Smart Phone

Kind of on a whim, we decided to go get smartphones this weekend. We’ve thought about it off and on for more than a year and we got our last phones in 2008.  We were paying far to much for our monthly service, because they were, technically, internet capable. We had been with Verizon since I got my first phone ten or so years ago. But we decided to switch to Sprint, their ads for truly unlimited data sealed the deal. Verizon’s offers were just to complicated. Plus, my wife gets a discount through her employer, and since Sprint’s plan is a single charge, instead of a small base charge plus multiple additional ones, it’s a greater % off.

We went with the Samsung Galaxy S2. We considered getting an iPhone 4S, but it would have been a wait, and we liked the bigger screen on the Galaxy. Siri sounded cool, but I like the flexibility of Android. It does have a Voice Actions system that is similar to Siri, but I imagine it doesn’t work as well.

One of the reasons we went with Sprint, aside from the price, was the integration with Google Voice. I like the idea of it the voice mail features.  Being able to set personalized voice mail messages, and access voice mail from the computer, make calls from the computer, record of these, it’s all cool. Any phone can be integrated with Google Voice, but with Sprint, we didn’t need to have two phone numbers, we got to keep our main number that we’ve had forever, and it’s the same for Google and our phone.

We played with them for a few hours last night, already installed apps for Netflix, Skype, Pandora, Google Music. But still have a lot to figure out.