McGarvey’s Words
by Robert McGarvey
World Phones Part III
|
|
McGarvey’s Words by Robert McGarvey World Phones Part III |
|
|
Here's What You Are Saying: Letters to McGarvey's Words . Back Pages: o Palms Away: Travels with a Palm. o Email-Country. Of Ricky Skaggs, cruising, Yahoo, and the ubiquity of email. O Google Spying: Much ado
about something good. o Ebay and the triumph of ecommerce.
|
You convinced me and, now that I’ve followed your advice, I don’t know why it took me so long. Regular readers will recall that I have been agonizing, repeatedly, over buying a world phone. I stuttered, hemmed and hawed. You wrote, often and persuasively, that I should take the plunge and go with T-Mobile. And at last I’ve done it and, thus far, reception is so good that I am delighted my readers are so sharp. Another factor: in casual conversation a neighbor related he had just dropped T-Mobile. Why, I asked. “Great reception here, but not enough coverage in outlying areas,” he said. What caught my attention was “great reception here.” I probed and, turns out, his T-Mobile phone worked like a champ in our little, mountainous corner of the Sonoran Desert and, as for remote areas, I don’t care because I also have a Verizon account that I am keeping because nobody covers the US the way Verizon does. But Verizon is worth squat abroad and that’s where T-Mobile enters because, as a member of the Deutsche Telekom family, its GSM technology works in 100+ countries at rates that won’t force bankruptcy upon a user. How much? Rates vary by country but usually are $.99 minute (Ireland, UK, Germany, etc.) to $1.49 (Australia, Greece, Thailand, etc.) to $1.99 (Argentina, Qatar, Mauritius). A few countries are higher still (Indonesia is a jaw-dropping $4.99/minute – another reason not to rethink that cancelled Bali vacation) but, with T-Mobile, most of the world is priced intelligently. There is no better deal offered by US carriers. T-Mobile is setting the pace for pricing global minutes for use by US-based callers. Still, though, the key whenever signing up with any wireless account: talk with users who use the service exactly where you will. In my case I plan to burn most of my domestic T-Mobile minutes (600 per month for $39.95) in my home office, so testimony from a neighbor carried real weight. Add that to the support from readers and how could I not sign up? I shopped around and decided on a Motorola V66. At 2.8 oz this tri-band phone isn't much bigger than a hummingbird and fidelity is proving good. The phone is so small (3.3" long) it takes some precision to get the speaker near the ear and the mike near the mouth but trial and error gets you there. Here’s the best part: the V66 cost is $-50. That’s right. T-Mobile is paying me $50 to take the phone. That’s the deal I found at Amazon and it is much sweeter than the deal at Tmobile.com which, last I looked, sold the phone at $99.99, a hefty $150 higher than Amazon. You could hunt around many Internet sites in search for a better deal but take my advice, cut to the chase, and at least as regards T-Mobile phones, head to Amazon because the prices are as good as you’ll find. Other tri-band phones tempted me. The Samsung 105 offers a color display. Motorola’s V60 is a bit bigger and sturdier than the diminutive V66. The Sony Ericsson T300 comes with a built-in camera (pretty spiffy...but, really, would you ever use this feature? I’m doubtful I would, not once the novelty wore off). But at $-50, the V66 is a lot of phone and it's so small you forget you are carrying it. Even cooler, the V66 provides a POP email interface, meaning I can read and reply to email right from my phone. What probably clinched the deal, however, is that with a USB data cable (about $40 from Amazon), I can use the little Motorola phone as a modem that interfaces with my HP computer, now that it is doing a Lazarus and coming back from the dead.** A week into this personal T-Mobile era and I am surprised that often I leave behind the Verizon phone (a clunkier Samsung SCH-N150) and take only the V66 – which is proving to work fine throughout my travels in southern Arizona. Soon a business trip to SFO looms and I’ll bring both phones. I will be connected. Just one thing now: With a worldphone in hand, I have to persuade a client to send me abroad. As budgets have racheted down, getting approval for any foreign travel is proving ever tougher – “Can’t that be done by telephone?” Well, yes, maybe it can be done by phone and, these days, with both GSM and CDMA in my pocket I’m reasonably sure of a connection. But...as summer hits Tucson I sure would welcome a trip to Ireland. For research purposes, mind you. Gotta test out the phone. And the cool, wet days wouldn’t hurt a bit. Are you still traveling abroad on business? Tell us why and we’ll post the best emails here. **HP update: After six weeks of waiting for HP to replace the hard drive in my four-month old laptop, my patience snapped and I escalated my case up the chain of command – “let me speak to your supervisor.” Finally I found somebody who authorized sending out a different hard drive (not the perpetually out of stock model). This hard drive was in stock. It arrived two days later. I then had to unscrew the dead drive, fit the new drive in the cradle, re-insert it...and, then, re-load software. How many hours did that take? More Re: HP. “Has your problem been resolved,” chirped the HP rep. Since I hadn’t much used the computer in the days after I'd wrestled the new drive into the slot, I honestly replied to the rep’s question: “I don’t know if it is fixed or not.” She didn’t miss a beat: “Have you mailed back the defective part?” Now...wait.... I am stuck with a dead computer because HP cannot find a new hard drive (“they’re on back order,” reps said, week after week) but I nonetheless am supposed to hop to it and return that defective drive asap. Um...why? It is in fact sitting in an open box on a bookcase and, certainly, I will some day seal the box and hand it to a UPS driver. But reloading files on my allegedly healed HP seems a higher priority, at least in my eyes. I’m sure I will get more hectoring calls, demanding the return of the part. For a company that seems unable to ship out replacement parts for defective gear, HP sure gets obstreperous about getting its dead stuff returned. Why? Do they want to bury the evidence? Yesterday, when yet another HP rep called to "remind" me to return the defective part, I pointed out that it took them six weeks to ship a part to me and I had four weeks to go before matching HP's sloth. This rep hung up on me! Sigh. As a onetime HP fan I am pained watching this stumbling disaster of a once-great company ruin its reputation. Click here to visit Joe Brancatelli's Travel Site JoeSentMe.com Keep coming back, for more of McGarvey’s Words. Copyright 2003 by Robert McGarvey Taos Land Sale: Click For Details
|
Have a cruise complaint? File it with Porthole Magazine's Ombudsman. About Robert McGarvey Author of How to Dotcom (Entrepreneur Press), McGarvey is a onetime columnist for BizTravel.com, he is a frequent contributor to dozens of magazines, ranging from American Legion to Electronic Business, Technology Review, and Rutgers. For the past five years, he has served as "The Ombudsman" for PORTHOLE Cruise Magazine. Still curious about McGarvey? Read up on him here. |
|
|