I love the insular nature of the technorati in the Bay area. Mike Arrington is all excited about his "port" of his phone number from the iPhone to Google Voice, which took him three days. His excitement over this goes on for paragraphs, until we get to this:

I had to pay the AT&T termination fee of $175. But that's it. And this myTouch phone (which TMobile has supplied to me for free for a test period) is an excellent piece of hardware.

So I figured on the termination fee, but most of us would not get a free piece of hardware. Out here in the real world, this entire post is what would be called "paid placement" - but I digress. What else is wrong with this picture?

Want to port your mobile number to Google Voice and do what I've done? You can't just yet, but porting will be released later this year publicly.

The paid placement nature of this thing just gets more obvious. Not only was his handset provided free (ka-ching), but the service was provided to him as a special pre-availability deal (ka-ching).

Yeah, I'm impressed. What was Arrington before he became a tech writer? Oh yeah, a lawyer. I suppose that explains a lot...

Technorati Tags: att, iPhone, apple, google