We don’t have the phone you are looking for
I fell for a Sprint salesman Jedi mind trick today at the Market St. Sprint store. I’ve been lusting over Motorola’s RAZR for a few weeks now, but my carrier, Sprint, doesn’t offer that phone. They instead offer the very comparable Samsung a900. EV-DO network access, small form factor, bluetooth. Perfect, but no Sprint store in town had them in stock. I called everywhere.
Finally, I called the Market St. store and asked if they had a demo I could play with. The answer was yes, so I headed straight there after work. The demo was hidden in the back, not on the floor, and the sales drone hovered over me as I pushed the buttons with glee and test drove all the features.
“I want this phone.” I told the drone.
“Are you a current Sprint customer?”
“Yes, I have a Treo 600 and I hate it.” I answered.
“Oh, well the a900 is a really popular phone and it just came out. We don’t have any in stock.”
“That’s a shame, could you give me a quote on how much it would be and when I can get it?”
Clearly, I was serious about the phone.
“You know, if you ordered another line to your existing plan, I could call another store and see if they had any in stock.” the salesman said, oh so slightly showing his hand to me. I didn’t pick up his hint, but I knew what I had come to buy and I wanted now.
“Yeah sure, whatever. I want this phone.” I grumbled out.
And then like magic, his manager appeared out of the back room with an a900 with my name on it. This was a “business account phone”, that’s why they had “just one left”.
This is a typical ploy from Sprint sales drones. They only want to sell these sexy new phones to new customers, because that’s were the money is at: Two year contracts, activation fees, and insurance policies.
Never mind all that though. With much enjoyment in my heart, I carried the phone out of the store and I’ve been playing with it ever since. It does almost everything I want. I paired it with my Powerbook and my Palm TX, and when I go to surf or ssh, the phone blinks for a second, and then I have ~250ms latency with a 700k/s transfer rate to either computer. What doesn’t work is the dialer in the Palm, which is very annoying since my contacts are on the Palm. To make matters worse, iSync and OnSync both don’t support my phone, so I’ll either have to enter contacts manually or export and manually upload the contacts data to my phone.
I figure this will be fixed in a few weeks, and other than these few technical problems, I think this is the best phone I’ve had since the Treo600. Recommended.