Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2006 > March > 10 > Entry
The RAZR DLMA
A few months ago, when I was kvetching about my cell phone dilemmas and planning a switch to Cingular with potential financial pitfalls that make the Dubai/ports deal look like a friendly game of penny-ante poker, the RAZR seemed like my best bet.
I found a place I could get the hardware pretty cheap, the Cingular calling plans I was seeing looked reasonable (I can only justify a $50-a-month cell service bill because we don’t have a land-line and haven’t needed one for about six years), and all seemed well in the cell phone world.
The thing I didn’t count on, the bit that surprised me was — it’s not that great a phone. Three months later, with the price drops on the RAZR and the ubiquitous promotion, the RAZR, in black, steel and even pink colors now, is as likely to be in someone’s hand as those gray clamshell Samsung phones have been the last two years. For about $100 or less now you can get a RAZR through Cingular or T-Mobile or online service-agnostic dealers. You can even get a non-flip upgrade called the “SLVR” that includes iTunes.
Incidentally, dropping vowels to make your product sound cooler is STPD.
The switch over to Cingular was not without its complications. I bought my phone at a Cingular store in New Braunfels before realizing that I wouldn’t be able to port my old Sprint number to it because New Braunfels is out of the 512 area. You can’t port a number across area codes, I learned.
So I took back the newly activated phone, bought one at a giant retail store in Austin and then found they couldn’t port my number either. I had to go through Cingular corporate and after several phone calls, they were able to do it by phone, but then I was slapped with a $35 number-transfer fee in addition to the money I’d just spent on the hardware, activation and my first month’s bill.
My wife followed suit and she was able to get the number-transfer fee waived. But then a bigger problem was lurking: Two months later I found out the New Braunfels account had never been deactivated even though I had taken the phone back within two days and asked for the account to be canceled. I accidentally paid the wrong bill and spend a whole day trying to get $110 I paid moved to the correct, active account. I’m still waiting on a refund check for that because it was impossible to get that check I sent moved to the right place.
Aside from the billing glitches, the phone itself worked like a dream. It was sleek, took grainy but decent photos and worked in my home, which was why I got away from Sprint in the first place.
Then it broke. While visiting family and after one too many margaritas, I was trying to post a blog entry via the RAZR (a bad idea, I know) about how totally fly I felt at that moment. I don’t know what I did, or what I pressed, but sometime that night, the left side of the keypad stopped working, as if it had suffered a RAZR STRK, paralyzing its operations. The keys 1, 4, 7 and * wouldn’t respond to any presses, making it impossible to text message with any degree of legibility.
I hoped the problem would go away, but no dice. I lived with it for another week, hoping maybe whatever I’d done would fix itself, but then I took the phone back to the store. The day I took it in was one day past the 15-day time limit for returning it for a full exchange. I called Cingular and jumped through tech support hoops before they agreed to send me a new phone.
A few days later, the unit arrived in a tiny box and bubble wrap. I transferred my numbers via the SIM card and transferred images to my iBook via the Bluetooth connection and then Bluetoothed them again to the new phone.
Everything transferred over just fine. But now my “new” phone (I have no way of knowing if the replacement phone was new or refurbished) has started displaying weird grainy horizontal lines. And friends have told me that if you keep your RAZR in your pocket for any length of time, you will most certainly get specks of dirt on the screen that are impossible to get out.
As time has gone on, I find myself using the slow Web browsing features less and less. I’m taking fewer photos. The phone’s menu and addressbook software, convoluted and sometimes plain dumb, are so 2002. And the call quality, while decent, isn’t anything to get thrilled about.
So I’ll stick with the RAZR a while longer because, unlike my old Sprint phone, I can at least make calls with it from my home, but I’m already looking over the horizon for a replacement, probably within the next year.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: Phones
Comments
By Greg
March 15, 2006 1:18 AM | Link to this
Omarnapothetic is onomatopoeic!
By Omar G.
March 14, 2006 4:27 PM | Link to this
I will be the first to admit that I can sometimes be pothetic.
By jimmycity
March 14, 2006 2:06 PM | Link to this
It's just a PHONE, fer cryin' out loud! You phreaks that need to have the latest and greatest model at all times, and can't put it down to eat a quiet meal at a restaurant, or take care of "business" in the restroom, or BACK OUT OF A PARKING SPACE need to have the stupid little gadgets forceably removed from your person. How did you live for all those years when you didn't have one? How important do you think your little life is, anyway?
And, if you insist upon continuing this obsession, at least please stop writing about it. Good grief!
By kris
March 14, 2006 1:21 PM | Link to this
your article was neither informative nor slightly enternaining. "so 2002" is a very poor way of describing things, it kinda reminds me of that annoying brat near campus, the one everyone's run in to once in their life. put your ego and poor self worth off the front lines and back into your home, its kinda pothetic.
By Meghan
March 14, 2006 11:49 AM | Link to this
"Incidentally, dropping vowels to make your product sound cooler is STPD."
Heh, tell that to the geniuses who created Flickr and all the spin-offs of it BECAUSE Es ARE FOR THE ESTABLISHMENT, MAN.