im getting a little sick and tired of verizon; there anti net-neutrality, ridiculous dsl practices, cell phone rape, etc. its very rare that big business do anything that doesnt actually hurt the consumer, and well vz is all for their gain.
so i have been wanting for awhile to get rid of my vz dsl and my vz cell phone service.
i have a treo 650 and my wife has a 600; her 600 is getting old and isnt working correctly and needs to be replaced. we can call the insurance to replace it with a 650, but she kinda needs more internal memory on the device as her medical apps have very large databases that typically need to be stored on the device and not on the sd card.
in the past we both had data plans for these phones but at nearly $50 a piece, we were paying $100 for blah 1xRTT data service.
now we have gone to the verizon store to inquire about replacing her 600 with a 700p, only to be told that there is no way turn the data network off on it like you could with the 600 and 650, and thus requires that you have the $50 data service. i was appalled upon hearing this. you can also pay per kb, but again, you cant turn the data network off and thus would get slammed for all those kilobits your sending/receiving without your knowledge and no way to stop it. now this is their new EV-DO network which is supposedly much faster, rep claims DSL speeds, but working at an ISP i know more about data speeds while sales people dont know the difference between kb and KB.
anyway, i find it hard to believe that palm would make a device where you could not turn off the data, so i would assume that vz changed the firmware to make it like this. i could be wrong as i have no way researched it or looked into it. i plan on going back to another vz store and playing with the 700p again and seeing what i can do in that department.
regardless, that is the straw that broke the camels back. i hate vz. so i started looking at sprint so that both of us can change over to sprint and get 700p's. that will cost a pretty penny, but in the long run it will be much better.
sprint offers a good amount of minutes between the two phones on one plan for $90. unlimited data can be had for $15 per line (it would be nice to have data again, and again, its the new *faster* EV-DO network), unlimited sms for $15 (of 500 for $8, which may be all we neeed), plus there other perks, etc. coverage shouldnt be a problem either as they use CDMA just like vz and they pretty much roam each others networks, on the cell phone providers tab.
however, one of the purposes of this thread, other than ranting, is to ask if anyone has sprint, and what the coverage and your experience is like
the only thing that vz, in my mind, has going for them is the fact that a lot of people we know have vzw as well, and they have that whole "in network" thing going on now. that and they have us by contract until Feb 2007. bastids. $175 early termination fee per line.
any thoughts or ideas? your experiences with sprint would be much appreciated.