Motorola Atrix HD review

For anyone who wants a nice Android phone but doesn't have a lot of money this may be the phone for you.  Check out the following review from Technobuffalo.

OH noes my Iphone go boom and how it will turn into an experiment with Nokia

So I knew that my trusted iPhone 4 was on her last legs.  The home button would take sometimes, 15 presses before it would recognize it and you can imagine how useless the phone is when that button doesn't work.  But I was really hoping that it would of held out till this fall so that I could pick up the iPhone 5.  I was crushed when today my phone (which pretty much is an apendage for me) was not responding to any of the actual button presses.  Turns out after taking it to the Apple store it was determined that something had caused the connection to all the physical buttons to stop working.  I could pay to have it fixed (not worth it by the way) or go ahead and get an iPhone 4s.  I will go ahead and say that I have no desire for the 4s, if I'm going to get a new iPhone it is going to be the 5.  Sadly, I have no extra phones laying around that I could use in it's place.  So the morale of the story is that I had to get a  new phone.  But which to choose.  I thought about Android but I have used them in the past and they are ok, very nice when it comes to customizable features but I don't like the fragmentation of updates for the OS.

To back track a little here in the story, I ran into an old friend the other day and she had a Nokia Lumia 900 (windows phone 7.)  I have talked about how nice the operating system looks and the phone is just stunning.  Well I got to play around with it for an extended amount of time and I really liked how Windows Phone operates.  It is a true, unique operating system.  I really liked it but the thought of the much smaller app store,  kind of made me think hard about that switch.

Here is a neat link that microsoft provides that will demo the operating system from your current phones web browser, check it out for yourself.  So when it comes to tech I really think things through before I make a purchase (OK, I admit sometimes with Apple products, I just buy, but they make it so hard to not do it.)  Anyway, I made a list of all the must have apps that I use daily on my iPhone.  When it came down to it, windows phone had about 85% of those apps and the rest could simply be replaced by apps that do the exact same thing.  I could get Spotify, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Netflix, and Evernote.  I thought that it sucked that a lot of the games I play had no Windows Phone app, but then I thought, Oh wait I have a New Ipad, I still have all of these apps and games.  To be honest, I mostly play all my games on the iPad because of the bigger screen anyways.

So I went to the AT&T store and looked at the phone and played with it for a while.  You just have to see one in person it just looks great.  After talking with the Sales guy, and I explained in our conversation that I have a blog and I could do a write up on my experiences with the Windows Phone, we came to an agreement that I could try the phone for 30 days (AT&T's normal exchange period) but not have to pay the $35 restocking fee if I did not like the phone.  So, considering I needed a phone desperately I bit the bullet and got this phone.  By the way it's only $99.

My thought process was if I didn't like it I could take it back in 30 days or also my Mother's contract, we share a family plan, would be up in August so I could use her upgrade for the iPhone 5 and give her this Windows Phone.  So I have a plan and now I am playing around with my brand new Windows Phone.  So far it has been extremely easy to setup, the one thing I do not like is the fact that you still have to plug it into a computer to update it's software, but that is for a different article.

I plan on giving a video review of what I think of the phone so far, sometime this week.  Then I will give an update next week to see how I am still liking it, and if I miss my iPhone and then again before the 30 day period is up.  So we will see if this Windows Phone is what it will take for me to leave my loyalty for iPhones.  This is my first non iPhone since the original iPhone was released in 2007.   Stay tuned for future updates on this experiment.

Verizon finally announced their shared Data plans...

The problem is... It sucks!  Yeah big surprise here these new Data Plans really won't save you money.   Turns out that instead of just charging you one lump sum for a certain amount of data, say 3 Gigs or so, you are still charged per device.  Check out the chart below.

As you can see from the chart it is still a per device option so say for a smartphone it is still $40 per phone.  now to ad the amount of shared data you want refer to step 2 which is $50.  So basically if you were a small family with two smartphones you would be paying $80 for your line access and an extra $50 for the 1 Gig of shared data.  So pay a total of $130.  Now this may be about $10 cheaper than most people are paying now with Verizon, but look a little closer, you are also losing 1 gig of data.  Yeah not a great deal if you are asking me. 

So what is Verizon's intent on this?  Well it is basically a redesign on how they do data plans and how much you would get charged for overages.  Theoretically, if you say barely ever use any of your data per month and your spouse always goes over their limit then instead of getting dinged $10 each time you will get to share that data and hopefully avoid that overage fee.  So yes there is one way of saving money but remember again you are getting 1 whole gig less data when you share so possibly its not going to save you much at all since you would probably need to bump yourselves to a higher data amount so then again there goes that money you saved.

Now AT&T says they were thinking of doing the shared data plans as well.  Let's see how they end up doing it as well.  This is would be a good time for them to come in and actually save people money without actually removing some of what they get.  But that is in a perfect world and just like Verizon, AT&T wants the money.