First, let me start off by wishing everyone a Happy Mother’s Day. Fiona and I are up, and Kim is getting to sleep in. Fiona did make Kim breakfast in bed and Kim will enjoy that later.

Money is still very tight for us, so we’ve been trying to find inexpensive but meaningful things for Kim. One thing we’ve been kicking around for a long time is upgrading her cellphone. She had an old Motorola RAZR that she’s had for many years. The keypad is wearing off. The battery has gotten less and less effective and a couple days ago, it appear to finally give up the ghost. Kim asked my recommendation about what to do.

I’ve really been enjoying the HTC Thunderbolt on Verizon that I have for work. So, I checked to see what was available on AT&T. They have the HTC Imagine, which is fairly similar to the Thunderbolt. For people with free upgrades, it still costs $100. However, I had an extra $100 off of an upgrade available on my line, so I suggested seeing if we could get that applied to Kim’s line. There were a bunch of different aspects to the upgrade, so Kim called AT&T, and there just wasn’t any way we could get the upgrade done. Disappointed, Kim and I started talking about whether it was time to move to Verizon or T-Mobile. T-Mobile has a nice upgrade offer on for this weekend, and my Nokia N900 would work nicely there as well.

However, Kim ran out to do a few errands and stopped at an AT&T store, where they gladly did the upgrade and made a few other changes to our account that essentially gives us additional services without any price increase. Kim is now the happy owner of an HTC Imagine and I’m showing her some of the neat things it can do.

I did install Swype on it. It is a nicer way to do input on cellphones, but it is complicated to install on the HTC Insight on AT&T. AT&T locks the phone so you can only install apps from the Android Market place, unless you go into debug mode with a USB connection. However, that sort of connection is pretty simple and straight forward, at least to a geek like me, and Kim is now starting to use Swype. I also installed Bump, but haven’t gotten Bump to successfully connect between phones.

Another Mother’s Day gift that Fiona and I got for Kim is a macrame hammock, some assembly required:

Happy Mother’s Day everyone.