As a registered Starbucks cardholder, I received a birthday coupon for a free drink of my choice. Now I’m sitting in the Starbucks on the east side of the Orange Circle, where I can easily judge the suckers who chose the Starbucks on the west side of the Circle. Those fools! Their Starbucks may be open later, but it’s not in a historic building.

Using my phone to type this post, I’m reminded of an Android app that I’d like to see: an app that automatically logs me into WiFi hotspots with web-based authentication, like Starbucks or Coffee Bean. It’s annoying to have to launch the web browser to log in and use the WiFi. Then again, unless I’m doing something particularly intense like watching YouTube videos, the 3G is fast enough.

So anyway, I got a white mocha.

Ash and I were both eligible for phone upgrades as of December 24, so we went out that morning and used our “New Every Two” credit to get two free (after rebate) Droid Eris phones.

The phones take a little getting used to since we’ve never had smart phones before. For instance, it automatically downloaded all my gmail contacts into my phone book, and I had to figure out how to stop that from happening. So there’s a learning curve. But it’s nice to finally have a device that I think is every bit as useful as the iPhone, yet on the Verizon Wireless network so it can make phone calls inside Friday’s at the Block, or at Rainforest Cafe, or at any other place where we’ve seen the iPhone fail at being a phone.

Today I picked up my new Jhane Barnes glasses at the optometrist, and I received my new phone in the mail. It’s an enV2 from LG, which is similar to the enV but smaller. I like it so far. My big complaints about the enV (which I had for a hot second) were the small keys on the front of the phone and the big overall size. This phone’s smaller, but with larger keys, so I’m pleased now.

On Saturday I was eligible for my “New Every Two” discount from Verizon Wireless, so yesterday I went to the Verizon store and upgraded to the new LG Chocolate. It’s a sleek, black phone that looks way more like an iPod than a phone, obviously because they’re trying to encourage people to listen to music on their phones. It slides open to reveal a keypad when you want to use it as a phone, and the rest of the time it’s really small and thin.

Verizon didn’t have the cable yet to transfer my phone book from my old phone, but with a USB cable and BitPim (set for the VX8300, which is pretty much compatible), I was able to transfer my phone book as well as all my photos. BitPim also let me create a custom ringtone out of an MP3 of “Such Great Heights,” so that was pretty awesome.

Verizon uses Windows Media Player 10 to sync music to the phone. It only comes with a tiny 60MB of memory, just enough for about an hour of music, so I put the Postal Service’s Give Up on there, and I might get a microSD card later to store more music.

I waited over an hour (literally sixty-three minutes) on hold to talk to Samsung’s Level Two Tech Support. When I explained the software bug in the web browser on my Samsung a670, they informed me that they don’t have a working a670 in the office, so they can’t test it.

Remind me not to buy Samsung stock.

Anyway, I explained my complaint: The manual says to hold down the “CLR” button to return to the browser home page, but when I hold down the “CLR” button, it does nothing at all. After talking with his supervisor, the tech support guy told me, “it’s a misprint.”

Remind me not to buy Samsung phones.