Why I got a Nokia Shorty from Virgin Wireless instead of a Treo 650 Smart Phone from Verizon Wireless

PART I

If you are a citizen of the United States and you have a cellular phone, there's a pretty good chance you will empathize with the following story. You see, I recently had one of the most infuriating experiences I can ever remember having and it will come as no surprise to most, that it involved my cell-phone service.

A little over 2 years ago, after forgetting to pay a phone bill and being disconnected by Sprint, I decided the time had come to ditch my land line and get a cell-phone as a full time replacement. After all, cell phones had been around for decades already and surely the quality issues were minimal by this point, right?

Wrong. I signed a 2 year contract with Cingular Wireless and got one of those Motorola flip phones...the v60 or something like that. The phone was actually pretty cool aside from rampant antenna breakage problems, but the service quality was so bad at my house that it was almost unusable. It was so bad that I ended up getting VOIP service from Lingo.com, which came with its own set of headaches, but was usually enough to let me get by in conjunction with the spotty cellular service. For the next 2 years, I generally avoided using my cell phone at home due to the annoyances caused by the poor reception. I assumed that all cellular services would have the same trouble in my area, so I just lived with it.

Recently, when my 2 year contract expired, I started asking around about other people's service and discovered that several other people I knew were quite happy with their service. This was a surprise to me after my experience with Cingular, so after a bit of research I decided that it must be because I was using an old CDMA phone and Cingular was switching everything to GSM and my phone was basically obsolete. This seemed like a plausable explanation since it seemed like my service had steadily degenerated over time, to the point that it was finally all but unusable anywhere in town. So I decided to give Cingular another try with a phone upgrade, this time a new Motorola 3-band GSM camera phone that would be free with another 2 year contract and which the know-nothing at the Cingular store said would work much better than my old phone.

After a few day of testing the phone, it became apparent that this phone had all the same problems and that Cingular's GSM network was just as bad in my area as it's CDMA network. So, before my 1-month return period had elapsed, I decided to take the phone back and switch providers. This is where my recent troubles really begin.

The "Changing Wireless Companies" incident
I have heard from my Canadian and European friends, that when they want to change cell phone providers or get a different phone, it's almost as easy as simply going to the store and picking out a new phone. They don't have ridiculous rate plans with 2 year contracts and limited minutes. They pay for the service and then they get to use it and when they don't want to use it anymore, the get to stop paying for it and they don't get charged hundred of dollars just because they changed their mind. I know for most American's that's probably pretty hard to imagine. For some reason, we in the "land of the free" seem to rejoice at the opportunity to be fucked up the ass by one corporation after another, and then swallow the regurgitated ass-jizz of lies and warped half-truths they use to justify said ass-fucking. Nowhere is this more evident than in the current landscape of cellular phone service providers. But I digress.

You see, when I finally decided to switch cellular providers, I was on a schedule. I was 2 weeks away from leaving on vacation and I decided I wanted a phone that could access the internet while I was away, specifically to check my work e-mail for late-breaking emergencies.

I started my phone search and quickly narrowed my search to two choices. There were the so-called "Blackberry" phones and then there was the Treo 650 Smartphone from Handspring. Both had the QWERTY keyboard layout I required, but in the end, the fact that the Treo 650 ran the PalmOS won me over as I was already a very happy owner of ancient and battered Handspring Visor Deluxe, which I got for x-mas in 2000 and has seldom been idle for more than a week or two since. The idea of being able to use all my Palm apps and finally integrate my Outlook and cell-phone address books was really just one of the killer apps for this device. The real, honest reason I wanted the Treo 650 was to satisfy my geek aesthetics.

A brief detour into my feeble consumer mind
In addition to my cell phone adventures, I've recently become quite the fan of HBO's new series Entourage. I'm not going to explain anything about the show here, but in it, there's two characters vying for the same girl and each pretending to be interested and knowledgable about whatever she seems interested in. In once scene one of the guys bests the other by noting some obscure facts about an African country the girl will be visiting. She had just mentioned it for the first time, so there was no obvious way he could have prepared his knowledge ahead of time. When the girl is out of earshot, the defeated guy looks at the other and says something like, "how'd you know that?." Smirking, the other guy holds up what appears to be a Blackberry-type phone diplaying the Google homepage and says, "I Googled it bitch!"

It was after seeing this scene that immediately decided that the time had come to get a Blackberry or similar phone that could access the web, and more specifically, Google. Google is the real killer app that I wanted when I decided to get this phone. I'm always getting into arguements with my friends over one thing or another (a major problem when you and all your friends are know-it-alls) and we always end up agreeing to Google it to decide the arguement. Often we are nowhere near a computer, so it would be nice to be able to whip out my phone and query Google on the spot. Basically it's a real-life Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's funny that out of all the sci-fi stuff I've read about and imagined seeing happen in my lifetime, the Hitchiker's guide is something I never really believed would be possible in my lifetime. And yet, that's what Google on a phone amounts to. This is going to be huge. Please don't blow it Google. But I digress.

Back to my cell phone problems...
So it was with these visions of technological grandeur that embarked upon my little adventure to get my cell new cell phone and have my service switched to a new provider, preferably without losing my number.

Please check back in a day or two for Part II of this story.

PART II
After doing a quick survey of the top Google results for cellular rate plans, I decided to go with www.myrateplan.com. They had some of the best rate plans and they had the Treo 650 in stock. On the monday, a full 5 days before I was scheduled to leave for North Carolina, I ordered the phone. The web site said to allow up to a week but that it was usually faster and they offered 2 day shipping. So I placed my order and paid extra for 2 day FedEx shipping. There was a place to include order notes on the order form, so I specified that they should notify me if the phone could not be delivered to my door by Friday because I would need to purchase a different phone from someone local instead.

