In the Just when you thought it was safe department

I've only recently (ie in the last year or so) become a prisoner of my cellphone. Sure I had one years ago. We had one of the radio phones that was like a suitcase that you carried with you and believe me we had some elaborate charging system for that 10 mins of usage at a time. *GRIN*. Then we had the Motorola 650 which is one of the toughest phones we've ever seen. Hubby actually ran over ours with a semi, not once but two or three times. On pavement and on gravel. he'd get out of the truck to do his bihourly brake and load check and take the phone with him to call home. Inevitably he'd set it on the back tire to thump his tires and occasionally he forgot it there. After retrieving it for the third time it became a family joke that we needed to invest in Motorola and that he oughta get a job in their R&D department for destructibility.

I progressed and picked up a V100. ( http://mobile.softpedia.com/phones/Motorola/Motorola-V100.shtml ) A cute little laptop wannabe in opaque blue plastic. It was intended I believe mostly for use as a handsfree and had a convenient little beltclip and nifty headset thingie. When you opened it up it had a tiny little keyboard but it was cute, and I got it for cheap ($50 I think) too bad that the cellphone service provider I used wasn't so cheap on the text messages.

After a while of not having one personally but hubby using the MIKE phone sytem (yet again Motorola go figure..that whole stock option thing I guess) and being able to talk to him when he was on the highway, all over the states and Canada we started looking for cellphones that worked for us.

Eventually we decided upon the Solo system. ( www.solomobility.ca ) Solely for the 10-4 capability. So we joined the current decade as my snarky children like to point out, and bought Sanyo 2300 phones. I tricked mine out with a MyTego tigerskin (www.mytego.com) and away we went. Soon we picked up one for the 10 yo, because it's handy for riding. The horses are all used to the phones ringing and talking and when you're collecting cattle in the foothills it's great to not have to shout around the bushes and over the hill.

But now... this is going a bit too far... http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/ref/nfc-phone.htm?cid=rss1 I have enough trouble with lost/misplaced cellphones, debit/credit cards without combining the two.

Yikes.