Verizon: “That’ll be a $1 surcharge. Or you can pay here for an additional $10.”

Earlier this year, I tried to pay my Verizon cell phone bill at a store that apparently wasn’t a Verizon Corporate Store (there seems to be a big delineation regarding this). Because I planned on paying with cash, the store tried to charge me an additional $3 processing fee. Yeah, not only did I leave…

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What can I do with a BlackBerry KEYone in 2023?

Background. In November 2021, my long-time loyalty to the BlackBerry cell phone ended. Not by choice, mind you – my carrier, Verizon, stopped supporting the phone on their network. And a startup company that promised a new 5G BlackBerry was nothing more than vaporware. So I purchased a Google Pixel 6 Pro – at the…

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Wait, there’s a BlackBerry movie coming out?? Seriously?!?

Longtime readers of this blog know that for as long as I’ve had cell phones, I’ve been a BlackBerry loyalist. Trust me, I stuck with the ‘Berry through eight different iterations, until Verizon’s network would no longer support by ‘Berry and I was forced to change to a Google Pixel 6 Pro. I say “forced…

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“You’re paying cash? That’ll be an additional $3.00.”

Time to run some Saturday morning errands. And one of those errands is to pay my phone bill. Normally I just do an electronic payment from my back account, but I had come into a sizeable amount of cash recently, and decided to pay my Verizon phone bill with the cash in hand. You know,…

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OnwardMobility: The Definition of Vaporware

God damn it, I got fooled. All us former BlackBerry users got fooled. We were fooled by a big promise from a company that had no plans on fulfilling their promise. Shame on us. Background. About two years ago, BlackBerry announced that their license with Chinese phone company TCL would cease, meaning that the Key…

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I don’t believe you, OnwardMobility.

As you know, I used BlackBerry cell phones for decades. I went through seven different iterations of that physical keyboard phone. And I loved every one of them. Then BlackBerry stopped making their phones. And a Texas-based startup named OnwardMobility claimed they would build a new 5G BlackBerry with a physical keyboard and all the…

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My new Google Pixel 6 Pro phone just earned a gold star.

Let’s have a short pop quiz. What is one of the most annoying things that Chuck has dealt with over the years? There’s someone in the back who’s got his hand up, and doing his best Arnold Horshak imitation right now. So let me explain. I have scribbled many blog posts about those annoying, unstoppable…

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The phone of a pack rat

I couldn’t believe it. Over 500 photos on my phone. Some going back, honestly, nearly half a decade. I shall explain. I’ve owned my BlackBerry KEYone cell phone for the past four-plus years. It was a replacement for my BlackBerry PRIV, which was a fantastic phone until I accidentally dropped it and it banged off…

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