Family Communication with the Verizon Palm Pre Plus

My husband and I have a checkered past when it comes to communication. We try to talk to each other but work, life, kids, technology get in the way. We have conversations like a normal couple. From time to time, we run in to difficulties. Let me explain…

We dated in the Dark Ages…pre-cell phones, pre-every home has an answering machine, pre-internet… I was a senior in college while my husband was a junior when we started dating. We had telephone difficulties. He would call my dorm and either get a no answer signal as I did not have an answering machine or he would get a busy signal if I was on the phone due to not having “Call Waiting.” When I called him I would get the same thing. He lived at home so I had to call him before 9 p.m. It’s amazing that we continued dating.
Our first home was a small townhouse in suburban Maryland. We received several answering machines as wedding presents. We gave one to each set of parents, so that we could leave messages for them. I’m not sure my in laws ever turned their machine on, though.
Our first computer was a monolithic, desk hogging machine with a 3.5 inch AND 5.25 inch disk drives, but no CD or DVD drives or USB ports as the technology had not been invented!!! It was considered state of the art. It had an 80 meg memory…can you even imagine how little fit on this machine. No e-mail back then either.
About a year or two in to our marriage, we discovered AOL and chat rooms. After a few years we migrated to MSN.
e-mail became a part of our lives in the mid 90s.
We purchased our first cell phone in 1995…the “only use this phone if you are having a baby” phone.

It’s now 2010…so much has changed with our family’s communication.

This past weekend I took a trip with a group of mommy bloggers and their kids to Orlando (Disclosure: I was provided with a trip to Orlando with my son by the Orlando Convention & Visitor’s Bureau, Disney Studios, Gatorland, Sea World, and Universal Studios.) My husband stayed home (sulking!) with our two daughters (pouting!) while my son (beaming!) and I (glowing!) traveled to Orlando.

While I was on the trip visiting parks, meeting with travel reps, and eating delicious food, I wanted to stay in contact with the home front. While I was being wined and dined, my husband and girls were racing to basketball games at a school charity event, packing a ice cooler for two all-day volleyball tournaments in another county, doing laundry, eating concession stand hot dogs and slurpees, taking a preteen to volleyball practice, and delivering a teen to birthday party. Phew!

I stayed in contact with my homebound family through the #VerizonPalmPrePlus messaging. It is hard to hear a cell phone ring in a cavernous gym because of the high ceilings, balls pounding off hands, and parents cheering…even if you do choose an obnoxious ringtone.

The beauty of messaging is that the message goes through more consistently than phone calls do. I’m #notatechie so don’t know why messages go through more than calls, but I love sending messages. I sent my husband a message that our almost 7-year-old rode a ‘gator. Included a photo, too. My husband told our 11-year-old what her brother did. She thought her Dad meant that her brother rode on a John Deere Gator. A little communication muddiness, but the message got through. The message I got back was that our teen’s volleyball team won their first match, and were gearing up for their second match.

The Verizon Palm Pre Plus phone allows me as a mostly at-home occasionally traveling mom to keep up with my working husband and three active kids. Four of us have cell phones. I suspect my almost 7-year-old will have one in a couple of years.

I was given a Verizon Palm Pre Plus ph0ne and one months’ service for my review.