cell phones

[digitaldiscipline]

okay, office shakeup seems to be taking place, including remote work environment. this means i might need a cell phone.

i do not grok the ways of wireless.

what do i look for? what do i avoid?

i figure i need voice mail and basic address book capabilities. beyond that, i want it to be relatively non-draconian in terms of costs.

yes, this means i might finally be shedding the last vestiges of my Luddite-hood.

Comments

[onezumi.livejournal.com]

Holy shit have you picked a subject I can talk about at length.

My friends' business is knowing cell phones and hes tested over 50 of them on various networks.

Avoid T Mobile.

I did a lengthy article about why they are the bottom of the barrel on my site awhile ago. In short, you have to pay more and dont get nights free, and dont get voicemail. The connection is markedly bad compared to sprint or verizon. The one month my birth mother had t mobile was the month I was unable to contact her.

I swear by sprint, they have free and clear which means you don't get crackly static. But I know some people don't like them either. My friend had tried them all and rates them as such:

1. Sprint
2. Verizon or Cingular
3. Nextel (They were a walkie talkie network RETRO FITTED for cellular.) They are ok but expect to pay out the ass for basic phones, and their plans are more expensive than mine.

The rest he has such an awful time with and paid so much that hed not even list them. And he becomes VIOLENT about t mobile.

I test verizon phones at my job and they are ok in this area. But I'd not give up my sprint for it..verizons data network is much slower than sprint and the phones inferior. I'll be testing another wave this week and none of them we can stand. Also verizon is crackly.

If I were you I'd look at Sprint, Verizon or Cingular. It really depends on the connection strength in your area. Here cingular is TERRIBLE since its not really here. Its renting space from another provider and my friend got a $6000 phone bill for one month because he was double charged or something from both providers. They never fixed the problem and she had to pay.

Note that a big issue that people do not realize is that it does depend on your phone. If you buy a shitty nokia or samsung for sprint you will have a terrible time, but if you opt for a sanyo, you will most likely have a good signal.

The T Mobile article on my site is here: http://onezumi.com/oni/html/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=67

[onezumi.livejournal.com]

Ack..wrote that too quickly. Another thing you will notice is that with cellular stuff there are a lot of conflicting views. Just because in on area, the network I regard as crap may be the best one. If you google you should probably be able to come up with a chart of cellular coverage in your area.

And, if you aren't worried about data connection, then a lot of the issues I have with different ones, you won't have. :)