The annoyances I listed last week about the Blackberry still hold, but the device is genuinely useful — its usefulness diminishes as the service costs go up, however. The dealbreaker for me was the $65/month cost for service from Cingular.
And then today, T-Mobile made me an offer I couldn’t resist (for the time being): their service is $29. When the taxes are added in, their service is nearly half the cost of Cingular. Their equipment cost is more, but the rep offered to match Cingular’s price if I kept my service past the 30-day return period; and to sweeten the deal they waived the activation fee — something that Cingular wouldn’t do, even though I was adding the Blackberry to an existing account in good standing.
At this point, I’m not moving my Cingular voice service over to T-Mobile — the T-Mobile voice plan has fewer minutes for the same price as my Cingular plan. Mix and match is the way to go here.
We’ll see how I like this arrangement over the next week; I quickly grew used to the device despite the inundation of spam. In an era where hotels charge for internet access, I can see the attraction of getting email and web everywhere and not taking the laptop along unless its necessary (like this weekend, when I used it for video editing). In ordinary circumstances, I take my laptop along on trips for email and web, and little else. My next trip, to Austin next month, will be sans-laptop, assuming that I keep this T-Mobile Blackberry.
Lastly, I should point out that T-Mobile was much more customer-oriented than Cingular. When I was at the Cingular store, the salesman kept turning to other customers leaving me standing there waiting to get my device activated, they couldn’t get their computers figured out, and they were not very knowledgable. T-Mobile was exactly the opposite; and I’m also pleased to note that their website supports Safari on the Mac rather than being Windows-only.
We’ll see — the saga continues…
