Yannblog

Okay, not really, but here’s what I’ve got running on my dual-screened system:

3x Internet Explorer, 5 tabs open total across two monitors
Microsoft Word 2007
Microsoft Excel 2007
Microsoft Outlook 2007 (has open a journal entry that I use as a time clock for work)
Notepad (for quick notes)
WIndows Media Player (miniplayer mode)
AIM & Windows Live Messenger (tray mode)

So, total, I have seven windows open, eight programs, eight instances of various programs plus two running in the background, all on a machine that I bought for $700 a year ago (though I upgraded the hard drive recently…same with the operating system). 🙂

Well, I’ll start with the most recent things and work my way backward, ending on Friday, the 22nd of June…

On July 1st (when I’m writing this) we got up, ate breakfast at a really nice Wingate hotel that seemed to have just been opened (all the TVs were big-screen flat panel HDTVs) and started driving. Which we did for most of the day. We stopped at the gift shop for the world’s largest pecan grove (in New Mexico, no less!) and went to Subway at Wal-Mart for lunch in a town whose name starts with a D but I forget exactly what the full name is. I bought another cell phone (see my Go4Prepaid blog post…the camera phone was a mere $40!) and a cheap ($30) inverter for the car while I was there, the latter being for charging my and my brother’s laptops, plus whatever other phone chargers and such I have that don’t have (at least for me) a DC equivalent.

There was a LOT of driving time today. I whiled away the hours mainly by watching my brother play (on his laptop) or playing (on mine) either Motocross Madness, Mario Kart 64 or Super Smash Brothers (the latter two with an N64 emulator). But about two hours of my time was diverted to watching the first two episodes of the first season of 24…I didn’t have quite enough hotel time to finish downloading the third episode and all the rest of the season was only about 70% done. I gotta say, so far the show is interesting enough to put as my lone favorite typical TV show )need to update that). Can’t wait to finish watching the season…at least thusfar.

The day was wound up somewhat when our heavily loaded van registered high engine temperatures after chugging up scrubby, lonely mountain byways toward Gila National Forest’s actual forested area. We turned around and safely coasted down the hill, aided by our van’s AutoStick feature…probably the only thing my dad will miss when the family upgrades in eventuality to a Japanese-made car (then again they might have it too). As we came down the hill we spotted a forest fire, caused by lightning from recent storms…we weren’t the first ones to see it and it was a ways away so there was no need to report it. We ended up watching…at an unprecedented-ly close distance…a very good fireworks display put on my the local community…I have some nice pictures and an okay movie, thanks to my new camera’s Fireworks mode. One of the pictures is now my desktop photo, changed thereto when I hooked my laptop up to true AC power at the little cabin where I’m typing this post. No internet here of any sort…dialup is probably long distance no matter what and there’s no Ethernet or WiFi, hence this post not being in realtime. But at least the room is as good as an average hotel room, plus kitchen, sans freezing-cold AC.

Well, got to turn in now. More on my former adventures later…

Okay, not like last post but I decided to just get various stuff with my graduation money rather than saving it for college, as I already have earned enough for my first year…

1. Canon PowerShot a710 IS digital camera – $237 at Profeel
2. Transcend 2GB SD card (for camera, palm, camcorder, PC, etc.) – $15.99 at ClubIT
3. Duracell 4x 2650 mAh rechargeable AAs (for camera, 2 backup sets!) – $7.25 on eBay
4. Lenmar Mach3 Lightning (I think) 8-minute charger (for camera) – $29.99 at Vann’s
5. Adobe Photoshop Elements 5 OEM – $33.90 on eBay
6. Adobe Premiere Elements 3 Retail – $50 on eBay
7. Canon Elura 100 refurbished camcorder with bag (cheaper with bag) – $338.94 on eBay
8. 3-in-1 FireWire cable – $7.99 on MeritLine
9. 6x Maxell 60-minute MiniDV tapes – $11.96 on eBay
10. $100 toward Boy Scout summer camp fee

For a total of $833.02. This may seem like a lot of money (it is!) but it’s really nice to know that just the cash presents I got for graduation are going to cover this, and (likely) then some. Now to get some thank you notes written…:)

Well, this is my first blog entry in a loooong time. My aim is to on these entries tell where I am now, and where I’ve been the day I’m writing on, what I’ve done, plus some deep thought and whatever else I want to talk about. So for you folks at home, behold, my life.

