Kinda Chunky

Last night, my T-Mobile Comet Android GSM smartphone was waiting for me when I got home.
I activated it on T-Mobile’s $30/month prepaid plan and popped that SIM into my iPhone. SO I’ll have 1500 units to share between texting and voice (way too much for me) and 30MB of cellular internet (just enough). Plus if I go over my inernet, I can order a 24-hour internet day pass at any time and my account will be debited $1.49. Perfect!
Looking at my current T-Mobile bill, I used 34MB of data last month (perfect!), 184 text messages and just under 200 minutes of talk.
There were cheaper plans but they didn’t work out for me. It was easy to see how I’d save a few bucks every once in awhile but probably go over $30/month more often than not. Not worth the trouble. This plan is the best fit for me at this time.

My wife and I have a T-Mobile monthly family plan. We have this deal where my internet is $10/mo and our shared unlimited text messaging is $10 or $15/mo total. Plus we have unlimited voice minutes. For some months now she’s had a Samsung Vibrant and she likes it alright. Though it may not be the perfect phone for her, she’s told me that she isn’t going to go back to a phone without a data plan, now that she’s tasted the always-connectedness of a data plan.
Enter Virgin Mobile.
Virgin Mobile now (and probably for some time now) has an Android phone available and some really attractive month-to-month, no-contract service plans. So we switched her from T-Mobile to the Virgin Mobile $40/mo plan Tuesday night, 1 Feb 2011. For $40 (no BS fees or taxes on top of that) she gets unlimited internet, unlimited texting and 1200 voice minutes per month. Wow. The Android phone we got for her is a Samsung Intercept. It comes up short of her Samsung Vibrant in many ways (screen size, resolution, colors and camera quality. And the internet is EvDO, not the speed she’s become accustomed to with her T-Mobile plan and phone. But at the price we’ll be paying for service, who can complain. And she doesn’t use the camera.
I’ve been hard pressed to find a similar “budget” service plan with a GSM carrier — Virgin Mobile USA uses Sprint’s non-GSM network. But at Best Buy buying my wife’s VM phone, i discovered that T-Mobile has a plan that’s attractive to me, which I didn’t find when searching the web for general GSM-based prepaid plans.
The T-Mobile plan I found costs $30/mo. For that, you get 1500 units per month, where a unit can be used as a text message or one voice minute. Plus 30MB/mo of internet. That’s a little light, even for me, but it’ll do. The only thing it really means for me is that I’ll be more inclined to use my Garmin GPS unit instead of my iPhone’s horrible built-in Google Maps app. That’s not a problem for me.
I ordered a T-Mobile Comet Android phone for $120. It comes with a $50 top-up card and the phone, so the phone winds up costing me $70. That’s worth it for me to have a backup smartphone for going to the beach or the like — places I wouldn’t want to bring my iPhone 3G S, which would costs hundreds of dollars to replace.

At Dr. Dunkelberger’s recommendation for a chronic cough, I’ve been on 10mg Zyrtec (occasionally Claritin) daily for months — since 6 October 2010. I’ve gained 15 pounds. Weird. I just can’t be medicating myself like this. Today I stopped taking Zyrtec.
29 August 2011 update: Instead of daily Zyrtec forever, I started cleaning my sinuses with a NeilMed-brand squeeze bottle. I couldn’t believe what came out of there. Been doing this for most of this year and my chronic cough is completely gone. Only took a few months before it was gone and just a couple weeks before it was markedly better.