Droid

Phone coverage in wyoming isn't that great with tmobile, but i had been using it with an iphone for quite a while and it worked okay, but the edge data connection was aggravatingly slow at times, and i needed the internet connection to set up google voice calls that i would route through a number that i had set in my fave five, effectively giving me free minutes.

When i heard about verizon coming out with an android handset i was exited. up until this point verizon only had a collection of crappy phones, and their network was extremely closed. The fact that they were offering an open source handset on their network meant they were changing their mentality towards openness.

I had always wanted to try using data exclusively for my communication, make calls via voip and IM instead of text. Verizon's network speed is more than fast enough to handle everything, i just wanted to make sure that they didn't cap data consumption as i had heard some networks did. I sent an email to verizon, and they said that the internet plan provided was indeed unlimited. Just to make sure i called them and confirmed this.

Tmobile canceled my contract with no termination fee, i sold my iphone to writer. Then i bought a droid on a one year contract, on the cheapest plan offered, and no texting plan. The price per month is almost the same as i was paying for tmobile, but i have significantly better coverage and its 3g as well.

I installed the google voice application for texting. the downside is the app is not instantaneous, there is some delay but hey, its free. Luckily i had signed up for a gizmo5 account before google bought them and stopped letting people sign up. google voice has built in support for gizmo5, and this allows you to get calls on any device that supports SIP protocol. With google voice all calls made are incoming so that means free unlimited calls from wherever you have an Internet connection. I tried a few different SIP applications before settling on sipdroid.

Calls with SIP over 3G work perfectly, there is very little noticeable lag and call quality is as good as making a normal call. I do have to leave the app running all the time and that takes away from battery life some but the battery life is quite good. I hope that verizon offers an internet only plan in the future, as it would be ideal for my situation.

As for the phone itself, i am extremely happy with it. Coming from an iphone to something that offers so much freedom is quite a liberating feeling. There are plenty of apps for doing about anything you would want to, and this phone does about everything. the keyboard takes a bit getting used to but i am starting to prefer it over the on screen one.The only thing thats bugged me is that though the phone hardware supports multitouch, for some reason google didnt build it into any of the native apps. There are third party apps that have multitouch support but i will really miss multitouch for the native apps.

If you are getting a smartphone in the future, go for android.