I think I have asked this question before, but let’s give it a go again, shall we? How many of my readers use a cell phone? I know, it seems like more and more people are calling them personal devices, but they are still cell phones to me. Personally, I use one every day. It is my alarm clock in the morning, my connection to the Internet, if in a pinch, and my calendar, but above and beyond everything else, it is a phone. With my parents getting elderly and a new granddaughter having arrived on March 26th of this year, it is more important than ever that I can be reached at all times. Updating my Facebook or Twitter status doesn’t count. One thing for sure, these little jewels of technological marvels have progressed greatly from the days of the bag phone. As always, comments are more than welcome. Please let me know how you view your cell phone.
Having said all of that, I am not above enjoying tech gadgets. I have a Garmin GPS and when I am driving, my bluetooth is always on. Hands free and all of that. More than once, I have been called a geek, both by my boss and my wife, although with much more love coming from her. I am constantly tweaking my desktop computer and it’s Mepis 8.5 operating system, which is Debian based. I do the same to my work computer, which runs Windows Vista, much to my displeasure. I suppose I fall under the category of “having to understand how it all works”, especially when it comes to all things technology.
This all leads me to the point of this post. About a year ago, I upgraded my cell phone to the Samsung Eternity, which was my first touch screen phone. It has been, by far, the best phone I have used and seeing it convinced my wife and daughter to recently upgrade to the Samsung Impression. I have never really wanted a smartphone, simply because my desire to browse the Internet a lot on a 3″-4″ screen was lacking. Give me my 22″ Acer monitor any day of the week. Couple that with the difference between my $10 data plan and the $30 data plan AT&T requires for a smartphone and it wasn’t a hard decision.
Because I have the master phone on our family plan, it is now time to upgrade again. As I have no wish to have a phone with a slide-out keyboard, I had pretty much made up my mind to go with the Samsung Mythic. That is, until I went to
Sam’s Club yesterday to look around and an AT&T representative showed me the new HTC Aria, running on Android 2.1. She had her own phone up and running and allowed me to play around with it. Needless to say, I was greatly impressed by what I saw. I was especially pleased to see the price of $95 for an upgrade.
Now, I know that the HTC Aria is not as high end of a phone as something like the iPhone, Nexxus One, and other phones that do everything but cook your supper. I know it is a smartphone and that I have to have a data plan, but since AT&T has reformatted their data plans, I can get a 200 MB plan for $15. Given the fact that the Aria is Wi-Fi capable, that should be plenty of data for me. Unless I change my mind, I will undoubtedly be upgrading to my first smartphone on Tuesday.
Since leaving Sam’s Cub yesterday, I have spent several hours on the Internet, learning what I could about the HTC Aria. First and foremost, I have found that nearly every reviewer liked it, but thought it was vastly overpriced, especially considering the fact that the latest and greatest iPhone has just been released. (From what I have heard, the iPhone 4 may not be the greatest, but that would be the subject for another post.) I have learned that the Aria is a smaller phone and is dwarfed by the aforementioned iPhone and the HTC Evo, 
offered by Sprint. It is nearly identical in size to my Samsung Eternity and that is about perfect for me. All in all, I think it all boils down to personal preferences. I have no need or desire to carry a large phone on my belt (yes, I still carry my phone on my belt) and the Aria will do anything I need it to do.
During this time of reading reviews and watching videos on YouTube, there is one thing that stuck out to me. I learned all about how the Aria has the pinch and zoom feature of zooming web pages. I discovered I can constantly keep in contact with my Facebook and Twitter accounts, finding out what some of my friends had for lunch, no doubt. I also figured out that I can have a time and weather widget on the Aria’s home screen, which isn’t so bad. It also tells you what city you are in, which I read is vital to one reviewer. He likes to know where he is.
Of all of the reviews I read and watched, only one mentioned the basic function of a cell phone, which is making phone calls. That mention was in passing, saying it handled phone calls nicely, if you are one of those people who still use a cell phone to make calls. I honestly couldn’t believe my ears. Am I so far behind the times that I use my cell phone to actually talk to someone? I have a feeling I am going to enjoy my new HTC Aria greatly and will probably discover I may use it for more than I imagined. It will not be for Facebook and Twitter, I can assure you, but I suspect I will find some good uses for it. However, the main feature I will be using it for is to stay in contact with those I care about, namely my immediate family. That is accomplished through phone calls and the occasional text message. If it does that, it will be a win for me.
