You can get an 8G iPhone 4 for free at Verizon right now with a 2 yr contract. Your monthly bill with 2G data would be between $70-$80, and unless you're going to stream music or movies that should be plenty.

ios people are more likely to download apps and more likely to spend $$ on apps

Oh, I have seven million apps. I don't think there's a single use case I don't have two apps to do it, and often as many as five. But I'm clearly not buying all of those, because that would shift me into crazy CRAZY land. As opposed to the slightly insane place I now inhabit.

I found WebOS frustrating because they wanted me to pay for so much--I was used to the Android experience of getting so much for free that I turned around and found that I'd invested so much time, that investing money wasn't as big a deal. But WebOS, for myriad reasons including business, pretty much asks you to commit with your wallet open, and I can't even find a try-right-after-you-buy option like Google Play (which is still the dumbest name ever--I can lend them a dictionary if that would help. Or maybe it's their thesaurus that's broken.)

So, on HP, I have paid money for two clock/alarm apps so far, and I don't like either of them enough to just use one--I'm still using a different alarm app from the one that shows me the time.

That's just not how I get into a platform. I want to find out I love something so much I'm throwing money at the people who made it, not exchanging money for the opportunity to see if I can fall in love.

It's a net-related adoption model, but I do kinda exercise it on my desktops as well, for a certain level of use cases.

I have iPad and iPhone. On my second of each. I have a TON of apps. Vast majority are free, or the $0.99 sale right before Christmas and Graduation season (to beef up "popularity" in the App Store for the folks who get the iOS device as a gift). Although, one time during those sales, I did drop like $20 on 20 games. But hey, free updates! There are plenty of games that are free, and try to get you to do an in-app purchase. I play them as long as it's viable, then toss them like yesterdays paper. I have paid some big bank for work related apps. But that's for work, so, doesn't really count, right? The apps I use the most are free. Mail. Calendar. Safari. Solitaire. Pandora. Netflix. The Weather Channel. You can do a lot with the free apps.

Yeah, I am on there constantly, but paid maybe 20 bucks tops? Locale/Tasker/Astrid, and an Office thing, and then maybe a few things like, I tried the pay version of an earlier nutrition software, but it wasn't worth it. I don't have any ongoing subscription apps.

Has the Toshiba Thrive been notably upgraded in the last year or so?

Yes. The new model name is "Excite".

It is slimmer, lighter, and faster; but the battery is not replaceable, the HDMI port is gone, the USB port is now micro, and the SD card drive is micro.

I had PalmOS devices from 1997 through 2007, and have had various iOS and Android devices since then. I doubt I have spent as much as $50 on add-on applications, and most of that was in PalmOS: $10 for a planetarium program, and $20 for PocketQuicken.

You can get an 8G iPhone 4 for free at Verizon right now with a 2 yr contract. Your monthly bill with 2G data would be between $70-$80, and unless you're going to stream music or movies that should be plenty.

Ah, but both the T-Mobile no-contract and Virgin have plans that seem good enough for $30-$35, and they have decent-looking phones for $150.

they have decent-looking phones for $150.

I'm considering going no-contract as well, but I'll probably get a more expensive model, that way it will last me longer (or so I hope). My current phone is only two years old and I'm already cranky about how it's slower than my BIL's.

When did the Excite come out? Are 3MP and 1 point something up to the high end tablet specs?

They first came out just over a year ago. What you see offered on that page is a newer version, which I don't remember seeing offered this past November and December.

I leave the specifications comparison research to you. That was why I included the link.

I don't expect to be in the market for a tablet again for at least a year, and probably much longer than that. Almost everything I do on my tablet I can do on my phone now, and the phone still fits in my pocket.

Hm, going through my iTunes purchase history, I've spent closer to $50 on apps overall, but enough of those were (a) impulse games I wouldn't bother replacing or (b) apps for Dylan's iPod Touch that I could probably replace everything I use regularly for under $25.

I have spent an awful lot on media though. Getting hooked on Big Love was more expensive than I thought. (Cheaper than an HBO subscription, but still!)