New Handspring Treo 180 and T-Mobile / Voicestream service

EDIT on 3/12/2003: Just discovered that the Treo 180 has been discontinued, so the links below do not work.

Though I had sadly a bunch of valuable stuff stolen in Estonia, two of the replaceable  things that I have been, well, eager to replace are my cell phone and PDA (Palm Pilot).

My new cell phone and plan: Handspring Treo 180 and T-Mobile /
Voicestream service

After stumbling upon the amazon.com wireless section and noting an amazing after-rebate price of $149 for the Handspring Treo 180 (phone + PDA), I had to grab it 🙂  I even shelled out an extra $11 or so to get expedited 2 day shipping… so I should get the phone on Wednesday.

My experiences so far with T-Mobile / Voicestream

This, of course, hasn’t stopped the relevant wireless carrier — T-Mobile / Voicestream — from overeagerly activating my account and starting the clock on my monthly bill even before Amazon shipped the darn thing!  Sheesh. And adding insult to injury, when I received a “we’ve shipped your phone” e-mail from Amazon today, I noticed that my new phone number listed was in the 514 area code.  San Francisco, where I live, has a *415* area code.  What the heck?  Do they have folks manually entering in area codes or something?  Sheesh!

• I placed a call to the number listed on the e-mail.  That, however, was the ACTIVATION number; I had to call the customer service number.  Okay.

• I called the cs number, waited for thankfully not-too-long, and spoke with a polite but unsurprisingly not-all-that-informed rep.  She changed my calling plan with no probs, and also assigned me a new number without much hassle. But when it came time to adjust my billing period… whoops!

• Apparently, their computers can’t assign a billing period that goes from the first of a month to the end of the month.  So I had to accept a billing period from the 2ND of the month to the 1st of the next month.  Oh well, I guess that’s not too painful.
• And to their credit, I was issued an one-time extra 100 anytime minutes to make up for the early billing (before my phone arrives).

What I get from T-Mobile / Voicestream (my calling plan)

So now I’m on their T-Zone Talk and Text $29.95 plan, which includes 300 anytime minutes, unlimited weekend minutes, 1 meg of T-zone (limited “internet”) access, 300 text messages (additional at 5 cents per), and no extra charge for long distance or nationwide roaming.  So on the weekends, I can yack it up with
friends across the country for free.  Of course, with BigZoo offering 2.9 cent-per-minute long distance on my landline and with my Treo having only an expected battery life of 2.5 hours talking-at-a-time, that’s not SO exciting, but oh well 🙂

To be continued…

I’ll keep you posted on how stuff goes when I get my Treo and try out the wireless service; hopefully the reception is decent in SF, and hopefully my friends get far-fewer “all circuits busy” messages when they try to reach me.