It's always something...

If the computer system at check in isn't crashing, you're leaving your brand new Treo 700p in your hotel room.

I'm viewing the second point mostly as an opportunity. The only thing I'll be missing if it isn't returned is the incremental pictures I've taken of my kids that are not backed up. Other than that, I'm almost happy to be rid of that poor excuse for a "productivity" device. In the end, it's my own fault. I had a Treo 600 for a number of years that I was relatively happy with. I have a predilection for destroying them; in 2 years I've had 3 600s. The first one most likely ended up somewhere on 280 after a short ride on the roof of my car. The second was crushed under the wheels of a golf cart while playing around with Mr. Raniere (but at least we were in Hawaii). Miraculously, that was not the death of the phone. The case cracked and the display slightly tweaked, it worked fine. It was subsequently stolen out of my desk during one of the nightly junky break ins at the old Adteractive office. I still have the 3rd and it works fine. I decided to switch phones for 2 reasons. First, I really wanted the ability to receive sync updates via wireless. Second, the TMobile network, at least in the Bay Area, sucks. Since Good Tech no longer sells a reasonably priced sync option, I decided I would buy a Treo 700w. This meant switching to the lowest tech network of all, Verizon. But, life is about tradeoffs. I was willing to give up some sound quality, security, and international compatibility for better coverage and the 700w. After having my 700w for about a week, I started to experience one of the all-too-common, super annoying, nebulous Microsoft OS errors. "There has been a fatal error in: device.exe". Looking through the details of the stack trace, it would appear there was some kind of memory leak (my best guess anyway). Each crash required me to restart the phone. Yee ha. So, Verizon replaced it. The day after I received it, same error. Just to be sure that I wasn't doing anything to cause the error, we didn't even setup the sync or add any software, but to no avail. So, I called my friendly, and quite lovely, Verizon rep, Anna Yam. She obtained approval from her manager for me to trade the phone for a 700p even though I was not beyond the equipment exchange time frame. The scene at the Verizon store on Pine in San Francisco was pretty hilarious (ironically speaking) and annoying at the same time. The current Verizon ad campaign touts the size of the support behind it's network. Well, just hope you never need anything from customer service at a bricks-and-mortar location. There were 4 people queued in the velvet rope obstacle course at the end of which were 4 customer service terminals, of which ONE was occupied by a human being. Whatever the issue, resolution required that the lone representative disappear behind the back wall for seemingly long periods of time. I really wanted to take a picture of the completely empty service counter with the poor bastards lined up in front of it. But I was about the give back the phone I would have used to capture the moment, and I didn't have an SD card with me. Finally I was the big winner, my turn at the counter. The exchange was relatively painless, Anna was located to add some veracity to my story about being granted special dispensation by the evaluation period Gods.

I figured with the 700p, I'd have a phone that is more or less a pimped out 600. Palm has much more experience building small footprint operating systems and even more important, the Palm user interface (both in terms of software and hardware) is far superior to the same from MS. I think it takes 3 additional steps on the Windows phone just to make a call when compared to the Palm OS. I had a couple of issues right away. Verizon provides a sync service that acts as a relay between the mail server and the phone. Even though I logged in and cleared out the account via the Web interface, when I setup my new phone, all of the data from the old phone was pushed down to the new one and since pretty much everyone's sync software is total crap, it created duplicate entries for everything. Swell. The next thing I noticed is that the phone started to lock up for long periods of time, occasionally for periods as long as 5 minutes. This happened most often when using SMS (which Jody and I use quite a lot). I would send a message and the phone would immediately become unresponsive. It would always recover on it's own, but talk about annoying. My next set of problems was with Verizon. Despite her stunning good looks and master of the details, Anna more or less botched the setup of my new account. My phone was listed as the secondary account to my wife's phone. Our address was entered as 360 rather than 630. These 2 things together combined to make a mess out of my first billing cycle. I had created an online account so as to avoid any unnecessary interaction with people or paper bills but could not figure out how to add Jody's phone. I called, Verizon said they would straighten it out and in the meantime, I paid my bill online deciding I would just have to wait for the paper bill to pay Jody's. That paper invoice was delivered to the nice folks at 360 Reina del Mar (assuming there is such an address) rather than my own. So, I started getting angry calls from Verizon Wireless Financial Services. Finally I managed to tell the story to every department and more or less, we're sorted now.

The thing that pisses me off is that the impetus for a move back to 1990's technology was to be able to get the 700w, which of course sucked. I wanted to switch networks, but certainly would have chosen Cingular/ATT over Verizon had it not been for the phone. Perhaps we should consider updating the phrase "Nothing grows out slower than a bad haircut" substituting cell phone plan for hair cut. 22 months and counting.... I'm going to go tomorrow and get myself a regular ol' phone. Maybe a RAZR or one of those cool switchblade-style phone like they use in the Matrix. No keyboard, no email, or any other crap I don't absolutely need. For those of you who know me, this is not what you would call typical behavior but I've hit the fill line. I'm opting for the quality primary feature over 20 mediocre productivity killers.

I'm out for now.

Peace.