New Treonaut Reporting in :)

[mcconahey]

First of all hello to everyone here and thank you for running this excellent site which helped me with the decision to purchase a Treo. Now, my Treonaut story:

I have needed to purchase a new cell phone for the last year and after doing extensive research I finally settled on the pda/smartphone bandwagon. I already knew several Treonauts that work at my company and and I read through the posts and forum on treonauts.com (thank's for the info!). When Palm announced the 680 I knew I had found my phone. It has a smaller form factor and upgraded hardware which solved most of the criticisms I had with my co-worker's Treos. It also has free software designed to work with googlemaps which I'm obsessed with. The next question was whether to buy one through Cingular or get what I really wanted - a copper unlocked Treo. Also where to find one and when I could afford the hefty price tag.

Several months later my parents and I were in Boston waiting for our plane for a two week trip to visit my sister in Iceland and to celebrate Christmas and New Years. We had 45 minutes till boarding so I decided to check out the shops in Logan airport. I went through the underground tunnel to the terminal where the shops are where I immediately found a Palm store with the copper Treo 680 in stock - only two of them left. After deliberating on the price tag for twenty minutes I gave in and triumphantly headed back to the gate.

Immediately I opened the box to discover that everything was in it except the Treo! With 15 minutes left till boarding I rushed back to the store where the sales people were naturally quite confused about the missing equipment. After much hemming and hawing they gave me a new box which we confirmed was complete and I sprinted back to the plane where they were waiting for me to board. I had nearly missed the flight and had to do a good bit of running (I can use the exercise anyway) but I finally succeeded in getting my Treo!

Because I had an unlocked Treo on the first day I was able to immediately set up pre-paid service with Vodaphone by simply purchasing a sim chip for $30 dollars at the Smaralind mall near Reykjavik. This took care of all our communication needs for the rest of the trip and was key for coordinating activities with my sister and arranging visits to a geothermal plant and game development studio.

Since my return to the US I examined the plan options between Cingular and T-Mobile and decided to try out T-Mobile since they are $20 a month cheaper due to Cingular's expensive PDA Data plan. Tomorrow the sim chip should arrive. I will test out their service for the trial period and report my findings. If they don't work out I figure I will switch to Cingular with the MediaMax data plan which I just found out works with a Treo through this forum. If I do this it it will not only be the same price but also have 150 more minutes, with roll over and 200 free messages so I may do it anyway.

Has anyone else used T-Mobile with a Treo? Cingular keeps pushing that they have better coverage and call quality and the roll over minutes. I don't know anyone who uses T-Mobile for voice service but I do know several people who use them for Sidekick data and have had no problems. I'm really looking forward to finally having a device that has internet everywhere!!

[bigcatny]

If you read or search through the threads you will find many threads about using T-mobile with the treos. You might also want to look around the threads at treocentral.com

Try this one
http://discussion.treocentral.com/sh...d.php?t=131237

Of course people use treos on t-mobile.

The plan I use is $39.99/mo for 1000 anywhere anytime minutes. plus $5.99/mo T-Zones plan which gives me unlimited internet access. (of course T-mo will deny this and try to make you buy the exact same service for $19.99/mo) Up to you. Total is about $56/mo incl tax.

I don't do SMS but the add on plan is only a few bucks. I think you'll find it SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper than Cingular. The service I find is pretty much interchangable. T-mo is slightly stronger in the east and cingular is stronger in california since that's where each company originally started.

I fly all over the country and all over the world and everything works fine.

If your actually worried about getting the best coverage you should be on VERIZON which admittedly kicks everyone's b**t's in the US. But then you couldn't have a 680......

[bbhank]

Oh yes I have a 680 also and am crazy about the machine but beware, if you havent found already that T-Mobile's customer service stinks but their technical support shines as much. Here's what happened to me. I'll paste this copy of my complaint that might eventually having to go to the FTC if they don't do something positive:

I'm finding out about this the hard way. I was sold a T-Mobile plan by an "authorized" dealer in a kiosk with full T-mobile logos and all in a major mall in Austin Texas. Everything looked like T-Mobile. He was from another country who was international savvy and told me about GSM phones and that T-Mobile is a German based company. He said I could get very reasonably priced internet service with this service by purchasing the $5.99 T-Zones service with my phone package and swapping out the SIM card with a PDA, a Treo 680 that was given to me by a friend. I would never have bought the service if that were not the case and told him I had been looking but was not very phone savvy. He assured me that this was the way to go and I bought the package. The unlimited nights and weekends was a real good thing to have.
I used the internet and added various apps, such as GoogleMaps, kMeteo, Express, Quick News, and xWeather. Everything worked fine until last week when without warning T-Mobile reset this service to where the internet access became quite useless. After some intense calls with their tech support and 5 hours (!) in their store I find that this service was never supposed to work with the open internet but just with their crippled access for the junk they try and sell to kids, y'know - ringtones and other the like. I have a Treo 680, a business machine, not an enhanced social device.
Once it was ascertained that no real internet access was available with this service any more I offered to put their ridiculously expensive full internet service on. They refused to do that due to the plan and "spending limit" associated with it I had. The store personnel called their customer service which refused to budge on any of it, not doing anything but wasting more of everybody's time. I had had the PDA on their service for more than the 14 day limit for returning the contract and going to another provider so they refused to let me out without a $200 penalty.
In addition the store personnel informed me that they were not responsible for the actions of the "authorized dealer". They were not happy with the way T-Mobile handles this because it almost always results in dissatisfied customeers coming into the stores having bought their services at these "authorized dealers" who will say anything to sell a phone plan. I will admit that the folks who sold me the plan were internationally phone knowlegable and personable but they were taking advantage of a loophole in the T-Mobile service and did not tell me about either the 14 day limit or that T-Mobile would not allow me th put on full internet access if this did not work for any reason. Once this has happened T-Mobile has refused to do ANY customer service that gets me internet service including sell me even month by month ridiculously priced prepaid for cash. This part is totally appalling. It also needs to be pointed out that their technical support is outstanding and their customer support is just the opposite. The store reps got the same line of crap as I did when I called and their hands were tied in the process of attempting to remediate this issue positively. The amount of energy and time wasted could have easily been used to get a positive solution with some good customer service. I feel that with all the effort and the fact that the seller basically misinformed me about the nature of the internet plan he was selling, T-Mobile corporate customer support would have been much better served by accepting the offered cash - even though the price was way to high - and putting me on their major internet service and/or saying here is a couple of free months free service and we're sorry for the misrepresentation by OUR "authorized dealer". Please come back and tell your friends that we operate positively, not that we will make great effort to see that our customers get beaten up if there are problems with our services.

[forgot]

Whew..sorry to hear about your bad experience, but thanks for posting it. It can serve as a warning to other potential Treonauts.

[Maris]

Gosh, bbhank, what a story! I would be so upset if that happened to me. However, that is not my experience with t-Mobile. I have been on the T-zones unlimited data plan for a few years and have always been able to access the Internet, and now I have the 680, it is no different. I use Google Maps and other Web applications all the time. Not sure why you would have been told it isn't available. I have read where some areas of the country require a proxy server be entered to get full service, but other areas, like mine, do not.

You might just go to their Web site which allows you to change plans any time you want and bypass the hard-nosed customer service reps you have been dealing with. One of the reasons I have stayed with t-Mobile is their pricing and the ability to change plans as needed (as well as great coverage).