Taking a leap of faith - Goodbye Verizon, Hello Cingular!

Of course, I will have to suck it up when it comes to the bane of a majority of American cell phone users, the money I will pay to escape the bonds of imprisonment with this last mobile provider’s contract.

But, sometimes to have a better quality of life, a little hurt in the wallet is worth it, especially if the long-term benefits truly enhance your quality of life, as I’m hoping my new service plan will.

As for finally having a clear signal and being able to actually hold a call where I live, for more than two minutes – I’m impressed. I talked for an hour to a friend last night, and not one dropped call in my tiny basement living space, where before, I could hardly hold a conversation over my Verizon mobile. And this has been my only phone since I moved here. I don’t have a landline to fall back on, which made it that much more disastrous when I couldn’t even get the basics I’d expect from a cellular provider.

I chose the Cingular 8525, the Windows Mobile Pocket PC Phone -- I know I could have gone with a much cheaper model of phone, but that's just not me. I always want all of the bells and whistles, access to the Internet at all times, text messaging, email and multimedia capabilities. So, instead of another Treo (even though Cingular offers them in similar models, I felt too burned and hesitant to give these Palm models another try), I went for something different to the tune of about $450 before taxes and activation fee.

I don't like it that this one runs on Windows, since I have a Mac, but I was willing to make a concession since I do have Virtual PC, which allows my Mac to run Windows programs and because it’s almost impossible to find phones (except for the still elusive iPhone that Apple dangles above us like a carrot) that work well with Macs.

However, when I connected my phone to my Apple PowerBook with the USB cable, popped in and installed the ActiveSync software from the cd and then attempted to sync my laptop to this mobile machine last night, my computer said it could not locate the device - okay, this could be bad, but I was so damned happy to get a signal (and tired last night) that I did not focus too much on it; not going to jump the gun, because maybe there is an easy fix out there. (Et voila - sure enough, I did later find a potential fix via a Google search, which resulted in a website featuring third-party software built for the purpose of helping Macs and many types of PC mobile devices talk to one another: http://pocketmac.net)

I also tried a number of times to sign in to a few different email accounts with usernames and passwords I knew for a fact were correct, but, no matter how many times I tried, I was denied access. I’m thinking this could be because the customer service reps told me it takes 48-72 hours to get everything in place with the account. I guess time will tell.

Other than that, I LOVE that it combines the options of letting me access the Internet via broadband AND WiFi. My old Treo was only broadband-accessible. So that's a bonus to me.

When I showed the manager my military ID card, I also garnered a 19 percent monthly discount off my bill. Suh-WEET! Since my plan is around $120 per month, this is a significant enough savings, over time, for me.

Plus, Cingular has a store that is practically so close to me, I could walk there, and Verizon did not. I think there was an obvious difference in the level of customer service I experienced from the beginning.

When I asked if I still had to punch in a combination of keys each month to update the phone on the network, the guy just looked at me and laughed and said, "Nope, that's a Verizon thing." Apparently, my new device is smart enough to do all of that without my human intervention. Even cooler. I’m all for this non-preschool version of a Smartphone.

Having gotten used to the Treo, I figured I might have a slight learning curve with the Windows Mobile phone, but it’s pretty easy to navigate, perhaps even more so for devout Windows users.

So, Verizon, consider me a customer divorced from you, happy, and with good riddance.

P.S. Okay, maybe one other gripe I do have is that when I had my Treo, I could easily access radio stations, podcasts and other content from one basic screen, and, as far as I can tell, this is not available on the Cingular network?