<p>I don’t think so Illinoismom. Look at your car battery and look at your phone battery. One is a heck of a lot smaller than the other, hard to imagine the little one draining the big one.</p>
<p>I saw a gizmo for sale (I think at Radio Shack) that had a radio that could be charged up with a hand crank that would also charge your cell phone. How much cranking it would take, I don’t know.</p>
<p>There are also some photovoltaic chargers for cell phones (we bought one & gave it to S to fiddle with). I believe the cranking for power takes a considerable amount of cranking. We bought it for flashlights & haven’t found them all that reliable (after a while, they don’t charge at all).</p>
<p>I keep two extra batteries for my cell phone (an Android Optimus) that i use when camping. They hold a charge sitting in a drawer for several months. Good for emergencies.</p>
<p>
At this point it’s more a matter of clarity than volume. And I can’t see putting on a headset every time I want to answer the phone or make a call. The landline provides a very clear connection and safety during a power outage and permits me to answer the phone in multiple rooms of my house without having to carry my cellphone everywhere. I also agree with the comment above that the landline number is the “house” phone, rather than a personal phone.</p>
<p>I think it’s clear from the responses that some people prefer land lines and others find cell phones adequate or even a better option due to their portability.</p>
<p>It doesn’t seem to be a ‘one size fits all’ answer so people will just need to decide what’s important to them and whether that’s worth the extra cost (unless they don’t have a cell phone at all).</p>
<p>I also will keep my landline. I find it much more comfortable to talk on than my cell, also we find that whatever cell phone company or phones we have on our family plan, they all die at one point or another and completely unexpectedly. I recently had a cell phone die on me when I was en route home from work on the Long Island Railroad on a night that the railroad service was messed up. I was meeting my husband at a point along the way… but we had no way to connect with each other. Not that having a landline would have made a difference in that scenario but I would hate to be dependent on a cell phone at home in a natural disaster or snowstorm and have that cell phone die on me. My dh is a retired federal executive and we had a secure phone line that he could be reached on in an emergency or he could reach those he needed to. The first time it rang it scared me half to death… only to find out it was a telemarketer.</p>
<p>Land lines DO indeed require electricity to work. However they get their power through the phone lines and not power lines which are more vulnerable to wide spread outages. We just cancelled our land line and got an ATA device (NetTalk Duo) to replace it. Less than $3 a month for 3,000 minutes/mo to anywhere in the 48 states and it works great, if you have a decent internet connection. It does rely on your internet connection to work, but if that is gone our cell phones, which are both, pay as you go, are the backup.</p>
<p>I think this is the longest thread I have ever started!
Thanks everyone
Lots of food for thought</p>
<p>Interesting. We have a family plan of 500 minutes and never use a quarter of it. Maybe that will change when I have one in college but I don’t worry about radiation either because none of us uses the phone primarily to talk.</p>
<p>We have rarely exceeded the 500 family plan minutes among the 3 of us, but it has happened about two or three times over the many years we’ve had the phone. Most of the time we’re way under, but when we visit or are with relatives who had a different carrier & area code, it can add up, just confirming what’s going on & plans.</p>
<p>^ Does your Verizon plan have any Family and Friends numbers? DW uses them for clients who aren’t on Verizon, it saves a ton of minutes, and she changes them around depending on who she is going to be talking to.</p>
<p>We have a bare-bones land-line. $150 minutes per month local. We just place calls with Google Voice when we want to make any calls - they are free in the US and cost very little for international calls.</p>
<p>
Boy, is that expensive!</p>
<p>;)</p>
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</p>
<p>Ours too, but with three on it (I share with my adult kids, and they pay their share), we often get close to the 700 mark. So the total unlimited on the landline, along with other reasons for having it, adds up to cheaper for us.</p>
<p>As ggDAd says, it really comes down to individual preferences and circumstances.</p>
<p>Hmmm. Should have been $16 for 150 minutes. It is actually a $5 plan. The rest is fees and taxes.</p>
<p>We have something like 3000 shared minutes on our plan (5 lines), unlimited night and weekends. Somehow we manage to come close to the limit every single month. And my dad is the only one who really uses minutes. He talks on the phone like a teenaged girl! lol</p>
<p>veruca, i’m not sure if it helps or not but i have cordless phones throughout my house that bluetooth to my cell phone. I can leave the phone in my purse or in my car or wherever - as long as i’m within x amount of feet to my house it picks up the connection. No landline, just a three cordless phone system in the living room, upstairs, and master bedroom. It’s perfect. My system can do up to two cordless phones at once.</p>