Mobile Rage

\\BEGIN VENT...

After doubling my cellphone bill by calling home for five minutes a day from Little Rock, Melissa and I decided to get new plans. We had a couple of "Ancient" Nokias and an expired contract with Cingular. Due to a corporate discount, we decided on going with AT&T for the next year or so. I got a nifty Motorola cameraphone, but they were out of stock of the Motorola Mel wanted, so she took a comparably priced LG one as a temporary. "I don't care what phone I get, as long as it can ring with the Harry Potter theme," Melissa told the salesperson, who told us it was free to send our own pictures and MP3's to our phones.

The phones were cool, and we spent a few days going over their features, transferring our massive phonebooks and whatnot. I even trimmed down some of my favorite MP3's and sent them to my phone to use as ringtones. (Fastball's "You're an Ocean" and "Grim Grinning Ghosts" from DisneyWorld's Haunted Mansion.)

Well, it's two weeks later, and they are still out of stock of Melissa's phone, which she really doesn't like. For some reason the agent couldn't even figure out, her phone rang with hip hop music no matter which ringtone she selected.

Then we got an E-bill for our first few days of service. First of all, the guy signed us up for Voice Dialing plans which we did not ask for. Secondly, it's NOT free to send yourself pictures and MP3's, its 2 cents per KB of data. So while a picture cost me 16 cents, I was billed $22.80 for sending myself a ringtone!!

Melissa's dad went up to the store to talk to the sales rep, who promised to contact us and make things right. What did this consist of? A canned text message to my phone at 8:30 that night, suggesting that I add a $24.95/mo Data Plan to my phone.

Before I do anything, I'm trying a geek thing. My Motorola has a 5-pin mini-USB socket, leading me to believe that I can probably upload and download pics and ringtones DIRECTLY from the phone, without all the hassle of (1)uploading them to the web, (2)emailing the link to my phone's e-mail address, and (3)downloading it to my phone from the hyperlink (thus avoiding any data transfer fees AT&T might want to charge). The amazing part is that this socket is ENTIRELY UNDOCUMENTED on the user's manual, which comes as no surprise.

The lesson here is to AVOID AT&T AT ALL COSTS. We're dropping them if this crap isn't sorted out by next week. Cingular has always been good to us before, and Verizon is tops in customer service, so try them if you have a choice.

\\End Vent.