Cell Phone Saga

Until last week Virginia and I have been with Sprint ever since we entered the cell phone family of users back in 1999. My old Palm device died recently and it was time for new phones anyway, so I decided to get one of those "smart phones" that is a phone, pda, and can do email, surf, etc. Sprint's reward for our 8 years of loyalty was to give me a deal just slightly less attractive than what they would use to entice a new customer, so we were done with Sprint. One kid uses Cingular and the other Verizon, so we decided to look at those providers... at least we could call one of them for free.




We settled on Verizon for a couple of reasons: 1) anecdotal testimony indicates that Verizon has the best signal in our area, and 2) a very helpful sales guy who got me this phone (Samsung i730 - last years model) free! It indeed had all the functions I desired, so I could sync with Outlook on my computer; I could also do email, etc. from this phone in the future if I want to by simply adding that service. However, the design was not easy to use, and it had a tendency to lock up once in a while, so I decided to take it back and buy another phone I had looked at.



This one, the Pantech PN820, is much more suited to me. It's a "clam shell" design, so it's not as bulky, and it still syncs nicely with

Outlook. And, with a sale and a rebate, I ended up getting it at a little less than half the price... not free, but much better than anything Sprint had to offer.

Maybe the best thing about the whole deal was getting to keep our old numbers. Having to get a new cell # might have been reason to stay with Sprint... or not.

That's all for now. Happy talking, wireless buddies!!