The Blackberry Diaries

One of my repeat customers recently upgraded to a Treo 650, orphaning a Blackberry 7210… I felt bad for the poor little thing, all abandoned in a junk drawer, so I offered to give it a good home.

I thought I had it all figured out. I’ve been wanting to get a new mobile device, but couldn’t afford something like a Treo 650 just yet. The Blackberry family had something to offer, albeit in an odd shape. Still, my original plan was to wait until my contract was up with AT&T Wireless, er umm Cingular, then do some serious comparison shopping.

So along comes this free Blackberry, which happened to be an AT&T flavored unit. Perfect. I can finally do handheld e-mail from anywhere with cell coverage, synch my Outlook calendar and contacts, and blather away all in one device.

Not so fast. I called Cingular customer service, and ended up losing 45 minutes of my life. I wanted to activate a Wireless PDA data plan on my account so I could use the e-mail feature… but they told me that I could not do that. The reasons they gave were, in my eyes, pretty lame… (1) they were migrating everyone to Cingular devices, so they don’t want to extend contracts on legacy AT&T devices; and (2) because of the existing “Shared Family Talk” plan I have with my wife, I was not eligible to add a data plan.

So here I am, a loyal, paid-up customer, wanting to throw even more money their way, and they won’t have me. They turned the business down, quite unapologetically. How can any cell phone company turn down business!!!???

So I pondered what to do with the newest member of my cell phone family. Surely I couldn’t add it to my own box of tech orphans. Despite the fact I could not use the e-mail functionality, I decided that having an all-in-one device that synchs with my Outlook was still better than a single function phone. Sorry Nokia 6200 series, you were a good soldier, take your retirement in style.

I am now in my fourth day with the Blackberry, and I must say it is growing on me. I’m still a bit of a klutz with the thumbwheel and tiny keys (I have banana hands, to quote Jack Black from “Shallow Hal”). But it’s helped me out already by helping me more intelligently schedule my workload.

My contract with AT&T/Cingular will expire in January 2006. By that time, there should be a new crop of Windows Mobile devices out. Then I will perhaps take my wireless dollars to another, more worthy provider.