I recently purchased the Flare originally for my wife to upgrade from her previous phone. After having used the Flare on a quick family call I came to love it. The Flare has great call quality, it looks great being all black and so damn shinny as well as having all of the standard things like bluetooth, external display, etc...I ended up purchasing a second Flare the next day to replace my phone, the Slice. We've been with Virgin Mobile for about 10 months now after having left Sprint. Our main reason was that we are not huge phone users and hated paying $90.00 - $110.00 a month for two phones giving us 3 - 4 times the amount of minutes that we actually need but never getting any kind of refund for unused minutes. I now love the fact that we are paying about $50.00 a month for two phones and still using Sprints network but not being molested by their charges. Granted, the Virgin Mobile phones could be of a better quality, having gone through about 5 different models myself, but overall we are very happy with the service. I would be willing to pay more for a phone, even up to $200 to get some of the bigger names in cell phones such as the razr, krzr, etc but Virgin has yet to bring them to the states even though Virgin Mobile does supply those top tier phones to other countries such as Canada and England.

I have the xbox 360 HD-DVD player. I recently purchased a "switch" that takes the analog signal and converts it to digital between the output of the 360 and the HDMI input of my TV and man, you can really tell a difference. However, my biggest concern regarding the quality of the HD-DVD player is the noted weakening of the audio signal compared to my regular DVD movies when played back. I use a monster optical cable from the 360 to my receiver. The audio sounds great when I'm playing a regular DVD via my HD-DVD player on the 360 but when I put in a HD-DVD movie I have to turn it up quite a bit to get the same, or close to, sound quality even when I change the audio setting of the HD-DVD movie from 5.1 to TrueHD (which does improve it a little bit). I feel like I'm sacrificing the audio quality for the better image quality and now I'm starting to doubt my purchase of the HD-DVD add on.