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http://solutions.vzwshop.com/shareeverything/

I am a current Verizon Wireless customer, do I have to change my plan to a Share Everything Plan?
While you're not required to change to a Share Everything Plan you may want to check out the benefits of new plans. If you decide to change to a Share Everything Plan, you can do so without a fee or having to extend your contract term. To find out which plan may work for you visit www.verizonwireless.com/shareeverythingcalculator

Well actually there IS a cheaper plan, but only if you only have a feature phone, see page 2 of:
http://solutions.vzwshop.com/shareeverything/pdf/verizon_share_everything_plan_details.pdf

They are not getting rid of the other plans. Here is Verizon's site for the new plans, and it clearly states that the existing tiered plans aren't going away; just the unlimited plans.

This plan is for people who want unlimited voice, text and/or want to share a data plan over many devices. Not for anyone else. Definitely not for me. As someone who pays $10-15 a month for basic prepaid service, I think it is ridiculously expensive, and a good reminder of why I don't intend to get a data plan any time soon.

Wow. I knew there was a lot of buzz about the new Blackberry , but I didn't think it'd be enough to move all of AT&T's Midwest customers to Verizon. :-)

Would that not be a chocolate?

3G is amazing on Cingular. I get 1Mb/sec download speeds. That is TRUE 100/KB (kilobytes not kilobits) per second. I tether my phone to my laptop and have broadband anywhere I go. I play MMORPGs, surf the net, and do everything I do on my home broadband connection except download very large files/videos.

I enjoy these speeds in New York City, Atlanta, and the suburbs of Hartford, CT. I'm not sure why everyone is saying it is 'so limited'. Additionally, 3G HSDPA is getting ready to zip up to 3.6Mbps in the near future.

I am absolutely devastated that the iPhone will not have 3G. I really may not be able to purchase at launch a product I was thoroughly excited about at announcement. I feel this is an inexcusable decision on Apple's part and hope we will be pleasantly surprised in June. It's painful to think that Cingular (I refuse to call it AT&T) has 5 handsets under $50 after rebate and one for $9.99 A.R. that all have 3G yet this flagship Apple product will not. Quite frustrating.

The price comment also continues to baffle me. My Treo 650 was $350 after huge discounts and mail in rebates from buy.com. The current 2-Year contract price on the Treo 750 is $499. PDA Smartphones/Pocket PCs have always hovered around $500, folks. If you are lucky you can string some rebates to get them around $300-400. And those phones have NEVER had 8GB of storage! Try 256MB or far less.

As a final comment to the original Cingular naysayer: I would never use Verizon. They terminate your service without warning if you go over 5GB/month of data (http://solutions.vzwshop.com/bba/pricing.htm) and cripple their phones' native functions, requiring you to use proprietary Verizon software. (That software often allows them to nickel-and-dime you)... Here's to Cingular iPhone 3G!

If Nokia, who last I checked happens to sell a lot of phones, puts their music store/player software on a phone, and takes advantage of EDGE/UTMS networks to let people download music on the fly... hell, that's a lot more compelling than running home, buying something from the PC, syncing it over to the ipod, and then running off.

Yeah, you're about a year too late, because Verizon Wireless already offers this. And has for a while. And yet, somehow, that pesky iTunes just keeps right on going, doesn't it?

It's not that people (yourself notwithstanding) don't know about this, either - I can't watch 5 minutes worth of TV without seeing an ad for V-Cast. The big thing going right now is the "part mp3-player, part phone" Chocolate ads.

The problem is that this doesn't work. You might find the idea of downloading music through the air on the fly compelling until you actually try it. What if you already own a CD and decide one day you want to listen to a particular song from it? Well, too bad, because your phone doesn't have enough memory to store it along with the 150 other songs you wanted to hear that day. So now you have to navigate through a horrible WAP interface to find it, then spend $2 to download it, then wait 2 minutes while it does. Then you've got a song on your phone in a proprietary format that you can't play in any other player. And you've gotta erase it off the phone if you want to hear something else.

The alternative is you use an iTunes-like PC application that does basically the same thing but doesn't work as well. But then you're right back where you started, and you're still using an inferior, underpowered music player on the hardware end.

The reason why iTunes/iPod works is that it's once and you're done. Your entire music collection with you all the time. How is the method I just described above an improvement on that? So you've gotta be at home to buy a new album - first of all, so what? Have you actually been in situations where you just HAD to have a new album THAT MINUTE, no matter what you're doing outside? (Not that it ever would actually work that way anywway.) And second of all, that's not what most iTunes users do - they rip CD's. (I can't remember where I saw the statistics on this, but some unbelievably high percentage of iTunes users have never bought a song off the iTunes music store. They acquire their music elsewhere. I'm one of those people.)

The bottom line is you need an actual *library* to store your music. That's iTunes' primary function, and it's the reason why the phone companies completely miss the point. iTunes is an enabler for the iPod, and the iPod either a full or partial mirror of your iTunes library; that's it.

There may come a day when your library *is* your iPod, but today's phones aren't even close to having the power to be able to do that and they likely never will. You're talking about having a phone that's able to rip digitally from CD, that's able to store thousands or even tens of thousands of songs, that has a simple music-playing interface and that offers all the features we've come to expect from a phone as well, including battery life of more than a week on standby or 6-7 hours of talk. It's just never going to happen. (You can argue that instead, the phone could store all your music on the network and stream it, but there are major problems with that strategy too that nobody even seems willing to tackle, much less able to.)

Verizon Wireless released a full featured version in March. http://estore.vzwshop.com/overview/customapplicati ons/fieldforcemanager/

It would be great to see TI calculators grow up into full featured palmtops.

With what we are seeing what can be done on Cell phones and laptops,
TI is overdue for boosting the abilities in it's products.

When I first saw the Samsung i730
I thought that T.I. could be doing products like that.
A full color screen, retractable QWERTY keyboard, ability to do calculations, email, music, and video.

Every iPod and Palm device in the world could have been a T.I. product!

If only Texas Instruments would wake up from behind the wheel and start driving their company into new market spaces.

From everything I know, this is COMPLETELY WRONG. Verizon makes a big point out of this in this release and this page from their store.