Right now I’m at what was my school…until I graduated about 195 hours ago. I’m here because my mom is taking her job too seriously…hopefully she’ll make up for that later on this summer. Maybe I’ll talk about that later. But anyway I’m here occupying myself, as I’ve run out of things to do (write thank you notes…at home…finish biology…at home…finish merit badge work…at home…watch a movie…not downloaded yet). I have internet access, on a different computer (wireless network has been password-protected since the second day of school ’06-’07 and I don’t feel like cracking it or suchlike), but I’ve already checked all the requisite sites there. I suppose I could do so again, but I really don’t feel like that’s as productive as wha tI’m doing now…writing this while that computer is BitTorrenting the first episode of the first season of 24. I’ve already listened to the Daily Giz Wiz podcase (first in awhile) and hope I won’t have enough time for another while I’m here…so I write…

I’m here also because I was spicked up from the house of the school’s principal and her husband, a really cool guy who taught a few different classes last year and was our “connected” (friend-wise) tour guide on the trip to D.C. that I’m amazed ended less than two weeks ago…more like a week and a half. I was there with the other three seniors (yep, a graduating class of four)…well, we were seniors until we graduated…having an absolutely great dinner of steak, corn, salad (who knew spinach could be so amazingly tasty…balsamic vinegar, feta cheese and cranberries obviously do the trick), sourdough bread and cobbler with ice cream. But of course the conversation was better than the food…it’s amazing when you have school faculty that treat you as friends…I hope I won’t have to miss that at Mines but I’m 99% sure I will. We talked about summer activities, a little about the past year…just relatively random things but everything interesting.

We (former seniors) were given a really amazing gift…beside the dinner…a keychain ornamented with a gold-plated (thicker than gold plate actually) ornament with our names, school class year, and an encouraging message that started with “Strong in grace” for all of us on the other side of the ornament that reminded me at first slightly of a dog tag though it didn’t really bear the slightest resemblance thereof. The messages had been the themes of each of our graduation benedictions, from baccalaureate chapel to graduation night. Thankfully, mine was abbreviated: Pursue people first (I’m glad there wasn’t space\was the consideration to respectively include and exclude “ahead of technology”…embarrasses me perhaps rightly). Good message, great gift. Too bad I don’t have any keys to hang on the keyring yet, and probably won’t have for awhile.

We four had a gift to give the school\them, too, helped by a local design firm whose “main man” was our art teacher: a framed and matted bunch of four photos in black and white, three of which were taken with my camera on the trip to Washington D.C., one of which taken on a Polaroid Land camera, three of which weren’t taken by me. The photos were of we four graduates…something to remember us by and a gift back to the school…I’m really thankful for the people at the design firm who helped us put it together, or rather put it together based on our rough ideas.

Start of extreme nerdiness

Going back a little, I had actually gotten to the dinner an hour early, to finish setting up a school laptop that had needed to be reformatted. Just basic stuff, like reinstalling drivers and whatnot. I had reformatted the laptop after a weird shutdown had corrupted the main hard drive, but not until I had safely gotten all the data off the drive by using a Puppy Linux live CD. The Windows XP CD was BitTorrented (I was surprised at the speed of the download when I did it) but the Dell serial number for Windows worked fine with it, as it was the same version of Windows as had been on the laptop. But I still had to install drivers for various laptop parts that didn’t come with the XP CD (but of course did come preinstalled with the laptop originally). A really annoying thing is that Dell really doesn’t provide a true recovery system for their new computers unless you specifically order a $10+ CD addon. You just get a recovery partition on the hard drive…a blank one…and a trial version of Norton Ghost. Ah well, all’s well that ends well and I actually used that backup partition (before upgrading my laptop’s hard drive) to dual boot a beta (RC2) of Windows Vista with the preinstalled Windows XP.

End of extreme nerdiness

While I was working on the computer the principal’s husband showed me the lovely 24-inch wall-mounted LCD he had hooked to his desktop computer (niiiice…beats my 19” panel on my desk but that’s fine with me…no space for a bigger panel where I sit anyway), as well as his new Vonage phone line…I had actually recommended Vonage to him a few months ago. He’s also now on DSL (was on dialup…glad he upgraded) with a D-Link router sitting near at hand. Geesh…the connection was a little less than four times as fast as my glorified WiFi connection at home (I live out of range of cable\DSL), at least on the download…uploads were maybe two and a half to three times as fast. Not as fast as they should have been, probably due to not a big enough data pipe coming into town for that ISP, but still nice and fast.

