notANON

Goodbye old phone, I'm not sorry to see you go.

June 3rd could not come soon enough.  I have been stuck on a Palm Treo 800w for what seems like over 2 years.  Sure, the Palm Treo 800w is better than the PPC6700 that it replaced but the battery life sucks, it has a terrible camera and has gotten extremely flaky lately.  As I’m talking on the phone, it opens up random applications for instance.  When i get off the phone, I generally have to close about 4-6 programs that are running.  I only originally chose the Palm 800w because it was the only phone available with irda.  I needed irda because I’m also a Realtor and the key boxes open up with Infrared.

I pre ordered my phone from Radio Shack.  I did this for several reasons.  First off, Sprint would not promise me a phone.  They said they would put my name on a waiting list but on the first day of release, the phone would be given out on a first come first serve basis.  Their previous popular phone, the Palm Pre, sold out in an hour.  Additionally, Sprint offered the phone with a $100 rebate so it ended up costing $299 at the point of sale and then they keep your money for 6-8 weeks while they decide if you’ve met their rebate criteria or not.

Radio Shack on the other hand was totally cool about it.  They said the phone is definitely mine.  All I had to do was purchase a $50 gift card at the time of reservation.  If I didn’t show up to pick up the phone on the first or second day, I would lose my reservation but still have my gift card available to use on any other purchase that I would like.  On top of that, they said I would receive a $20 credit towards any accessory purchase at the time of sale but the topper is that there is no manufacture’s rebate.  The only complaint I have overall about the process is that I was not able to opt for a 1-year contract.  I was forced into a 2 year contract.  Otherwise I had to pay $700-$800 for the phone.  I really hate to be stuck with any device for over a year but this one looks good enough to take my chances with.

I’ve had to do a bit of preparation to get ready to move to my new EVO.  First off, I needed to consolidate my contacts since I moved from Windows XP to a Mac in early 2009 so I still had things stuck in Outlook Express.  I consolidated them all to the Address Book on the Mac side now.  I also took it a step further and sync’d up address book to Google.  My hope is now that I will bring my new phone home, put in my Gmail account info and it will magically all just work.  I’ll report more on that in a few days.

It appears that the rooting community has even figured out how to root the EVO before it’s even released.  Overall, there seems to be an enormous amount of excitement over this phone.  Personally I can’t wait for the 3rd.  Amazon already has four pages of accessories available even.  Personally I have my eye on this Rubberized Hard Case for HTC EVO 4G.  It’s not quite an iBand but it looks like it’s the best available so far.