Cell Phones and Service Plans for the Frugal

Your Guide to Cell Phones and Service Plans

Cell Phone Test that unveils your 5 ideal phones view my top cell phone picks.

View the latest phones... And check out my new cell phone stuff right here: Thursday December 30, 2004 Latest Review: The Samsung A790This business-class phone allows you to use Verizon's CDMA network in the U.S. and GSM networks overseas. But is it business-enough?

Read My Review Of The Samsung A790 November 01, 2004 Is Your Kyocera Battery Under Recall? Kyocera today announced a voluntary recall of fraudulent batteries in its KE/KX 400 Series, 3200 Series and Slider Series phones - which represents a amont of phones sold in the U.S. and Canada. Original batteries for these phones may be.

There is no charge for this recall, which qualifies as "proactive". In the past, batteries have caused explosions on some Nokia phones. To arrange for a replacement, consumers need to call a Kyocera recall line at 1-866-559-3882.
Press Release Monday November 01, 2004 #

The Treo 650 at PCS Will Support Bluetooth Good news. Sprint PCS changed their decision of removing the Dial-up networking portion of the upcoming Treo Bluetooth, which would allow users to connect their laptop to their Treo's all-you-can-eat wireless data plan, without having to subscribe to a different data plan. Treo owners will be given access to a patch that will re-enable DUN.
source Wednesday October 27, 2004 #

A Competitor To Verizon Is BornYesterday, with the completion of the Cingular-AT&T Wireless merger, an important change hapened in the cellular. In the latest years, Verizon has dominated the market with interesting pricing and a large coverage area. Now that Cingular and AT&T unite, their coverage may still not be as wide as Verizon's but they should be able to attract customers with a larger network. It will be interesting to see, though, if the merger, by eliminating a competitor, will have the effect of allowing both cingular and AT&T to raise their prices. You can count on me to make note of the current rates and see how it evolves in a few months.Wednesday October 27, 2004 #

My Technical Analysis of The Motorola i860Here is a recent iDEN phone (available at Nextel) with the Push-to-talk feature. Take a look at its pros and cons.
Read Tuesday October 26, 2004 #

The Week of The Mega-Megapixel PhonesNot only are cell phone makers announcing new megapixel phones regularly, we're starting to hear about 4 and even 5 megapixel phones for the "near future"... though we know how that kind of crazy announces sometimes are just vapourware. Nevertheless, Mitsubishi announced this week that it will produce a CCD (the part that actually takes the pictures in phones) that allows for 4 megapixel phones starting in March 2005. And Samsung said that they will launch a 5 megapixel phone as soon as this fall, but only in Korea.
Source Friday October 22, 2004 #

Canada: Bell Mobility's Customer Service Knock-Out By New Invoicing SystemBell Mobility seems unable to keep up with problems caused by the introduction of its new invoicing system, which delayed some invoices by up to 2 months, causing customers to receive many invoices at once and spawning a storm of customer service calls. Today at 4pm, Bell Mobility's automated response system reported a wait time of more than 3 hours and offered to call customers back (which I suspect means they'll call you back tomorrow).Tuesday October 19, 2004 #

New Service Sends Weather Forecasts By SMSAn interesting service was launched today by the Weather Channel, that allows you to get a weather forecast by sending a short message, with your zip code in it, to 4CAST (42278), which will return the prediction by short message too. Pretty simple, easy and wise, but the rate is a bit exagerated. At $0.75 per forecast, let's hope we'll be able to get a refund if the forecast was innacurate! And it may be wiser and just as quick to simply set a bookmark to your city's weather in your wap browser.Tuesday October 19, 2004 #

Highly Publicized Motorola MPx220 Hits The Stores This Sunday The Motorola MPx220, which has been the object of a considerable Internet Buzz, mostly because it is based on a Microsoft operating system, is going in stores Sunday. So far, it will only be available on a Cingular contract at Best Buy stores beginning Sunday, and later this fall at Cingular stores. Is this megapixel camera phone worth it?
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