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" &amp;quot;Live in Fear.&amp;quot; My philosophy of life can be summed up by this motto. Sometimes, when I&amp;#039;m feeling particularly optimistic, I will swing my life view to the happier &amp;quot;Cling to the Wreckage,&amp;quot; but mainly it&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Live in Fear.&amp;quot; You never know when you&amp;#039;ll be in a terrorist attack or lost in the woods, and I intend, when that happens, to have the one phone that is connected to the one tower of the one service provider that is still up and running. This means living with many cell phones. Until recently, I traveled with a Sprint Samsung 500, a T-Mobile Sidekick II, an AT&amp;amp;amp;T BlackBerry 8800, and a Verizon BlackBerry 8703. Plus their chargers -- AC and car -- extra batteries, and two power strips. As you might suspect, all of this slows me down getting through airport security. I also have enough 12-volt-to-110 converters and cigarette-lighter adapters to charge all of the equipment in my car. When I tell Sweetie (the wife) I need to get the car ready 20 minutes ahead of time for our drive into New York City from East Hampton, she looks at me with a mixture of anger and sadness, as if she knows her loved one will never be totally cured. Just about the time she&amp;#039;s calmed down, she gets frustrated again as we&amp;#039;re entering the Midtown Tunnel, which is when I start to dismantle the wires while I&amp;#039;m driving so that we can be all packed up by the time we reach the hotel. &amp;quot;Let me do it; you&amp;#039;re going to get us killed,&amp;quot; she says. (She&amp;#039;s terrible at putting the chargers back into their specific Ziploc bags, which is why I wanted to do it in the first place.) I recently got a Verizon Blackberry 8830 World Edition Phone ($520; verizonwireless.com/blackberry), which may be the first phone that lets me get rid of all the rest. Verizon&amp;#039;s network works the best in the two places I live -- East Hampton, New York, and Telluride, Colorado. And its EV-DO wireless Internet system is faster than AT&amp;amp;amp;T&amp;#039;s EDGE technology. The problem with Verizon is that its CDMA network doesn&amp;#039;t work in most foreign lands. That&amp;#039;s where the 8830 is genius. When you travel, the phone automatically switches over to the GSM bandwidth, which is standard in most of the rest of the world. (Verizon and Sprint use CDMA in the U.S.)  The phone itself is excellent. BlackBerrys have the best contact lists, the best e-mail system, an excellent keypad, long battery times, and in spite of what Walt Mossberg says in The Wall Street Journal, there is just no comparison between the BlackBerry and the Treo. In the old days, the BlackBerry was great for data but a bad phone, but no longer. This may be the only phone I&amp;#039;ll ever need. Although...Verizon says that the BlackBerry won&amp;#039;t switch over to GSM in the U.S., even if there is no CDMA service in the area. So what if I&amp;#039;m lost, or there&amp;#039;s an earthquake? Maybe I&amp;#039;ll carry just the BlackBerry and the iPhone. Sweetie, can you plug this in? And this? Don&amp;#039;t understand the acronyms in this story? You&amp;#039;re not alone. Read Irritating Acronyms Explained! to get the details. Barry Sonnenfeld is the director of Men in Black and the producer of Pushing Daisies on ABC. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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