After maligning Cingular for the absolutely horrid service I was getting following their acquisition of AT&T Wireless, I decided the only way to get around the growing problems with my service was to switch to a real Cingular plan — and that meant buying a new phone.  Ah, but what to get?  I was flummoxed by all the choices.

Not!  I knew precisely what I wanted — the new Motorola RAZR V3.

You know me well enough by now to realize I'm a sucker for the latest and greatest toys, and that's clearer in no greater way than in the technology I use (that's my line of work; would you expect anything less of me?).

I'd seen the commercials and had even visited my neighborhood Cingular store on one occasion to manhandle (I love that word) the phone so that I could evaluate it's appropriateness for moi.  As you can no doubt already guess, it seemed perfectly appropriate for me.

A few weeks ago I finally concluded that additional lack of action on my rapidly declining cellular service would indeed paint me as the lazy bum I am, eager only to continue complaining about Cingular without taking action to solve the problem they themselves deny exists and which they themselves created.  I therefore carried my tired little ass up to the local Cingular five-and-dime and switched to a purely Cingular plan, native to their network and not AT&T's now defunct and much ignored infrastructure, and purchased the silver RAZR.

Allow me to say that this is a great phone, at least for me.  It's small, it's absolutely beautiful and very edgy (my Anglophile self wishes to say it's quite smart), it has all the features I need, and it works on Cingular's native network rather than the bastardized remains of AT&T's network (that thing Cingular promised not to degrade, a memo apparently not shared with those who actually maintain the network — if there is any maintenance taking place, that is).

Amazingly — can you see the sarcasm dripping? — it works in my home.  That in and of itself is a feat of technological wizardry which I believed impossible given Cingular's claims that there was in fact no AT&T network relegation or degradation.

I have excellent network coverage in all the places I frequent (like where I live), I have a sleek little phone that everyone talks about and wants to fondle when they see it (often prompting me to slip it in my front pocket after waving it around madly in front of the hotties), and my cell phone woes are — as of this writing, anyway — a thing of the past.  I even noticed that, when I paid my last bill in the same manner I've been paying them for many years (electronically through my bank), it didn't take Cingular 28 days to process the payment, a problem I'd been having with them since they acquired AT&T and which, oddly enough, they constantly blamed on me as it meant my payments were often late.

So long as I am trouble-free with this phone and plan, I believe I may actually stay with Cingular — for now.