I ordered Motorola E815 and Verizon Wireless new service plan from Amazon yesterday, after doing some research on the web. My contract with T-mobile expired recently, and I was not impressed by their service: the biggest problem is their limited coverage area. Many times when I am off the highways, I no longer have the signal. The other day when I was in MSP airport, in some places it had signal, in other places it didn’t. And their customer service is not consistent either. I heard mixed messages from time to time.

I checked out the cell phones and plans from Amazon. Cingular and Sprint both require 2 years contract, which I don’t like. I had some difficulty to choose the phone between E815 and LG VX8100. Sometimes choice is not necessary a good thing. I chose the Motorola because it’s slightly cheaper and it comes with bluebooth headset.

This evening (Feb. 21) I drove by the Verizon store and decided to take a look at the real thing. It seems the LG phone is much sexier than the Motorola E815. Now I can only hope the E815 has better substance. How can I forget the store which I drive by everyday? I know I am a little out of mind these days.

Note: I found the cell phone buying guide from eBay to be helpful.

Note on Feb 22: on second thought, I changed my order from Motorola E815 ($20 money back with mail-in rebates) to SamSung A850 ($100 money back with mail-in rebates). People in China will think it’s crazy we can make money here just buying cell phone. But it’s just a way the carriers here used to entice new customers. The monthly rate of the plans is not cheap. The one-year plan I am going to have is $39.99 per month before tax. That’s $480 for one year. Thinking I may not be in St. Louis for several months in the coming year, I want to cut the phone bill a bit. Besides that, I don’t think the extra feature offered by E815 such as 1.3M camera, video capture and MP3 player will be very useful for me. I am just a simple guy who use phone for talk and text messaging.