Shiny and new.

As of 12/30/2012 I was 'eligible' for a new phone upgrade with Verizon - which means absolutely nothing other than the fact that I get to renew a 2 year contract and pay an additional $30 on top of buying a new phone from Verizon at a discounted price...*sigh*.  Anyways, I was able to 'upgrade' my phone, to a new 4g phone, while losing my unlimited data plan..again, some upgrade.  This year I was torn between getting a new Samsung phone, and an iPhone 5.  I've resisted getting an iPhone in the past, mostly because I'm not a mac user, and I am a heavy google/picasa user.  I decided to go with an iPhone this time because they 'just' (this fall) released the iPhone 5 with 4g, and there are enough apps out there to make picasa and google readily accessible, so I ordered up a shiny new iPhone and it was delivered shortly after the new year.

So far I love it - it's smaller than my old phone, but I don't mind the size - it fits nicely in my hand.  I love how snappy and fast it is, and I love the speed of 4G - it's lightning quick - faster than our wireless connection at home.  We have an iPod Touch at home so the operating system was nothing new to me.

A couple drawbacks to the iPhone that I've noticed thus far:
1.  No widgets.  On my android phone I downloaded an app called "Beautiful Widgets", that let me put a 4x2 widget up on my home screen that always showed me the current weather and time.  It isn't apparent to me that iOS allows that, at least google hasn't revealed anything
2.  Custom Ringtones/Sounds.  It sounds like this is possible, but it doesn't sound as though it's as easy as texting a sound to my phone and being able to set it as a ringtone.  I admit that I haven't looked too hard at this, but from what I have looked at I haven't found anything that looks super easy.  My favorite ringtone is a .mp3, and I haven't found a way to use it yet.
3.  Memory - everything that was on my other phone was on a sim card and if I filled it up I could buy a new one or even get a bigger one.  I bought this phone with 16GB of memory, but that's it - once I use it up I have to start deleting, cause there's no option to change out memory options.
4.  Nagging text messages - if I get a text message, and my phone is locked, the phone will keep nagging me every couple of minutes that I have a message...which I think is annoying.  I don't mind one notification of a new message, but I don't like getting CONSTANT reminders that I have a message.  I'm sure there's some way of turning this off, I just need to figure out how.

Other than that I really like the phone.  Everything seems very fast right now, and I haven't had it lockup or do anything weird yet.  Yay!