Who was in this Think Tank?

If you read the article linked in the headline you'll get more details on the new device Verizon wants to sell to consumers.  It's for customers who have dropped their landline, but still like the landline functionality.  It does some pretty minor stuff like look up traffic and weather through your broadband and receive text messages.  The suggestion is that it works with your Verizon cell-phone for phone calls you place through it.  What's truly astounding is that they want to charge $200 for the unit and $35/month subscription fee for the service, which essentially just gives you unlimited minutes when using the device.

Even though it's not explicit, the press release suggests that a broadband connection is required, so this is essentially a Vonage type device (Vonage being only $25/month for the same service offerings except it doesn't use the same telephone number as your cell phone).  If you're already paying for the cell phone minutes, and perhaps getting unlimited nights and weekend minutes with that plan, it's a total ripoff that you're paying for overlapping unlimited minutes, especially when a service like Skype can offer calls for as little as pennies a minute from a device such as this.

I know that this is all designed for the uninformed consumer to continue wasting money and handing it to Verizon (and just like those sweet financial blogs I'll say that I'm a shareholder of Verizon and yadda yadda yadda) but I wish some company would come up with an innovative and useful product instead of one designed purely to take advantage.  Imagine the sucker that's paying $70/month for their cell phone, $35/month for their Verizon DLS, and pitching in another $35/month for a phone that overlaps the functions of those two services they're already paying for!  Instead, Verizon should be selling the unit at MSRP with no monthly fee and allowing the consumer to bridge their services (thus tying them to the Verizon brand and making Verizon look like some sort of leader in technology).