I just retired my venerable StarTac phone in favor of the VI-125 from LG after 5 years of use.Who is LG? No idea, but this phone had several features that I really liked so I went with it. Unfortunately Sprint PCS does not offer Motorola phones any longer. Motorola seemed to be the only folks out there who understood the concept of a "Vibrate then Ring" setting.
The new phone does sport a vibrate mode and is intelligent enough to switch to a ring tone when in the charger. Mich’s Samsung phone (SCH-A460) doesn’t do that for some weird reason. It seems like whoever designed hers doesn’t actually use a cell phone.
I also wanted to get rid of the antenna since that turned out to be the biggest weakness in my wonderful StarTac. It kept getting caught on things and eventually the "catching" caused the case to crack. It isn’t completely shattered yet, but it was about to go and I didn’t want to be "Phoneless". I recognize that the internal antenna is likely to not be as sensitive as an external, but I’m pretty sure that this new technology phone’s newer electronics should allow it to be on par with my last phone with the antenna.
I also wanted a speaker phone. Not for public places, but when I’m at my desk at home or in my car I’d much prefer to be talking to the phone at a distance rather than holding it up to my ear. One of the odd things that I’m noticing with a lot of new phones now is that you cannot hear yourself in the earpiece as you talk. Maybe that partly explains why folks seem to sound so loud when they use them?
And, most importantly, the phone is just a phone. I was a little concerned that I was going to end up with all sorts of other junk on the phone (camera being the most obvious add-in). Don’t get me wrong. I’m no Luddite, but the camera quality on cell phones is so poor that I’m not remotely interested. When they sport 3-6 Megapixel CCDs and decent optics I’ll look into combining my phone and camera (at least I’ll always have the camera). But I just upgraded from an older digital camera because the pictures really don’t look good anymore on today’s computers and I see no reason to go backwards just to have the camera on my phone.