Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Mobile contract up time for a new phone right? What to do?

Not that easy. I have a Blackberry Pearl. It is small. I can still see the letters and type pretty well with my right hand thumb. Of course I can only have the T-Mobile network. There are many places in Connecticut where there is simply no service. It does work well in New York and most other cities to which I travel. And it is enabled such that when I travel abroad I can get service quite easily (although I do move to a local SIM card). I do use it primarily for email and phone calls but find myself using the internet function more and more. And it has no music player (ok it is 2 years old now or nearly).

So feeling that I am BB leaning guy I went to Verizon to check out the new BB Storm. How T-Mobile does not sell this phone is a mystery to me. What is it with phone manufacturers that they feel compelled to single provide service (i.e. Apple/AT & T for a long time and BB Storm Verizon)??? And Verizon can crow about its 3G service all it wants but we Nutmeg state residents won’t see 3G in Connecticut until mid-year 2009 at best I am told.

We have a family type plan and at present the rest of the family are on Verizon and they seem to love the service. Of course Verizon is more expensive. And they want to charge for the Storm but T-Mobile who does NOT have the phone I want will offer the phone for free with a contract sign up. OK – I HATE THIS GAME.

Now the Apple cultists will come out and implore me to come out of the dark side and come over to the iPhone because it is the greatest thing EVER. What is it about Apple/Mac/iPhone people that make them appear like they are all one step away from wearing long robes and singing kumbaya? Apple is cool – the Mac is a good operating system as is the iPhone a good phone. But both are far from perfect and believe it or not the Blackberry Storm has some things to offer that the iPhone cannot touch like a really good email set up. The touch screen seems adaptable and something I would get used to fairly quickly. But the BB Storm music player is far from an i-Pod application (MP3’s are so yesterday) and the internet browser is a better experience on the iPhone than the Storm.

So what to do? You can probably tell that I am leaning to going with the BB Storm and consequently Verizon service. But this is not the kind of choice I think we should be faced with. What say you?