I’m going to be getting a new phone in the early part of December since my contract is up, and since Michelle just shopped for one herself, it got me to thinking about what I want to get.

Michelle found a couple great 3rd-party sites that more or less give phones away for nothing. The only trade-off seems to be that you have to pay activation. I can live with that.

So that really opens up your options, y’know? I was thinking about one of these new-fangled “music player” phones, cuz I admit that I like to listen to the tunes on my walk to work, but don’t really see that I need an iPod for a couple reasons:
– Apple and iTunes can eat my ass
– If I’m going to drop that sort of coin on a portable electronic device, I want more comprehensive control over what sort of data I put on it (i.e., F proprietary file formats)
– I think iTunes sucks
– My walk is only 12 minutes one way

So I really don’t *need* to have an iPod, and those of you that do, hey—enjoy the crap out of ’em, really. I just… I don’t need it. So if I could get a phone with a music player for zero monies, then everybody wins.

Rumor has it that the Motorola SLVR (which is essentially a shitty iTunes player built into a phone) is coming to Verizon in the very near future. I’ve been reading review for it online and they mostly suck. It sounds like Motorola is great at aesthetic design, and totally head-up-ass with features/functionality. So I read like three reviews and decided I will not be getting this phone.

I’m pretty well sold on the same phone that Michelle is getting, an LG VX8300, but I guess the flash card that it takes (MicroSD, not MiniSD) is pretty expensive. Not sure why that is… But it does make me want to keep looking for other options.

Lost in this whole conversation with myself is the fact that I still have a very serviceable PDA that I purchased a couple years back from Dell, and I found a fantastic music player for Windows Mobile that essentially turns this device into an iPod with less memory (which, it’s been established, I barely need anyway).

When all this is said and done, I guess I come back to “just get a phone that’s a phone leave it at that.”

Sometimes I think I’m shopping and trying to think of tweaks for things just for the sake of tweaking. I should be mindful of the mantra on a site I recently unearthed (yes, looking for some computing solution): “Don’t live to geek; geek to live.”

In loosely-related geek news, IE7 was officially released late last night. Way to go, Microsoft. You just caught up to where Firefox was 18 months ago.