Cell phone trouble

Last night as I was shutting stuff down to head off to bed, I looked down and noticed that the screen on my blackberry was glowing an errie shade of gray.  What gives here?  I turned the phone off, and back on.  No change except that it goes out and comes back on.  Nothing brought back the logic on the screen that I was desperately looking for.

This was not good, but I just shut it down and headed off to bed.  In the morning, nothing had changed, the dreaded gray screen was still there!

I messed with the phone for a while and realized that only the screen was gone, the rest of the phone seemed to be operating normally.  But the screen was totally gone, and I had no idea why.  I needed a new phone!  I wasn't prepared to make such a decision, as I had several months left on my contract.

All morning was spent first of all deciding if I was staying with T Mobile or leaving for Verizon.  For months I had said I was going to Verizon, but that was much more expensive, and requires that I can tether a phone into my router, or the laptop and eliminate the air card in order to have those funds for the increased cost.  Verizon now has it setup so that it costs $20 above your data plan to get 2 Gigabytes for tethering.  Or else you have to Root the phone and install software that is not from Verizon.   And yes I know that you can run Apps that will allow tethering without rooting, but word is that Verizon is working on ways to find folks that are doing that.  This is nuts, because your $30 for the data plan pays for 5Gb, but if you don't view it on the phone, but rather view it on another device you are throttled back  two 2Gb and the cost in now $50.  What?

So it appears that I will be replacing my Verizon aircard with a 4G model sometime quite soon.  That will reduce the cost from $60 to $50 and keep my 5 Gb limit irrespective of the phone.  I did learn that you can now get 10 Gb for $80.  That would be good for someone that archives a lot of pictures, or has a really bad You Tube habit.

So after having made the decision that I needed a new aircard and would only casually be tethering the phone under certain circumstances, using  a non authorized app hoping not to get caught, then the decision to stay with my historically low priced T-Mobile plan was easy.  But now I need a new phone.

I decided on the HTC G2, which wasn't hard since it is the newest and fastest available from TMO.  But since my contract wasn't up, I was being charged a penalty by the web site for early contract renewal on the old phone.

This makes us two for two on our Blackberry's not making it the full two years.  We have lost them both.  One to the swimming pool toy bucket with a small amount of water left in it, and now the screen on the second phone.

I started studying the internet on blogs about the G2.  One young man gave out a customer service number on his blog and advised that I need to ask about contract resolution.  And then bring up the loyalty factor that I have been a customer for many years, and several contracts.  It worked!!

The phone was suddenly $50 cheaper, which eliminated the early termination fees that the website was charging me and also had the phone cheaper too.  The next thing I knew, I had value pays over the next four months like I was buying it on QVC or ShopNBC.  I only had to pay one payment and the sales tax and shipping today!  How could I beat using their money?

It will still take several days to ship and receive this new phone, and I can only answer calls with my old phone by pressing the green button and saying hello.  If I am very careful about pushing the little buttons, I can also make a call as well.  Holding down the speed dial letters will also still make those calls for me.  But Dang it is frustrating to have the email bell dinging away and not be able to look at the email.  And no Instant Messages, and no Facebook, and No............

The rest of the day didn't amount to much, after I got all that decided!

Retired Rod