Larry Jaques wrote:

On Sat, 15 Mar 2008 01:17:31 -0400, with neither quill nor qualm,
Gerald Miller quickly quoth:

On Fri, 14 Mar 2008 20:59:26 -0500, RoyJ
wrote:

A man after my own heart. I still have to OCCASIONALLY wear a watch. But
no cell phone.

We have a cell phone for emergency use by SWMBO - Pay and talk -
current credit balance is ~$300.00 or 20 hours of local talk time, and
this is after taking off $40/year for roadside assistance coverage.

Instead of the usual $40/month for a cell phone, I opted for a
TracFone. The original phone was $15 and came with 80 minutes talk
time and 3 months service. I used a total of 12 minutes in those 3
months. I then spent $99 on a 1 year contract with 600 minutes. I
still have a month to go and 535 minutes. It sits in my truck until I
need to call someone from West BF who has given me bad directions to
their home.

I have myself and my mother on a Verizon family plan. Unlimited in
network voice, text, pic and vid messaging, and a sizeable pool of
minutes and messages for out of network use. Very useful since we're
typically 1,700 miles apart. For something like $4/mo more I have an
international calling add on to my phone that gets me good rates for
calls I periodically need to make to the UK.

I've seen some new plans offered with unlimited anything to anywhere in
the US, which means the cell is now fully viable as a land line
replacement.


I hate cell phones for all the drops and garbled voices (from damnear
everyone I talk to on them) and I still insist that the technology is
NOT ready for prime time.

Either you have a lousy phone, or are in a really bad coverage area, or
perhaps you got suckered into a GSM phone which still has crap for
coverage in the US. The early digital cell phones were pretty crappy for
voice quality compared to analog, but those problems went away in the
first few years. My current LG VX8300 phone is perfectly clear nearly
everywhere.