This crap $14 Nokia phone was left on for 4 days straight when we were in the hospital having our baby. During that time I called every single family member I had. When we got home and back to the charger the thing was still running like a champ. No smart phone is going to have battery life like that.

Since I’m not required to have an internet enabled phone to do my job I find that the crappy phones that can go a week before needing a charge work great for me.

Alan

I should also note that it works great as an ebook reader, which I’ve been using to read a couple of books. I did this with the blackberry as well, but this screen is much easier on the eyes (larger/more text on a page).

So while I see your point that it’s not a toy, it’s more like a multitool for my usage… then again I also see tools as toys so I guess it’s a wash.

1. Sales people are sales people. Whatever they may be like off company hours, on company hours their jobs are to 1. sell things and 2. not allow returns. Furthermore, the contracts are written to help them with (2). Things like human decency don’t factor into the on-the-job equation.

2. Sprint sales folks will lie to you. I had a 2 year Sprint plan in Raleigh, hooked in by the $WORK company discount they offered (see (1.1). A few months into my contract, I got a very steep bill because I’d run well over my monthly minute allowance. I contacted them, asked to adjust my minutes up. The phone rep said, “It’s done.” The following month, I used the minutes like I had them. Imagine my shock when I got the bill, the allowance hadn’t been increased and the phone tech I talked to gave me the “well, it was never adjusted and I have no evidence that you called in” line.

3. Verizon’s coverage is probably the best in the country, but their reps can treat you pretty badly. I walked into a Verizon store in Huntsville, AL, and got in line. an older couple wandered in after I did, but the sales rep made a beeline for them, completely ignoring me. The three of them spent the next 2-3 *HOURS* examining Every. Single. Phone. On. The. Shelves., inquiring about battery life and ringtone volume because “he can’t hear ringtones”. After half an hour, I approached the tech support desk and was told I was “next on the list”. Gee, thanks. After 45 minutes, I started pacing laps around the store floor to see if I could get their attention. After an hour, the store manager came out and told me to stop pacing, that I was next in line. My complaints fell on deaf ears. I paced for most of the rest of the time until told (again) to stop, that it was making people nervous. I’ve generally had better response time from Verizon staff, but that incident annoyed me.

4. When buying a phone, it’s probably best to test functionality before you buy it. That won’t tell you if it is going to switch to and from roaming every 5 minutes, but it can give you a good feel for the UI. When my wife and I purchased our blackberry Curves at the Verizon store, we tried the newest touch-screen blackberry available. Neither of us could get it to scroll, it repeated keystrokes, and generally was an annoyance to use. The older, less fancy Curve, acted exactly as one would expect, so that’s what we got. It’s been quite a pleasant device to use. Compare that with the Treo that preceded it. I had had Palm PDAs in the past, and had had good experiences with them. The lack of a grafiti pad, and the tendency of the phone to freeze when it had trouble picking up a signal, contributed to my replacing it at the end of the contract with a blackberry.

5. From all the reports I’ve heard, it would probably have been best to wait for the next generation ‘Droid. Early adopters get to sort through all of the design flaws that haven’t yet been identified, much less solved.

6. Maybe it’s because I’m of partial Scottish ancestry, or maybe it’s the economy, but I’m starting to desire having just a regular, cheap, crappy phone without the monthly data plan. It’s not like I irc from the phone, or that I’m going to log into a server somewhere and fix it from the Metro train.

7. If $WORK wants me available 24×7, they can jolly well pony up for a work phone. There’s no way I’m spending *MY* hard-earned cash on *THEIR* leash.

At the end of the day, I’ve decided that a phone is just a tool, not a toy, and that one service provider is probably just as mediocre as another service provider. Sometimes you get lucky and they treat you like a human instead of another number. Most of the time they treat you like another annoyance to be dealt with as quickly and (to them) painlessly as possible.

Me, cynical? naaaaaawwwwww………..