V551

So a few days ago I bought a replacement cellphone at a Cingular store. See a while back Jen lost her Siemens s55 phone (bluetooth, IR, color screen…) and she got stuck with brandon’s hand-me-down non color, non feature phone for a bit. The things trashed, no joke. Its missing the front panel (which covers the display) and it has the tendency to have a loose batt cover. All in all a crappy replacement for a kick ass phone she had before. One other huge annoyance is that the phone is sooo oldschool that it doesnt allow more than 1 # per person. So you have to have an entry for EVERY damn phone number you have for EVERY damn person. Uhhhggg!

So, Jen gave me approval (hehe) to buy myself a new phone (I’m a feature whore I know..) and she got my hand-me-down. So I look online and the phone i want was pretty damn expensive, I did some more shopping and found a weird cingular store that is privately owned so they are just under the Cingular umbrella. I went in and talked to the guy, ends up that most of these stores get people that use the phones for a day or so, and either cant use them (grandma) dont like them (rich guys) or just hate the way they work (soccer moms). Well, they turn around and sell these phones to the consumer (me) for a cheaper price. I ended up finding the phone I wanted at a local store for like $50 off the retail. Not bad.. it beats ebay too! (ebay bastards are charging like $25 bucks on shipping, I checked it myself using our scales at my warehouse and, ‘well lookie here’ less than $8 to ship the bastard.)

Anywho, I ended up getting a V551 phone, was used for 1 day by some person that didnt like it for whatever reason. IMHO the phone is brand new, didnt even have any more than 10 mins of talk time in its life.

So hows the phone? Pretty kickass. it has all the standard features, has an awesome display and plays mp3 ringtones. Also has a camera that does both picture taking and video with audio. The ONLY drawback I see so far is it only has 5 megs of end user memory. The typical image size it takes is right around 100-150k, not too bad really. As for video, i dunno, I do know it take some weird propriatary video format. So, If you compress your jpegs down small for picture caller ID and what not then 5mb is pretty decent, not awesome but decent. And having bluetooth lets you pull down those images with no problems.

As for phone insurance.. man oh man… its totally worth it. BUY IT! I mean really, make sure you have it, it will cost you hundreds in replacement costs.