do well with HTML. C’est la vie. My old phone didn’t even having a properly working 4 key.

In non-phone related news, a new season of Top Chef starts tonight. Huzzah!