Carve your number on my wall

[austin_dern]

Now, the full story of my week visiting bunny_hugger and my return to con-going ways I think has a logical precedent and one unexpected crash of life leading up to it so I'll go into that. The start of this piece is my conclusion that yes, I really should have a cell phone. It'd be convenient to have if, say, I were stranded on an obscure road somewhere (a lesser concern with the new car than the old, but still, always a possibility), or when trying to arrange meeting with someone at a highly fluid social situation like a convention, and for that matter in handling really personal matters like figuring out zoo memberships when I don't feel fully comfortable making calls about that on my office phone.

I'm not a fast shopper. I end up weighing options to the point that I'm lost in oblivion and end up buying the first thing I looked at. This is pretty much how my car buying went although that actually involved slightly less time spent looking at web sites and comparing alternatives. Serving as complicating factors: pretty much everyone in my immediate family is with Verizon, suggesting that deals with free calls to Verizon customers would be useful. And I make very few phone calls; back in grad school, I actually didn't get the standard Bell Atlantic phone service because I could do better paying for every call separately than wasting funds on that flat-rate local-call service. In Singapore I had multiple phone bills of under one dollar. Clearly, I can't justify one of those unlimited-minutes service plans that cost as much as multiple hardcover books per month.

Further complicating things: it struck me that what I do do is use the web, and one of those phones that has good web or data service would fit my needs nicely. This would speak well for a prepaid phone if it had a usable keyboard and data plan. (I've attempted text messaging on numeric keypads and the less said of that the better.) This proves to be a combination of services in which the mobile phone market does not currently excel. Still, there are prepaid phones with web services, although usually charging per megabyte which must be used in a day or something like 50 megabytes to use in a month. I could hardly guess what my projected use would be, but ... Verizon had this interesting mention in their prepaid cell phone plans: 99 cents for a day of Mobile Web access.

Verizon's prepaid phones have various plans, most of which amount to a per-day access fee where one pays (say) $1.99 on a day of use for unlimited calling to Verizon callers and per-minute charge to others. A dollar for a day of web site access would be not bad, unless there were a per-megabyte charge on top of that, or if you also had to pay the daily phone-use access on top of that. The flyers manage to be unclear whether there's a per-megabyte charge. The subscription plans have some per-megabyte use data plans, and some unlimited-use data plans. Ah, but surely a web site reviewing Verizon's plans will be clear about the terms of use, wouldn't it? It would if a web site did more than repeat what the flyers said.

So the logical thing to do after this is to ask an actual store clerk what the terms of service are. Surely this should clear things up easily.

Trivia: In the first half of 1865 Reuters's costs for telegraphic service to North America averaged £67 per month. In the first half of 1867 --- after the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable was in successful operation --- they averaged £424 per month. Source: The Power Of News: The History Of Reuters, Donald Read.

Currently Reading: The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision In Britain, 1800 - 1910, Chris Otter.

Comments

[xiaobaitu.livejournal.com]

when trying to arrange meeting with someone at a highly fluid social situation like a convention

As silly technologies go, my latest conference was what finally convinced me to start using my twitter account. It's pretty much perfect for posting your ephemeral location to your attending colleagues.

For that matter, the reason I got an iPhone was a year ago this summer--the idea of using it at Otakon to write a GPS app to track the locations of each other in the absurdly crowded dealers' room. Ironically, I the app already existed, but I never got it working properly.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Hm. That app does sound like a pretty useful thing, although I would have (maybe naively) thought the built-in error factor would overwhelm the dealer location data. Or maybe if you can get to within (I don't know) ten feet of the spot you can probably find the precise table?

I still haven't found something to put my Twitter account to use for.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

My Virgin mobile phone apparently handles the web, but I'm not inclined to spend more money on it yet for the modest amount I would need it.

I do rather wish it had a Twitter client. That would be enough. ..maybe it does. I'm going to go look.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

In fact, Virgin Mobile entered my endless debating and considering of phones because of its rather reasonable per-use fees. But the data part wasn't as generally nice as the phone side of things was.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Quite true. I was initially attracted by their per-use charges and there very reasonable text-messaging costs, which have stayed good and are a reason I still use them, now on my sixth phone with the company.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

See? The system's caught you. This is why I had to pick a phone so carefully; I might be stuck with the inheritance of it for the rest of my life.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Oh, there've been ample opportunities to escape, but they keep being good and cheap, and I'm not currently able or willing to pay for great and expensive.

Now Apple and their iTunes/iPod juggernaut, that has me trapped.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes, good and cheap is a potent combination. But it would be nice if they had text messages lasting longer than 160 characters to make sending MiSTing Quotes less impractical.

[moxie_man]

The fun you've gone through is one of the reasons why I must be one of the last people in the USA without a personal cellphone. :)

Nor, do I plan to have one anytime soon.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I procrastinated mostly because of the very low average use I expected it to have. But the fact that the few times I might really need a hand phone I'd really need one did eventually win out. And so far, in the fourteen days I've had one, it's proven useful in two of them, although I admit I wouldn't have been in crisis without it.

[mondhasen.livejournal.com]

charging per megabyte

The final frontier. Unregulated capitalism at its greedy best.

Calling plans have dropped in price. Deals have been offered for unlimited calls, calls to other cell providors, rolling over minutes for calls, even texting, but megabyte usage is the hot one: Verizon charges 2 dollars per mb, or 25 mb plans for 10 dollars, etc... and I haven't figured out their formula for determining what an mb is or how it is determined. I can't estimate mb usage prior to using the service (I suppose it is there somewhere in the fine print) and am generally numb when seeing the charges they tack onto the bills for the ringtones, song, and games the kids buy. You don't just pay for these items, they charge you to download them, too.

My daughter wanted the LG enV® TOUCH and was told at the end of the deal that, btw, you have to have a data plan of 25mb monthly because it is a pda... zing. Of course she bought it... Everyone wants access, and there's no alternative other than paying for it.

I like the iTouch (not the iPhone, I don't have AT&T) for accessing internet, but one has to be in a wi-fi zone.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

That I don't know how many megabytes I might use was another of those complicating factors, even for companies that offer plans which have various megabyte-use levels. I could easily imagine checking Google Maps for traffic reports, for example, but how much would that require? Would I get to reading so many Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan fictions in my spare time that this would billow me over a five-megabyte-a-month limit? Sure, you can change plans until you find the one that fits, but I also know that once I guess at a plan I'm liable to try living with that rather than adapt it to fit my needs. Getting the plan changed would probably require some interaction with a person.

[rcoony.livejournal.com]

I used to think I'd never get one either, and coincidentally, it was also my acquaintance with a female-type person that made me consider the advantages of having one. After coming to my senses it turned out to be genuinely useful for real-life stuff too, even though I don't use it a whole lot. Though I admit I use the clock and alarm clock functions on it more than anything else.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if there's an alarm clock feature on this. I'd be surprised if there were one that was loud enough to be useful to me, though. I tend to need the sort of alarm clock that delivers mild electric jolts directly to key parts of the brain to wake me up and they don't have that except on the higher-end iPhones.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Just about every cell phone will have an alarm clock function; it has replaced completely the need for me to carry a Travel Alarm.

Of course, I barely use my alarm clock now, since K seems to have decided that waking me up noon is a duty. Since I stopped having the morning-shifts job in Feabruary, I have used my alarm clock maybe.. four times.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I think I do better waking to a travel alarm clock, actually. The lack of a snooze button removes a failure mode. A person deliberately waking me, that's a different matter, and harder to reason with.