silver razor paperweight that torments me

my cell phone and/or service has seriously started sucking in the last week or so. it's a good thing that i don't rely on it any more than i do, otherwise, i'd be even more upset. amazingly, my two year contract with cingular/at&t expired last wednesday, so i am free to leave the network without having to pay a huge penalty.

ever since cingular switched over to at&t, my service has been horrible. heath thinks it's the phone because he doubts that the network could be that bad without one of us hearing something about it somewhere. either way, i'm thoroughly frustrated by it. first off, nearly every call i am on gets dropped. (ironically, it happened once as i was driving past an at&t billboard touting their wireless service as having the 'fewest dropped calls.' pfft.) even worse than having dropped calls is how many call failures i have. this is the little delight that has been driving me most nuts. i try to call somebody, it attempts to dial, then blips out "call failed." i retry, and it fails again. i retry and it fails again. yesterday, i needed to call to check with heath for something before heading to meet him at the beach, and i promise that i'm not exaggerating, it failed at least 15 times before finally going through. i was so frustrated that i hardly wanted to go to the beach anymore, but i was stuck because i couldn't call heath to let him know i wasn't coming!!! arrgh! by the time i got there, i was fuming and was about to throw the stupid phone in the lake.

i've got to just pick out a new phone and just sign up with a new provider. at the moment, i'm leaning toward verizon, but am not 100% sure yet. i was looking at a few of their phones and the front runner at the moment is the LG VX8600 or the LG enV. (motorola is off the list after this razor experience, and LG has historically had pretty good phones.) feel free to offer your input as to which i should get. i need to check the verizon site when i get home, but it seems as though amazon.com might be cheaper.