So you know that we moved, and that our new home has the worst cell phone coverage in the continental United States, right? I mean, nobody has any reception worth a damn out here. It might as well be the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania. You'd think I would have glanced at my precious Sidekick once during the initial tours and walk-arounds of the property.
So, T-Mobile has nothing, maybe one bar. Same with Verizon and Nextel... maybe one and a half outside. AT&T fared the best, peaking at two bars depending on which way the wind blows.
And if I drive half a mile up the road, bang, T-Mobile breathes again.
There is a local land line service available, but it's some mom-and-pop racket that expects $25/month, and that's not even including long distance. It's a gouging of Caponesque levels. So we were trying really hard to avoid having old-fashioned bullshit handset phones installed.
We checked out Skype. It's a possibility. For what we wanted, it would break down to about $8 a month, which is pretty great. Of course, that would mean the Mac(s) become the phone, so there's no walking around and we'd need to remember to have the Skype app (which looks comfortably like iChat, by the way) open all the time.
Then the iPhone details came out, and I felt that the planets were aligning for the sole purpose of handing me the Jesus phone. AT&T sort of works, but the iPhone can use WiFi networks anyway, so our down-in-the-valley troubles wouldn't matter anyway.
I was really close to sealing that deal when I noticed T-Mobile's stealth announcement of Hotspot@Home. Did anybody tell those guys that using @ symbols in your year 2007 marketing is completely pathetic? Even the word "hotspot" bothers me. Anyway.
For an extra $10 a month, plus a a new phone (two year contract, of course), you get the ability to use your home WiFi, just like the iPhone. So that's what we did. They only have two models, they're both $50, and we choose the one that was least unattractive. It's a Nokia, as if that means one fucking thing, all these non-iPhone phones have the same shit worthless UI where nothing makes sense, the buttons aren't consistent, and you can never find any function without hunting for half an hour.
The haters won't tell you this, but that is precisely why people are willing to pay $600 for an iPhone. Useability. I damn near did.
But $10 a month is easier to swallow right now. This puts our monthly phone bill in the approaching $100 range, as opposed to the over $100 range, which is where the iPhone AT&T plans would have gone. And the word is that eventually, T-Mobile is going to jump the rate to $20/month, unless you sign up now for the $10 price.
That's a handful higher than Skype, but for that $2 we retain the ability to walk while we make phone calls, and I don't know that we would have been thrilled with the lack of privacy that you get by screaming at the iMac to make a phone call (yes yes Skype fans, I know you can buy special USB handsets).
The WiFi function seems solid enough. It saw my home network right away, and now it jumps on as soon as it sees it. If you walk outside of the my WiFi cloud, the phone hops to the nearest T-Mobile tower, and vice versa. It also works on any other WiFi network, although the marketing pamphlet is quick to stress how AWESOME it is to CONNECT to the T-Mobile HOTSPOTS at BORDER'S and other OFFICIAL locations. All calls made on WiFi do not count against your plan's minutes, not that we ever had a problem with overages in the first place.
T-Mobile also offers a free (via rebate) WiFi router... it is supposed to be specially designed to toss more bandwidth at phones, but it has the same model number as the Linksys router I've used for years. Suspicious? I'm probably going to switch to it anyway as soon as I feel like rewiring everything, just because it's newer.
Unfortunately, the new phone had to replace Rhon's cute Motorola, so she had to sacrifice a little form factor there. My Sidekick remains largely unusable at home (it does maintain a data connection strong enough for IM, sometimes), which stinks, but I bet a future Sidekick will have WiFi capability.
But I would still buy an iPhone, yeah.
