Miscellaneous

Big news in the Ward household yesterday: My wife and I finally traded in our Sanyo SCP 4500 phones (picture at right, photo credit here). We had these phones since May 2001 ? nearly eight years ago. Back then, they were state of the art. Today they are antiques. Mine still worked fine, but hers started showing signs of rigor mortis.

Our first stop was the Radio Shack two blocks away, where we had bought the 4500s. Unfortunately, our account was so old that they were unable to upgrade us at the best price. They sent us to our friendly neighborhood Sprint Store on Tchoupitoulas. My wife, wanting a simple device, got the Samsung M320, a basic phone with the now-mandatory built-in camera. I wanted a basic phone too, but I decided to get something with features that I might use later. I ended up getting the Samsung Rant (picture at right). It has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard (picture below), very nice for typing text. And if I decided to sign up for the Sprint data package (or some subset of it), I?ll have access to the Web, GMail, music, GPS navigation, and other goodies.