Cell phone advice?

get Verizon wireless and a good quality Motorola phone. I've never had a prob w/them. There are many plans to choose from depending on how much you will be talking and if you use text messages. If you get your bill and you say "whoa" you can ask them which plan would be optimal for the kinds of calls you make and they can suggest one and switch you, which saves $.

scope out your options here

http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/index.jsp

My advice

Sigh, I do not have the time to write the long scathing rant that I would like to about the silliness of the cell phone market these days. But I'll sum up a couple of recommendations:

Buy the cheapest phone you can. They always get beat up, dropped, mangled, crunched, lost, etc.

Ignore all the hype about the cool whiz-bang shit they build into them these days. You'll never use it. It's all crap anyway just designed to separate you from your money.

All you really need is a phone that can make calls and receive calls. That's it. Everything else is just superfluous junk. The one _possible_ exception is text messaging capability. But very very few people use it these days.

I'm currently on Cingular and am happier with them than I've been with any of my past service providers. The only bad thing I can say about Cingular is that they really really really want you in an automatic payment program where they charge your credit card each month. To "encourage" you to do this, they seem to have a policy of cutting off your service if you are the least bit late with paying a bill and then charging ou a hefty reconnect fee. But overall, I've been happy with them and I love the rollover minutes feature. This has saved me lots of money.

Re: My advice

Combining what Miranda and Calvin said -- paulcory and I have Cingular with Motorola phones and are reasonably happy. We got the "Family Talk" plan and share our minutes and call each other for free, blah blah blah. We had way more rollover minutes than we were using, so they let us drop down to a plan that had fewer minutes and didn't give us any hassle about it (and we still have more minutes than we know what to do with).

Here's 2 cents.

I use Verizon and the phone that as free when I signed up. I get as much coverage, area-wise) as I need. *I* have 400 minutes a month. That is enough for me. But I don't use if for my only phone either.

They will get in touch with you about changing your level of service if you keep going over what you initially expect.

On the subject of landlines, during serious blackouts the power goes out in cell phone towers. Just something to think about