So would you spend $649 for the Razr then? People ***** about the US carriers but lap up "$199" incentives like it's no tomorrow.
It's a business - it works for the carriers as surprise their goal is the make money. Your shiny new toy matters to them only until you leave the store.
I've seen / had similar experience across all the carriers I deal with on 4G type devices. You really need to just provision a new SIM, you shouldn't lose your old plan but from what I've been seeing good luck holding onto unlimited data as it will be gone by end of next year.
On Thursday, my shiny, new, brilliantly thin and light, nearly bulletproof (it’s case is made of Kevlar) Droid Razr arrived via FedEx. I was at my office, but the SMS alert I’d set to track it let me know that my wife had signed for it. It was safely in my house. Well, not safely, since she thought it would be a good idea to let my fussy 2-year old daughter try to open the box, but still, it was nearly in my possession. Yay!
When I made it home and figured out where my daughter had stashed it, I ran through the activation steps, marveling at how truly remarkable mobile technology had become. I’ll spare you the details…the phone has been well reviewed on ZDNet and elsewhere. Suffice to say, when the automated activation failed, I was impatient to get to an operator and get this thing working so I could see if its performance matched its immediate cool factor.
It took fifteen minutes for the Verizon rep (who, very incorrectly, greeted me as “my Verizon expert for the day”) to figure out that my phone wouldn’t activate because the number was originally associated with a Samsung MiFi device. The Samsung device, by the way, turned out to be a piece of 4G junk. Half the time it wouldn’t connect (from the device’s built-in web interface, the problem looked to be a DNS issue that would occasionally be solved by removing the battery or getting Verizon to reset the device remotely). Since I needed to replace my Droid Incredible anyway (another piece of junk that I was unwilling to pay a nearly $100 insurance deductible to have replaced a second time, but more on the Incredible later), I decided to just activate the mobile hotspot capabilities on a new Razr.
I should also note that purchasing the Razr was a painful process to begin with. Although I had purchased the MiFi outright, Verizon screwed up the service agreement twice, placing me on a 2-year contract instead of monthly billing. That mixup meant an hour on the phone just to pre-order the Razr and sort out billing to ensure that I didn’t have to pay early termination fees (I was already paying an early term fee on the Incredible).
So back to my activation woes. After several attempts, my Verizon expert was finally able to get my phone activated. He told me to dial *228 to reprogram it if I had any more problems; later I found out that *228 can do real number on 4G SIM cards and it should never be used. My ultimate goal was to get the phone into my family share plan and retain the number from my Incredible, not only grandfathering my unlimited data plan, but avoiding the hassle of switching numbers. Apparently, this was a separate process, but it wouldn’t be any problem to get things switched over. Uhhh, yeah.
So now it’s Friday and my phone works, but the number is wrong and I’m paying even more than I would ordinarily to have it on a separate account. I call Verizon and began the process of “assuming liability” (fancy talk for merging the accounts), which, unfortunately, involves getting my wife to talk to the “assumption of liability department”, since she is the primary account holder on our combined land line/mobile bill. The operator made the mistake of asking my wife if she understood all of the disclosures and processes related to merging the accounts. Now, I don’t call her my Lovely Luddite for nothing. Besides, I don’t think anyone actually understands cellular contracts. My wife, of course, responded “Not really.” You can imagine how much longer that call became.
Once I convinced my wife that it was expedient to simply say “Yes” to every question (the operator was on speaker, so at least one of us had a clue), the two accounts were finally merged. And then the real fun began.
Next: Wait! It gets better! (and by that, I mean it gets worse) »
