...more recent posts
I have some Carhartt pants that have a special cell phone pocket, about where a hammer loop would be. In my haste to start a load of laundry, I failed to check that pocket.
So now I have a Droid 2 that's an unhappy phone. It powers up, but no display. I moved service back to my Droid 1, which other than the keyboard is a mighty fine phone. Unlike the Droid 2, the basic telephony UI doesn't have the appearance of a UI designed by someone 20 years away from presbyopia. And the speaker phone volume goes all the way up to annoying!
So I check on the Droid 4. Five hundred and forty nine dollars, retail, with no contract renewal. Or $99 for a refurb unit -- but only with a contract renewal. Somewhere in between, perhaps half retail, is a new unit with contract renewal. Contract renewals get rid of the grandfathered "unlimited data". I don't use anywhere near the limit. But goddammit, I might. One day.
To me this pricing is like Safeway, but more insidious. If you ever go in a Safeway, you'll notice the way they do "sale" pricing. Do you want to pay "absolutely fucking ridiculous price" or do you want to pay "discount price that only comes with a discount card." What Safeway is doing is coercing you to submit to data tracking.
VZW is practicing the same sort of coercion, but they're coercing customers into new contracts. And they get to do it by talking about "subsidized price". They're doing you a fucking favor.
So, I'm a Droid 1 user.