Verizon Wireless On The Go

In June, I packed up Baby Doc and headed to Nashville for the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine‘s Annual Forum. This is always a fun conference for me – I get to see a lot of my veterinarian friends from all over the country. (Often, this is the only time all year we see each other!) There are also a ton of continuing education lectures going on for large and small animal veterinarians. Last year I gave a few sessions myself! And, lots and lots of committee meetings. This is the only time all the volunteers who help keep the ACVIM running are in the same place at the same time, so it is always a very busy week of meetings (and socializing, of course).

I knew I was going to have a very busy week, and I was going to be relying heavily on technology to keep me connected during the meeting – to all the people there, the events I was supposed to be attending, to my parents (who were in Nashville to help out with Baby Doc), and everything else going on at home, in our practice, and online. Verizon Wireless helped me out by giving me a few gadgets to try out on my trip.

I started off the trip using this Motorola Sonic Rider Bluetooth speakerphone in my truck. What a great hands-free device! It’s about the size of a smartphone, and it hooks right to the visor in your window. It was very easy to link my phone to the speaker. It was easy to make and receive phone calls with the speaker.

I stream music on my phone when I’m driving, and it is usually hard to find the sweet spot in the truck where I can hear the music from the phone. This speakerphone made it easy – once the phone was linked to the speaker, the music came from the speaker, right by my head! The navigation directions came through the speaker as well, which meant no (well, almost no) missed turns because I didn’t hear the instructions.

I also tried out this sweet little portable power pack, the Mophie Juice Pack. I was a bit hesitant at first. I have a 10-inch Samsung Galaxy 2 tablet, and most of the portable power packs I have tried don’t have enough oomph to give my tablet any juice. The Mophie was designed to be able to power the iPad. It had plenty of oomph to give my tablet a little kick!

The Mophie didn’t have enough battery power to recharge my Samsung tablet completely, but it was able to give me enough extra battery life to make it through a full day of meetings and note-taking.

I was also able to test drive the LG G2 phone with a smart cover. I loved this phone! The buttons on the back made it easy to take pictures and adjust the volume while I was talking or streaming music. The battery life was amazing – this phone easily made it through 10 hours of heavy use (email, internet, social media) during meetings in a conference center where service wasn’t always the best.

At first, I was a little bummed that there was no place for an external SD card. But holy moly, it’s got 25 GB of storage in the phone without external storage! I loved the KnockOn feature – turn the screen on or off simply by double-tapping on the screen. Answer the phone by just bringing it to your ear, no tapping or sliding needed. Its multitasking feature was great. I was able to keep up to 3 apps open at once, and easily switch back and forth between them as I was in my meetings.

But I think this was my favorite feature:

All it takes to snooze this alarm in the morning is flipping the phone over. Farmer Doc didn’t think this was so great… I don’t have such a good history when it comes to snoozing alarms… BUT this also works to silence the ringer (for those times when you forget to turn it off before you go into that meeting).

Thanks, Verizon Wireless, for keeping me connected and running during my conference (and for contributing to my snooze habit once I got back home)!

{Verizon Wireless did provide me with these devices to use. All thoughts and opinions are my own.}