I'm a late bloomer when it comes to cell phones. I've never really needed or wanted one. I tend to enjoy being away from the world when I'm eating out for dinner, for example. Yeah, I guess I can turn off the phone. But afterwards, I'd immediatly turn it back on, and want to deal with any messages there. If I *can't* check messages or email, I tend not to care... if I know one is there, or have the ability to check them, it bothers me until I do :-)

Alas, for various reasons, I'm giving in, some of the reasons being:

• The occasional desire to get in touch with someone while I'm not at home
• I run a business, where I do consulting and hosting. People like being able to get in touch with you, not just when you're next to a landline
• If something goes wrong with the hosting, I need to be able to fix it, where ever it is I am

So, I've begun poking my head around the various offerings. I've been learning about things like GSM and CDMA. Apparently, CDMA allows for more users on a single tower, and has a broader range per tower. But, GSM is more popular internationally, and claims a higher digital voice quality.

Then there's all the providers... Verizon and Spring use CDMA. Verizon has a large presence in the North-East, where I spent most of my time. Cingular and T-Mobile, using GSM, do have coverage as well. T-Mobile tends to be more-so near highways, but otherwise, often considered to be rather poor coverage. Cingular seems to have an even network around the US... maybe not as good in the North East as Verizon, but better in other areas.

It gets tough though, as you can run into pockets of people who will suggest any of the above. Some people love Verizons network and connectivity. Others love Cingular for the same reason. Some like TMobile because it works well enough, but is cheaper.... especially when including data into the plan.

The thing that gets me with all this is cost... it kills me that I'll end up spending so much to be able to have a phone that allows me to connect to the Net in the case of an emergency.

We'll probably get a phone for Shana at the same time... so, for the both of us, family plans tend to start at $60/month. Data, for one user, is at least another $20. So, we're suddenly spending $80/month. And then there's at least another $5-$10 in taxes. Yay! So, we're almost at $100 for two people to carry around phones, one of whom can use it to get on the Net for a brief period of time. Ugh!

Anyhow... the next issue at hand is in choosing a phone. There's a ton of them out there. And if you look at say, the CNet reviews, you can find at least 5 things wrong with each one, and an additional 2-3 if you read what the users have to say in addition to the actual review.

So, what level of imperfection are you willing to tolerate in order to gain the privilage of spending $100 a month to be able to have people interrupt you during dinner?

Well, in any case, if I'm going to be doing Internet work, it's going to be over ssh. And with ssh, a keyboard is nice. The Treo's and such are tempting, but they're quite large, and they run Windows. I was really just considering dealing with one of the standard LG phones, or perhaps a flipout keyboardthat the LG-9800 offers. With it, you can use the free BitPim to upload wallpapers and ringtones, modify the filesystem, and other goodies that seem to come disabled (so not only am I spending $100 on phones, I'm spending that much on phones with features taken out!).

But, in poking around the Net, I ran across this rather cool looking Nokia, the E70. It sports not just a keyboard, but over 7 hours of talk time, WiFi access (b, g, e, and i), a 2MB camera, a 352 x 416 screen with 16 million colors, 75MB of space and a mini-sd card slot, and it supports Java so I should have no trouble getting my ssh client.

After all is said and done, it seems like a winner of a phone. I'm leaning towards going with Cingular... as Tmobile doesn't really seem to be cheaper, you just get more features for your money (ie, it's still $60 for a family plan, but you get 700 minutes, instead of 550). So, I'm leaning towards the better coverage, since I don't really need the extra minutes.

The unfortunate part of all this is that the Nokia E70 isn't available yet... Nokia claims it's fixing some software bugs it discovered, they claim it'll be out later this quarter. We'll see how that goes :-)