Sorry if this last part seems brief in comparison with the above but I’m running low on battery and don’t have my charger with me…

Before I went over to the people’s house I was generally sitting around my house doing…not much. Just obsessively checking a few different things online, plus reading up on savings accounts. Annoying that I can’t open one linked to my checking account because it’s in my name only and I’m a minor (16 to be exact). Before that I played a game of Age Of Empires II: The Conquerors against my 11-year-old brother and his friend…beat them relatively quickly of course but I think they had a little fun. Before they had come over I was motivated to actually do stuff…chores mostly, but also a cell phone review, the Motorola w370 from Tracfone…by pumping out the volume on U2’s 18 Singles deluxe edition (yay Yahoo Music Unlimited To Go!). But I still need to be more productive…sigh…

Hmm…that’s about it for now. My mom says she’s about ready to leave school\work and my laptop battery is at 7% and dropping. So hope you enjoyed reading this, my first blog post in…hmmm…several months and the first of this type of blog post in even longer…hopefully I’ll do this again sometime…until then, cya.

Yann

Okay, I’m a Mac user. And a PC user. I like both platforms equally. So I feel I have the right to criticize either platform if I want to. You know, like how my laptop, with a full gigabyte of memory, can’t be used for anthing while it’s importing DV video and encoding it into WMV. Guess I need something more powerful. But anyway, I’ll see if I can provide an answer to all of Apple’s reasons to get a Mac, tit for tat. Not going to even bring into the equation that you can get something that’s as powerful as a Macbook Pro for a mere $1400 from Dell. No wait…the Dell is more powerful. Hmph. Anyway…

1. It Just Works
True, if you have a fairly limited subset of the hardware available out there. Don’t try hooking up your Mocrosoft LifeCam to your Mac Mini…the Mac will act like it isn’t even there. Or try hooking up an inexpensive laser printer, or a Canon copier, or a relatively new HP photo printer over a network (the other end of the connection is a Windows computer, let’s say). Nothing. So it just works…if you have the right hardware, or if you install Windows on it.

2. You can make amazing stuff
Um…Windows users don’t have to buy a new version of MicroLife for $79 every time it comes out, only to find that some features have been dumbed down or require zillions of horsepower to do well. I mean, skimming is nice but I use iMovie HD because I want more control over my footage. Or Windows Movie Maker. iPhoto? Try Windows or Windows Live Photo Gallery, or Google’s Picasa2. iTunes is available on Windows, but I like Windows Media Player better. iWeb? Meet the web…WordPress looks better and doesn’t need to sit on your computer. I’m forgetting something I’m sure…besides GarageBand, which I’ll talk about later…help me someone…

3. Everything-ready
Yes, you can use your Bluetooth headphones with your Mac. You can use some Bluetooth phones with your Mac even. Oh, and you can use a few printers and scanners…though a lot of ’em you can’t. Windows Mobile devices of course are harder to work with. Disk drives? Of course. Keyboards and mice? Yep. Can you use them on Windows too? Sure. Might require some software, but the software gives you extra features that Macs just don’t get. Or that software allows the device to work in the first place…I don’t like hunting for dirvers either, but lately I haven’t had to and finding drivers is better than not finding them.

4. 114,000 viruses? Not on a Mac.
Just wait. Once you get enough market share, hackers will start writing for the Mac. Look what happened to the iPhone. There is Mac antivirus out there, but most people don’t need it…yet. Then again, unless you don’t know what you’re doing you don’t need antivirus on Windows either. Not kidding.

5. Still the most advanced OS
The features touted as “more advanced” are available in Windows Vista, or via Google Desktop (yep, just one app) in XP. Next, please?

6. The latest Intel chips
Last time I checked, your consumer-line products tended to be a tad behind in tech, only catching up a few months after the tech is released. Pro products tend to be a few weeks ahead of the curve, true, but in the end PC gets the same technol0gy (minus EFI) as Mac, at a lower price point. Oh, and Windows isn’t optimized for a particular processor…it’s optimized for ANY x86 processor. Meaning it will run well on any computer you throw at it, depending on specs (Vista or XP), not be confined to a particular tiny subset of hardware like the Mac is. Last time I checked, there were about two dozen times as many PC makers that are major as Mac makers, because the Mac just doesn’t support a decent subset of internal hardware. That, and Stevie Jobs wants to keep a close vest. By the way, Leopard is pretty much the resource-hungry best that Windows Vista is, except Windows Vista generally has more whiz-bang visual effects than Mac OS…and the translucently disgusting menus don’t count.