Several hours after placing my order, the order status page on the web site said that my order had passed the "review" stage and was now in the "processing" stage where it would be packed and shipped. Then a few hours later I checked again, hoping there would already be a tracking number. Instead, the order status showed that it had been reset back to the "review" phase. So to clear up any problems as quickly as possible, I decided to give them a call.

After a somewhat difficult search, I found their contact number on the web and called what was almost certainly a call center in India. After 30 to 40 minutes on hold, I finally spoke to a polite woman with an Indian accent. She asked me the usual variety of personal questions to look up my order and verify my identity, then asured me that the order would be at my house by Wednesday and that there were no problems with the order. Reluctatly, I chose to believe her.

Wednesday came, but no phone. I was miffed. I called them again. I waited 40 minutes on hold again. This time I spoke to someone who told me the order was sent to Verizon for processing and that they were waiting on Verizon to approve the phone contract so the phone could be "released" to me. I reiterated the fact that I ordered the phone on the condition that it would be delivered by Friday and that if this was not possible that they should cancel the order. I was again assured that the phone would arrive by Friday. This time, I knew it was bullshit, but there was nothing I could do. There was no time to order another phone online and I wasn't ready get ass-fucked on a rate plan from someone local, where it would cost me $100 more for the same phone with the same rate plan. So I just had to wait.

In the meantime, I was also writing similar and increasingly angry inquries to the customer support department via their e-mail form at www.whereismyorder.com. I wrote one on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Not once during the entire course of this story did I ever get a reply to any of these e-mail messages.

Thursday came and still no phone, so I called them again. Waited on hold again. Heard the same bunch of bullhit again. This time they gave me Verizon's number and a "backoffice order number" which I was supposed to able to give to Verizon to expedite the order.

So I called verizon. Verizon, it seems, has their customer service shit together. I spent very little time on hold and spoke to a customer service person who was both helpful, and knew what they hell they were doing. They told me they had only just received the order from myrateplan.com the day before and it was scheduled to be processed automatically sometime later that day. However, he was able to expedite my order immediately and complete Verizon's portion of the process while I was still on the phone. I now had my approval and they told me I could call my rate plan company and tell them everything was ready and they could send me the phone. So again, I called the myrateplan.com and waited on hold and answered the security questions and this time was told that there was nothing they could do to expedite the order and that it would have to wait until the end of the day when the batch processes would grab my approval code and my order would then move to the "processing" phase and my phone would be packed and shipped.

I was furious by this point. I had been assured multiple times that my phone would be at my house by Friday, but there seemed little chance of that now. There was still a chance of getting it before I left for the airport on Saturday, but only if I could get the shipping changed to special "Saturday Delivery" from FedEx. I asked the rate plan people if they could do this since they had clearly screwed up in not getting my order to Verizon the day I placed it. They could not do this and they could not guarantee that my phone would ship out that day for overnight delivery either.

I hung up on them.

I wrote another nasty email to them.

Friday came. The phone did not arrrive.

Frustrated, dejected, I went to Best Buy and bought a Nokia Shorty with "pay-as-you-go" service through Virgin Wireless. I brought it home, activated it and added $20 to my balance all within 15 minutes.

I smiled for the first time in a week.

Not only was my new Nokia Shorty cheap and quick and painless to set up, but the quality of the cellular service itself was leaps and bounds above what I had come to expect from Cingular Wireless. I have since learned that Virgin Wireless uses the Sprint PCS network and that this network has coverage that is second only to Verizon. I has since served me very well and my recommendations have already resulted in two of my friends getting new cell phones, one of whom is a first time cellular buyer. Since I have gotten referral credit for both of them, I have only had to add money to my phone once so far and I've been using it quite a bit. Pay-as-you-go service is still not as economical in the long run or for people who use their phone for over 300 minutes per month, but for light users such as myself or for those who want to try some different carriers first, or for those who simply hate the idea of cellular contracts too much to sign one, they are truly a godsend.

Unfortunately, the Spint PCS network has zero coverage where I was vacationing in Banner Elk, so despite getting a phone in time, I was unable to use it on vacation. Still, I've been quite happy with my Virgin Wireless service and phone, though I still REALLY want a Treo 650. I'm simply going to put it off until Verizon's and everyone else's rate plans get a bit better and I have time to try the Verizon network where I live. SO, Verizon should be pissed off at myrateplan.com because they definitely lost a sale. The Treo 650 finally arrived at my house the Monday after I left for vacation. I was actually still looking forward to having it when I got home, but despite the effort of my friend who had called FedEx and asked them to hold it, it had already been returned by FedEx by the time I got back. So it was not meant to be. Everyone at every level dropped the ball in this one so they will have to wait for my money. Too bad.

Followup: As of May 20, 2006, I'm still using my Nokia Shorty. The battery is still good and the lexan body of the phone has proven to be nearly indestructible, a fact that I sometimes demonstrate to friends by tossing it on hard floors and stomping on it (I use a vinyl screen protector to keep scratches off the display). My only real complaint with Virgin Wireless service is that it is a bit more expensive that it reasonably should be, and they jut started charging for text messaging. That really sucks for people like me, who manage a server and get status messages sent to their phone via SMS. Oh well, I'm staying strong and waiting until the carriers start charging reasonable prices for cellular data access and then I'll get a smartphone.