Phone Groan

I have a friend, we’ll call him Michael, because that’s his name, who has a Droid phone. I mention this not because I feel that he needs recognition for his purchasing power, but because I needed a new phone and after experimenting with several other friends phones, found his to be the best. Moreover, the new version, the Droid X, had just hit the market.

But let me back up for a moment. My previous phone, which was the most durable, long-lasting, dependable phone that I’ve ever owned, finally decided that it had a good life and died on me. I originally paid $20 for this phone and it did everything from the basic phone features, to double as my iPod after my iPod bit the dust. It was a good phone, but it was a piece of technology and thus doomed from the start.

So into the local Verizon store I went to get the new hotness, which I hoped would not only last me as long as my previous phone, but would also giving me options that that my old phone lacked. I spent the next hour playing with every phone in the place, only to come to the conclusion that indeed the new Droid X was by far the best phone in the store.

So up to the counter I went, sure, confident and fully prepared to commit the next several years to being dependent on this one device. The young girl walked over, smiled and asked me what she could help me with. I explained that my previous phone had lived a good life, but it was time to move on. She agreed and we went about the business of ordering my final choice. And that is where things went bad.

So there I was, ready to shell out the $200 for a phone and she hit me with the first bit of bad news. If I wanted the new Droid X, I would need to pay an additional $30 a month for a data package. That was in addition to $45 a month fee for regular service, unlimited texting and plenty of minutes. But being the math wizard that I am, I quickly calculated that the new hotness was going to cost me about $1200 for one year of use.

But that is when I took a step back and rethought the phone. The Droid X was nice, but Kela’s new i5, blu-ray, 500GB, Windows 7 laptop was half of that price and does twice as much. I liked the Droid X, but $1200 is a weeklong cruise in the Caribbean even after paying for drinks. For the same price as a year with the Droid X I could have paid someone else to finish the concrete stucco work on the outside of the house.

I now have a nice low-end Samsung Alias 2, which does everything that my old phone did, except a little faster. I just couldn’t justify $1200 a year for what is little more than a toy. But maybe I’m looking at this wrong. Maybe I’m supposed to just buy these things because they are the new hotness. Maybe I’m extremely uncool for analyzing this more monetarily than socially. Maybe I’m a dork for even writing all of this down, but hey, you’re the one who sat there and read it.