7. No hunting for drivers.
Right. You don’t need to search; you either have them or you don’t. If you don’t, you’re…hmm…screwed. Yeah, that sounds about right.

8. Design that turns heads.
Well, that’s comparing Apple to PC makers, who don’t pay their design teams, or don’t have them, or something. But take another look…HP and Dell are getting better-looking all the time. Or you can grab an Acer Ferarri laptop…how cool is that? Don’t get me wrong, I am happy with how my iMac is designed, but PC makers are catching up…and they give you design choices, not a select-from-thrse-six-designs-across-our-platform mentality. You’d think that Apple was pursuing an economy of scale, which went out awhile back for high-end stuff like computers.

9. Instant video chats.
First off, you need to get an account to work with the chat program. At which point the PC has caught up to you; WIndows Live Messenger does the same thing, perhaps better over low-bandwidth connections (in my experience) with a simple download…MS could not include it due to antitrust stuff last I heard. So why can Apple bundle all the good stuff? Geez.

10. More fun with photos.
One word: Picasa2. Another few words: MS Photo Gallery. Now stop bragging and start working on development again. People aren’t going to switch because of iPhoto anymore unless they’re ignorant, and nobody likes to be ignorant, right?

Oh, and quick interjection here: my parents use Windows…on a Mac mini. So there.

11. Hollywood style movies.
Excuse me while I laugh my head off on this one. We’re talking iMovie ’08 here? Gimme a break. Also, if you haven’t noticed, Windows Vista Home Premium (the most common iteration of Vista) also has a very passable suite of video editing tools. They’re called Windows Movie Maker and Windows DVD Maker, if memory serves me…and they don’t let you overdo your menus, then ask you to randomly put less motion in them. Geez. Oh and now I remember: iDVD was the iLife app I forgot. So what?

12. One-click websites
Actually, this is false advertising. No website can be made in a click 😉 Especially when it requires paying for .Mac to get that site up, or your webhost, or whoever. Okay, iWeb is good software, but KompoZer is available for Windows, and doesn’t come as part of a $79 suite. In fact, it doesn’t cost a penny. Yep, iWeb seems to be for people who want to whip up something quickly, but you can do that with WordPress last time I checked. No reason to switch.

13. Amazing podcasts.
Sorry, but everyone and their dog still doesn’t podcast. But for those who do this is a valid point. Then again, I still haven’t figured out how to work GarageBank. Maybe I’m dense, but…oh and you can use the free Audacity on the Windows side for this sorta thing.

14. Rock star tunemaking
Whatever. Tout GarageBand twice, willya? Still don’t know how to use it for whatever reason. Can some Machead help me?

15. Awesome out of the box.
Agreed. Most big box manufacturers love to box their computers with extra software. The Mac, or any PC that you install Windows on yourself, has none of it. Also, Dell now has the Vostro line of computers. Sure, they’re just black boxes, but there’s no extra software…and without the extra software, Windows runs nicely. Hmm…if PC makers actually got the extra software right then PCs would, too, be just as awesome.

Vista Reasons

1. No upgrade nightmares.
Hey, at least you can upgrade Vista in your sleep ;). Okay, I’m kidding, but my nearly-new iMac (bought AFTER Leopard came out) had to have Leopard installed twice. What an ordeal. If that ain’t a nightmare, or at least part of one, then ask anyone else who has tried to upgrade to Leopard and had problems, how they feel. Probably as Mac-headed as ever. But you’ll be able to find them.

2. You can even run Windows
Yep, thanks for finally seeing the light Apple, and making your computers 5x faster in the process. My parents are “even running Windows” right now. I “even run Windows” and wouldn’t have bought a Mac if I couldn’t have. Now stop treating us like illegitimates.

3. It’s simpler
Ooookay, if you’ve never used a computer before. But if you’ve used Windows, it’s like dude, totally radical. Oh, so you’re talking about versions? Well, if you’re a business guy you don’t want to have to pay for frilly home features, right? And if you’re a home user you don’t need business features. But if you’re a power user you want everything. Easy enough; it’s kind of like buying Microsoft Office…you pay for the features you need. Novel concept.

