Samsung Intercept

I'm notoriously frugal, which is why when I read from Robert Cringely's prediction of the demise of Feature phones, I thought he was overly optimistic. When someone disdains monthly cell phone plans, what other options are there for a cell phone but a feature phone?

Well, it turns out, there are a few options out there. In fall of last year, Virgin Mobile started offering the Samsung Intercept, a phone with Android 2.1. The initial price was steep ($250!), but it was a fully loaded smart phone, on a pre-paid plan! Of course, if you wanted data, you're better off with a monthly plan, but these plans are ridiculously priced. For $25 a month, one can get unlimited data, texting, and 300 minutes.

It all sounds good on paper, especially if you were to compare phone and data plans with other carriers. The reduced monthly price (at expense for higher hardware costs) pays for itself in about a year.

Needless to say, I eventually bought the phone (on sale after Christmas for $180) and have been using it for 5 months. I honestly can say I don't know how I operated without this device. Prior to this, I had a cheap phone for calls, an MP3 player to listen to music at work, an old Pocket PC for reading and writing, a Tom Tom GPS in the car for directions. This device has replaced them all and then some.

I use the sliding Qwerty keyboard all the time to write notes, search the web, or even write blog posts. The on screen keyboard is a little cramped, but is handy with the auto-sense.

I have better success with navigation on the phone vs. Tom Tom. This is largely because the GPS device's maps are a few years out of date and map updates cost so much, I might as well buy a new device.

I have a lot more storage on the phone as compared to my MP3 player, so I can keep a much larger music collection on hand. And if I get bored of that, there's always YouTube and Pandora.

With Amazon's Kindle application, reading is much easier on my phone compared to my old Pocket PC. I've finished a few books on the device, plus read hundreds of articles using the InstaFetch application that synchronizes with my InstaPaper account.

Finally, I've taken many more pictures with the phone's camera thanks to it always being in my pocket. Uploading to Facebook can be a bit difficult (as it doesn't always recognize orientation), but I've installed the application PicSay to handle this when the native application fails.

All told, I'm still loving my Droid phone. It was upgraded to Droid 2.2 about a month ago. The only downside here is that during the upgrade, the note application, which I had saved a dozen notes in, was removed and I lost all of the notes. This warning was clearly stated, but unfortunately, I did not heed the warning.