The beginning...

My 2 and a half year old Motoralla Crazer has gone through alot - throwing, falling...  It had a good life and until yesterday almost everything worked. My Crazer screen decided to stop showing images and being a good opportunist, I thought it would be a good time to upgrade.

This is where my dilemma begins. I cancelled with Koodo to go with a smart phone provider, until I realized how much bullshit new phone users have to go through. They want me to pay $35 to purchase from some store and then I'm going to be billed another $35 for start-up costs. Naturally, I haggle. But i'm afraid the store workers don't really have much flexibility.

After everything is said and done the best deal i'm going to get is a $79.99 HTC Desire with a $50 rebate on a 3 year plan  + the $70 start-up fees + the $100 extended warranty. I go there expecting to walk out happy with a new phone, but I end up getting pissed off at the amount of bullshit I have to go through. To top it off, if I declined to get the warranty I would be paying $35 extra in shipping fees if it broke of natural causes in the first year. Then batteries cost more than what I would be paying for the phone, no battery is going to stay strong for 3 years so i'll probably be needing 2 batteries at about 100 bucks a pop.

We have one of the highest prices for cell-phone plans in world. I feel like the lack of competition in the Canadian market is allowing 4 or 5 carriers to come to a business agreement and reducing the kind of innovation or competitive pricing that is needed in the telecommunications market.

This is when I started thinking. What will life be like for one month without a mobile phone. People have thrived for Millennia without them, so why can't I. Yes, we are a connected world, even the homeless guy who hangs outside superstore carries a cell-phone. Mind you he's probably cooler than me.

Are we lazier in the sense that we're moving away from real conversations to texting and social media?
Are people flakier because cell-phones have made it more convenient to cancel an engagement?
For the amount of talking we do, what are we losing out on in quality of conversation?
One thing that has always bugged me is people who answer text-messages or cell-phones in the middle of conversation. Something I admit i'm guilt of myself.

What do you think? What are we gaining with cell-phones? What are we losing?

I'm definitely pro-cellphone and this will be a difficult challenge for me, but I'm interested in learning how well I can adapt. While trying to decide which cell-phone carrier and plan to go with a month from now.