4. You don’t have to buy new stuff
Weeeelllll, you might need to once 10.6 comes out. If you bought a computer in ’05 before Intel machines came out, sounds like you’re out of luck when the next upgrade rolls around. Hey, at least you can upgrade a late 1999 computer to work very well with Windows XP, or run Vista on a computer from 2003 with maybe $20 worth of extra RAM. All right, if you want Aero you need a beefier system, but seriously Apple, you guys scale down graphics too when the computer isnt powerful enough…and I noticed a few hiccups running 10.5 on a current-generation Mac Mini that someone would end up paying around $800 for, including keyboard, monitor and mouse. Don’t throw stones in a glass house, especially when you can’t reinforce the glass!

5. Know iTunes? You know the Mac.
More like, you know iTunes. iTunes for Mac works differently (a bit) than iTunes for Windows, and iTunes for Mac in turn works differently (a bit) than any other Mac OS program. I mean come on, when the “zoom: button does who-knows-what, your Windows key is nw the functional equivalent of Ctrl on the PC…yeagh. Mac ain’t PC.

6. Macs run Microsoft Office.
Right, but since the release of Intel, Office has run slow because it’s designed for the older PowerPC platform. Thankfully for Mac users, the new Office ’08 has remedied the problem, but Office ’07 on Vista delivers a can of whoop-you-know-what in terms of power-of-use (there is a learning curve to the new UI so not quite ease of use) compared to ’08 for Mac. Office was meant to run on PC. So y’all Mac users just sit back with your little iWork and create TPS reports…no wait, iWork can’t do that. Scratch that…

7. You can take it with you.
Are we talking Back to My Mac? Nope, because it doesn’t work. Are we talking ultraportables? Not yet…all of Apple’s laptops are rather heavy and though they’re thin for regular laptops, they haven’t made the step toward ultimate portability…yet. Oh, so we’re talking file formats. Welcome to the revolution, Apple. Everyone else has been compatible for years…Linux, Windows, Palm OS, Windows Mobile, Symbian. Geez.

So I love my Mac. But most of Apple’s claims are empty. We just need to get the PC makers to stop shipping over-bloated, under-powered Vista machines and all of this Apple marketing is for naught, and Apple will have to find something legitimate to crow about. Which they have. It’s just not the above.

Well, I’ve been wanting to do this for awhile, and now I’ve finally done it: disregard same-color and refurbished and limited-edition versions of the same phone, and count up which carrier has the best selection of cell phones…

The top honor looks to go to Verizon at the moment. At the moment meaning that all carriers change their offerings on phones very quickly so a small lead might become a small defecit quickly. But anyhow, with a whopping 26 models of phone to pick from on the regular side, 8 smartphone models, 4 blackberries and 8 aircards, for 40 phone\smartphone\blackberry models total (counting the two push-to-talk enabled phones not mentioned above), VZW is the leader in choice…for the moment. Their prepaid section, however, is by no means first, with just six phones to choose from.

Second place looks to be a tie between AT&T and Sprint. AT&T actually may have more phones, and thus be first, but I was so confused by their bunches of multi-colored and refurbished models scattered throughout the phone buying page that I may have missed one or two. Anyhow, AT&T looks to have 24 regular phone models for sale, eight smartphones, five Blackberries and four aircards, for thirty-seven total models phone-wise. Pretty good, considering AT&T’s phone selection seems to be cheaper than VZW’s, especially in the area of smartphones. You can get a Treo 680 for $70 refurbished, or a Samsung Blackjack for just $30. The prepaid area is quite huge as well…again I may have missed a few models, or maybe overcounted, but the number looks to be 20 there. Oh, and a very large portion of AT&T’s phones are 3G-enabled. The same can’t be said of Verizon and Sprint’s offerings, though the proportion of 3G phones isn’t too bad on their respective services, and unlike AT&T’s network, the CDMA 3G network works in a LOT of places and is darn fast 🙂

So, on to Sprint. At first glance, they have a paltry 12 “regular” phones. But to that you have to add 10 Nextel iDEN phones, two of which are smart (one Blackberry, one Windows Mobile device that also has GSM capability for overseas). And three hybrid CDMA\iDEN handsets that give you both walkie-talkie and all the cool CDMA features in one handset. Add eight CDMA smartphones and 4 CDMA Blackberries to the mix…and a choice between seven aircards if you need ’em…and you get a magnificent 37 models to choose from. Geesh, the choices…do I want to pay an arm and a leg for the world’s highest-tech, fastest-data, instant-communications walkie talkie phone (the Motorola ic902) or do I want a freebie Samsung cameraphone? How about an HTC PDA? Would you like that with or without a keyboard? Okay, that’ll be right out to you…oh and if you need to go overseas Sprint will rent you a GSM phone or three. Or use your fancy new Blackberry 8830. But all major CDMA carriers have that ‘un.

