About two months ago, I decided that it was time to give my old Nokia cellphone a break. I had it for about 2.5 years and it always worked very well. My original carrier was AT&T and then they merged with Cingular. The service with AT&T was always very good. I always had excellent signal reception in Austin, and when I traveled to other cities (Miami, New Orleans, Dallas, Houston, NY, Boston, Washington…) it always seemed to work just fine.

Since I was content with AT&T, I tried to see my options for upgrading the phone. I was willing to sign another 2 year contract with them, in exchange for a free phone (and retaining my phone number). But unfortunately, they only offer those options to new or switching customers. I find that bussiness practice totally absurd. Why give a free phone to a new customer, but not to an existing loyal one?

So after calling them a couple of times and visiting stores like Best Buy, I understood that my best option was to switch carrier.

So I call a friend who uses T-Mobile and asked him about it and he told me that T-Mobile was a good carrier. So I went ahead and bought a T-Mobile plan.

The plan included the Motorola V330 which is a bluetooth camera phone supported by iSync.

I’ve been using this phone + plan for two months and I’m really dissapointed. In other words: T-Mobile sucks!

My phone is always searching for signal. The reception sucks. I don’t receive phone calls all the time. I get text messages 30 minutes after they were sent. I would rank AT&T service with 10 and T-Mobile with 4. So if you live in Texas, don’t sign with T-Mobile!

Regarding the phone, I’m not very happy either. I’m sure that part of the bad reception is caused by the phone, because otherwise I’m sure my friend would never had recommended me T-Mobile. I also like the simple Nokia style better; I don’t like opening an closing a clam-type phone all the time.

I must say that phone integration with iSync worked very well. I was also able to use bluetooth to copy MP3 soundtracks to my phone and use them as ring tones. That is actually really cool. I converted the MP3 song to WAV, croped it to 30 seconds, changed it from stereo to mono, converted it back to MP3 and uploaded it to the phone. Now Connection from Elastica plays everytime the “…vital connection is made”.