Verizon has been a good service for me, so here is some even better news. The company has increased the amount of text messages you can send/receive and isn’t charging extra for it. Their $15 plan, which offered 1,000 texts now gives you 1,500, while their $20 plan, which alloted you 2,500, now gives you 5,000.

Press Release

Verizon Wireless, the No. 2 U.S. cellphone carrier, passed on the chance to be the exclusive distributor of the iPhone almost two years ago, balking at Apple’s rich financial terms and other demands. Apparently Apple’s first choice for exclusive iPhone service was Verizon and not Cingular! The two companies couldn’t agree on a deal that worked for both companies. “We said no.” Said Jim Gerace, a VZW VP. “We have nothing bad to say about the Apple iPhone. We just couldn’t reach a deal that was mutually beneficial.” Talks began as far back as two years ago, but Apple’s demands were steep.

Apple wanted a percentage of monthly service fees, control over distribution that would limit iPhone sales to Apple and Verizon stores, and even some control over service and support for iPhone customers. “They would have been stepping in between us and our customers to the point where we would have almost had to take a back seat … on hardware and service support,” say Gerace.

Whether consumers — who would have presumably had a fair shot at an EV-DO iPhone with Verizon as a service provider — will win in the end is yet to be seen.

Source: Engadget

Everyone knows the success of the iPod. The external interface attracted a lot of people to purchase, and for good reason. The LG Chocolate looks iPod inspired. If your looking for an MP3 player that can make phone calls, look elsewhere. If you have a commute, and just need something to entertain you on the way this is the phone for you.

This phone is loud. Visually and audibly loud in every way you can imagine. Audibly, the phone makes you seem like your getting yelled at. You’ll find yourself turning the sound down on it a lot. To counterbalance that, you’d imagine there would be a speaker phone to play your MP3’s and to make calls. No, there is no speaker phone function. That seems odd to me, that it will ring MP3’s, but not have a speaker phone.

The Navi-key is very touchy, excuse the pun. Walking will cause you to occasionally activate the wrong option, which seems minor. If you buy a cellphone, you probably do walk and talk, walk and access your phone. You’ll find yourself using the number pad more, and they are small but much more useful than the Navi-pad.

The phone has Bluetooth headset capability, which is a bonus. However, you can’t transfer music via Bluetooth which can be a turn off. They advise you to purchase an SD card and load all your songs on it, then slip it into your phone. You’ll still have to format the card, and the best way to do that is to buy a song off of Vcast. Kind of defeats the purpose. The dead shocker is the battery life. For everything I described, you’d imagine it’d get poor battery time. It’s very above average for all the functioning. If you don’t use it to play songs, you will really only need to charge the phone once a week. You can also play a couple hours music before a recharge is needed. If you are a heavy call/text/music person, you’ll get about 2 to 3 days between charges.

This phone won’t blow anyone away, and the difficulty of loading songs was a turn off to me. For a novelty, it’s a decent phone because of the manageable price tag. The whole situation will remind you a lot of the RAZR. The fanfare is there, the colors are there, but for the novelty do you really want to be stuck with this phone for at least a year? I’d be inclined to say no.