As I mentioned in the last post, Jess and I got new phones – Palm Pres. After a couple of days of playing with them, we’re pretty pleased. They’re smartphones with a lot of similar functionality to an iPhone, except without all of Apple’s shady business practices. Moreover, the Pre, like any Android-based phone such as the HTC Hero, really appeals to me as a software developer because Palm is very developer-friendly. I’m going to download their SDK shortly and start playing around with writing some apps for the phone.

I’m very happy with the phone’s performance. The UI is snappy and responsive, it accepts a standard headphone plug, the phone works well, the camera is fantastic, and there is a rapidly-growing list of applications available for it, and you can actually browse the catalog on your PC, unlike the iPhone app store and the Android Market. For the iPhone and Android-based phones you can only browse the app catalogs from the handset, itself.

I mentioned the camera is great. Look at this picture I took after work this week. It’s scaled down to fit on this page. Click it for the full-size version:

While the phones, themselves, are great, getting them set up… not so much. Some would call the whole process a bit of a nightmare. Read more if you’re interesting in hearing some tales of woe that become laughable at some point.

I bought the phones from Amazon because they had far-and-away the best price, especially given that there were no mail-in rebates involved, unlike if I’d have bought them directly from Sprint or from one of those discount cell phone web sites. The process started off well. I ordered the phones on Thursday night, and on Friday morning I received an email from Amazon stating that I had to call Sprint to answer some questions before they’d authorize me for service. That’s pretty normal, and that call went very smoothly. 5-10 minutes and I was off the phone and had received a new email from Amazon stating that I had been authorized by Sprint and they’d continue processing my order. A few hours later and I was told my phones had shipped. A couple days later, on Tuesday, the phones arrived. So far so good.

I went to the Pens game on Tuesday night, so activating them would have to wait until Wednesday. Wednesday, after work, I set out to activate the phones and port over our old numbers. The details off all the times I had to call Sprint’s customer service are a bit fuzzy now due to how many menus I went through, how many English-troubled support people I talked to, and how many times I was disconnected or transferred to the wrong departement, such as the time they told me they need to escalate me to “tech support,” and transfered me to “Pay by phone.” I don’t want to make anything up, so I’ll just write about the details I remember.

On Wednesday night I called to activate and to port the numbers. This was… difficult. I spent about three hours on the phone with them and took one trip to the Sprint store.

First step: activation. I called to activate the phones. They asked for the new phones’ numbers. I gave them to them. Then they asked for the account’s PIN code. Uh-oh. The account was brand new. I never set up a pin code. One wasn’t assigned to me, either. Fantastic. The woman on the line, through her broken English, told me she could not help me and suggested I go to a Sprint store to have the phones activated. I was told to bring two forms of Photo ID. I explained that I only have one. They said that would be fine. Turns out it was, because they asked for no ID at all at the store. Anyway, at the store, the guy took a look at the phones and told me they were already activated! They certainly weren’t activated when I began the process an hour earlier. While I was there, I set up a PIN code and security question for the account then headed home to call about number porting.

Second step: number porting. When I got home from the store I called Sprint back to begin the number porting process. They asked for my phone number and my account PIN. I gave them the PIN I’d just set up in the store. Didn’t work. I told it to her again. Nope. A third try. She told me it wasn’t even close. I then asked her to read me the security question and I’d answer that. There was no security question on the account. Whatever the guy set up in the store, it didn’t take. I wonder if he changed someone else’s PIN and security question… The support person then said she could email my PIN to the email address on record for the account and I could read it back to her. Why couldn’t they do this before I had to go to the Sprint store?

So they emailed the PIN code to me, and it truly was nothing like the one I’d just set up in the store. I read it back to her and was able to begin the number porting process. This took about 90 minutes. In the end, they said the porting had been scheduled and the phones would be active with the new numbers at 11:31 and 11:34 PM. When we went to bed, Jess set the alarm for midnight so I could get up and check if it worked and put the phones on the chargers. It hadn’t worked. Our old phones had been deactivated, yes, but our new phones didn’t work. When I tried to make a call with them, I was greeted with something, “Thank you for calling American Calling Services. Please enter your PIN or press 0 to make a collect call.” Uh-oh. I went back to bed and called Sprint the next morning.

I spent an hour on the line with their support people Thursday morning getting the numbers ported correctly. The first phone went well and was up and running in 10 minutes. The second phone proved to be more troublesome. After 45 minutes, the tech guy gave up on me. He told me that my phone was probably faulty and I should send it back to Amazon. I wasn’t buying it. I noticed that the working phone had an EVDO icon on it, while the faulty one did not. I searched the web for 2 minutes and found that others have had this problem and it was not a hardware issue, but that the phone’s had not been properly provision by Sprint to include the necessary data service.

I called back at lunchtime to ask them to properly provision the phone and then reset it so it would connect. They tried, I guess, but couldn’t get it right. They suggested that I take it to a Sprint store to have it handled there. So I did just that. At the store they told me it would take about 40 minutes to get it right. I left the phone with them while I ran back to the office to throw my lunch down my throat hole. I went back 45 minutes later and they were “just finishing up.” After a couple minutes of waiting the phone was done and finally worked. Lesson learned: do not buy a cell phone online if either or both of the following are true:

• You are porting your old number to the new phone.
• Your new service plan includes a data component in addition to the voice component.

With that out of the way, It’s time to get to work on those shed pictures I promised…

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News by Jack