The N900 and T-Mobile

I've started and stopped this post about a dozen times. The N900 is a relatively new device, and a lot of the times I start to write something, I think, "Oh, maybe it works this way..." and I get sidetracked by playing with my new phone for another while.

Then I get into forum posts, wikis, tutorials, etc. I completely forget I even started a blog post.

Trying not to get in over my head here, I'm going to try and write a lot of small posts instead of one big one.

First, let's talk about T-Mobile. I had the phone for a day before I got my T-Mobile SIM, so I already had 40GB of mp3s put on it, as well as a lot of games, apps, email accounts, etc.

When I took my phone in, the woman who set up my account got confused a few times, for instance when I said the power button was at the top of the device (the N900 is designed primarily for landscape use, so it's 'top' is actually what most people would probably assume is the side of the device).

She said it was a pretty big phone and one of her co-workers walked up, "It's the same as my phone" and pulled out his Touch Pro 2. That was a bit of a treat for me because even though I was thinking of getting a Touch Pro 2 until I saw it's specs, I still hadn't seen one in person. The Touch Pro 2 is a beautiful device, perhaps better looking than the N900 but the N900 can do so much more.

She pulled out the N900's keyboard, I said I wished it had an extra row of two of keys, and her co-worker complained that the TP2's keys were too big. I tried a demonstration model a little later and I have to say I like the feel of the TP2's keys better than the hard-to-press keys of the N900 and the first Touch Pro.

Then I learned a very valuable lesson in time management. The woman who was helping me, let's call her 'Summer,' had an error in her system and had to call T-Mobile and get them to finish the activation on her end. She talked to one person who put her on hold. Four minutes later, Summer hung up on the call, telling me that she shouldn't have been on hold for nearly that long.

"If I go through the whole activation with her, this could end up being a half-hour call." This call was about 6 minutes when she hung up. "The whole call shouldn't take any longer than eight minutes."

She called back, got a different person, and lo and behold, the call took almost exactly eight minutes. I've been stuck on the phone with some very slow representatives, but it's never occurred to me to just hang up and call back, hoping to get a quick or even average speed employee.

I'm also very grateful I was spared from what probably would have been at least a half an hour call with the first representative.

I've had the phone for 2 days on T-Mobile's network. It's a bit spotty. Who has service gaps on major highways between the 3rd and 4th largest (I think) cities of a state? I suppose I'm just used to Sprint, which roamed on Alltel's (now Verizon's) network, which is the absolutely best network coverage-wise for Kansas.

When I can access T-Mobile 3G network it's very fast, and for most general walking around the house my phone access the internet through my personal broadband-connected wifi, so it's not that important anyway. One of the benefits of working at home.

Well I'm very near the verge of distraction. Topics I hope to cover in upcoming posts include web browsing and mp3 playing on a N900.

David