My apologies. I read it wrong.

I am baised but here goes anyway
 

I like the idea of a Notebook over desktop, while more money it is portable.
I do not like smart phones I make and receive calls nothing else so I would stay with a good simple phone.
If you have Internet access you can use Yahoo mail Gmail mail or theirs for a email account and have email access from anywhere with a Internet connection.
Since you are streaming movies from netflix I assume you have a Comcast High Speed Internet account, if this is true get rid of AOL and use Comcast or one of the others I noted for email.
So recommendations, I prefer PC over MAC (Yes, I said it out loud) why becasue I do not like paying a premium. BTW, I have used both recently had a 17 MACBook Pro supplied by work nice machine but to me they are tools. I recently purchased a ThinkPad becasue I travel quite a bit and they hold up well. I have had Dell's HP's and Toshiba's also in the past but for my money I selected Thinkpad. These machines with Win 7 nice processor large hard drive and memory should be under 1K. When looking at a PC select the Chip that has 6MB L2 Cache (3 per core, 12MB if a Quad Core) this will help performance. I would suggest 4GB of RAM , to expensive for more at this time in a notebook. Get a 500GB Hard Drive and the DVD drive of your choice. These machines come with USB and Fire-wire connections so you should be good to go.
As for Cell plans I am not in the Mpls area much anymore so I can not say which service is the best, but that is how I would make my choice. When I worked in Brooklyn Park Verizon Service and ATT worked pretty good.