But wait…there’s more…Sprint doesn’t have its own branded prepaid service, but it does have Virgin Mobile, with 11 phones, and Boost Mobile, with 2. Plus, if you want, 2 more from Boost Unlimited, for a magnificent total of 15!

Last among the carriers, due to a near-complete lack of smartphones as of yet (I suppose because their 3G network ain’t there quite yet and 2.75G smartphones are sooo out of style…no wait the iPhone is 2.75G), is T-Mobile. But hey, you could actually buy one of their phones without a contract and your wallet would live to tell the tale. I think AT&T and Alltel are also okay at that sorta thing. But back to T-Mobile. They have a decent 22 phones of the regular sort on tap, plus their three Sidekick devices…which you could call “smartphones” if you wanted I suppose. They have four Blackberries (e-mail is fine with non-3G connectivity…heck, that’s why you even have a Blackberry or two on iDEN) and an abysmal (in my opinion…oh and now I remember…T-Mobile doesn’t sell Treos and that’s why there is a lack of smartphones…maybe) three smartphones available. That’s just 32 phones…and if you want an aircard (don’t know why…internet speed on T-Mobile is maybe twice dialup, probably worse) your choice is simple…there’s only one. The prepaid side of things is simply pathetic…just four phones available. Then again, their FlexPlan converts any plan, if you buy the phone without the discount, into a prepaid plan, and you can use whatever phone you want with whatever feature you want that way. Or put a phone, at full price, onto T-Mobile To Go. So you could say they have the best prepaid phone selection of anyone.

Now to the last carrier…nah I’ll put in one more below this one as far as mainstream carriers go. Anyway, Alltel is significantly lower than the above carriers in postpaid lineup, with just 13 regular phonne models, 5 smartphones and 2 blackberries, for just 20 total. Oh, and four aircards. But hey, their phones generally work well and quality should be there though quantity isn’t. And you get thirteen prepaid phones t pick from, from low-end to high-end. Cool.

What the heck, I’ll do two more biggies. Second-to-last, US Cellular clocks in at fifteen “normal” phones strong, if you call a bag phone a normal phone. Two Blackberries and the Motorola Q later…yes, just one smartphone due to USCC’s mere 1xRTT network (think T-Mobile speed, maybe just a tad slower)…and you get just eighteen models to choose from. Weak. Three prepaid phones? Gimme a break.

Last, let’s get Qwest in here. They resell Sprint. Maybe their extra phones should be credited to Sprint’s account, giving that carrier domination in the area of phone selection. Anyhow, you get a choice between nine decent phones for Qwest service, plus three smartphones, for a total of just twelve. Meh, at least they’re okay phones. Oh, and seven of them are Qwwest-only if you’re comparing the lineup to Sprint. So if they’re counted Sprint comes out as the clear choice leader when it comes to cellular selection. Interesting.

Now for the honorable mentions. Or dishonorable: the unlimited carriers. No smartphones here anymore. CricKet has just elevevn models to choose from. The same as Pocket, a Texas-based unlimited carrier that services where I live…and has about one-tenth the number of customers. MetroPCS is a little better, with 13 phones and color choice on one of ’em. Heard of Cleartalk PCS? Didn’t think so…they’re also unlimited, and sell just eight phone models, looks like. All this looks pretty pitiful when you consider the local carrier in my area, Five Star Wireless, has ten phones to choose from, plus maybe a Treo, and their 2.5G CDMA network, while simply amazing coverage-wise, can’t cover more than 200,000 people…and I’ll bet only 10-20,000 are using Five Star as their provider directly.

Well, hope this has enlightened you to…something. Just thought I’d do a little research and see what came up, and the above is what happened. Maybe it’ll be of use to someone, though PLEASE don’t choose your carrier just because it has more hones available than anyone else. Choose it if it gives the features you want with the coverage you need at a price you’re willing to pay. 🙂