I have been a faithful Verizon user since 2001. But urgh. I do not like the path the company is going on. I can’t afford to get a new phone because they robbed me of my full credit. So basically my choices for my “new every two” is like a RZR. If I want to pay some money, even afte rthe credit, I can get the chocolate (erm I have first gen) or the EnV (my husband is nearly up for his new every two on his EnV)… are you seeing where this is going?
I should not have to pay for a phone that’s a nearly two years old model.
Furthermore now I have to change my contract as is normal since these companies are always doing new and flashy things. Unfortunately get this… it has always worked in my favour. Not this time. I have to increase my bill by about 15-20 bucks a month.
WTH?
I’m thinking about changing.
So I’m looking at TMobile. Their coverage scares me. But they have a cute purple phone.
Thoughts?
Message me about your phone, your plan, etc etc.
I want the good and the bad. You guys know me. I’m an uber geek. My pix need to look good. I send like 3k texts a month. (Erm, that might not be much of an exageration.) I travel a lot. I need good coverage, good phone, neat stuff.
Hook me up with some info!!
(Yes you too Melanie, after you stop your cartwheels. HAHAHA)
Tmobile?
Att?
Um, whatever else might be out there! (Is there anything else?)
–Lady O
Originally posted on ladyozma.vox.com
Lady Ozma's Journey 
twirlandswirl said:
I have T-Mobile. Do you have any specific questions?
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Lady Ozma said:
yeah everything!!
Good, bad, ugly. Tell it to me, baby! What do you like. What don’t you like? How does the faves really work out. What’s the coverage like? Dropped calls? What phone do you have and how’s the quality of it. All the things i mentioned. 🙂
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aaron_p_lehmann said:
Sprint… and phones are for calling
Maybe if you didn’t want your phone to wash our car and do your taxes you’d have better luck.
Phones should make a ringing noise, be incapable of taking pictures, and not be usable to send IMs.
Crazy kids… my day… uphill, through the snow
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aaron_p_lehmann said:
Re: Sprint… and phones are for calling
s/our/your/
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Lady Ozma said:
Re: Sprint… and phones are for calling
HAHA You forget… I’m older than you. 😉
And it’s not my fault i read these news reports from Japan and Korea about phones that are portable computers!!!!
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elle_cosette said:
I use t-mobile and don’t have much to complain about. We get decent coverage here (no idea how it would be for you). My favorite part is all my extended family is on t-mobile so we can all call each other free all da time. yak yak yak yak. I don’t use the circle thing.
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Lady Ozma said:
So they do offer mobile to mobile?
My biggest reason for thinking I would do the faves was because 99% of my people are verizon. So I could fave my mum and stuff. Because I do use a lot of minutes, but right now it’s all “in”
How do you feel about everything else. I feel like Verizon nickle and dimes you. I’m locked into THEIR ring tones. I spent 30 bucks to get a cable and a CD so that I could access my phone and load my own stuff? Guess what, doesnt’ work that easy. You have to hack. yay for bit pim. I do not like the ring tones they offer because it is music I don’t listen to. And I don’t want to pay 2.99 for a rap song or something. You know?
Things like that. They seperate everything out. I do not want to pay 125 bucks a month for only two phones. It’s crazy.
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gauvaine said:
Rachel and I have Sprint. Their coverage is good, especially out here in Nevada where there are hundreds of miles of desolate wastes and savage beasts ready to gobble you up. T-Mobile doesn’t work too good out here. It’s good in a 30 mile radius, basically, and that’s it.
But, Sprint nickles and dimes you, too. I think they all do. I’m looking to get a PDA/Blackberry/Pocket PC next month when my contract is up because I just can’t keep track of everything going on in my life, especially with my old, two-year old flip phone I have. Everyone has Razors and Smartphones now. I need my email sent to my phone, I need an address book, appointment calendar, note taker, web access, etc etc and to be able to download ebooks and documents and MP3’s and a “phone” just won’t do all those things.
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Lady Ozma said:
I hear ya…
See the TMobile coverage worries me. I’ve lived out near you. I know those desolate wastes quite well. ROFL. (I’m actually returning for a visit — Phoenix in one month! WOOOT)
I hear sprint is the worse for the nickle and diming. GRRR> Verizon is taking over though I think. I don’t know which is worse. It really annoys me.
I’m sorry but I agree. I need something that will allow me to manage my address book, appointments would be fantastic, web access is excellent because I homeschool and we are on the go alot, and sqqueeee ebooks. I don’t want basically an expensive cordless phone. I need it to do so much more.
Plus I’m an uber geek. ROFL
(PS I know i have messages from you, I’ve been super busy with some house rearranging due to new furniture… I’ll get to them, I promise.)
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loadhan said:
I’ve only had one cell phone. I got it (with my first plan) in summer 2005. It’s with T-Mobile. I choose T-Mobile because their coverage was pretty good (in my open, at least for the areas I go), and was able to tag onto the Cingular (at the time) network with no fees when no in a T-Mobile area. Plus, it gave me the most for less money than the other major providers and I could get two phones on a family plan. The only downside I saw was lack of roll-over minutes, but then I realized that if I had enough minutes to roll-over, I wasn’t using them anyway. Oh, and my then girlfriend had T-Mobile.
I’ve liked it. I got a good phone at the time – though I got it for the phone. I didn’t care about the camera or video features. My phone turned out to be quite cute with multi-color blinking lights. Kinda 1960’s art deco futuristic.
But I’ve had no problems with them. Seldom had to use their customer support but they seemed competent, friendly, and helpful. Suffice to say, I have no desire to switch at the moment – but mainly because I still think my current plan grandfathered in is the best for my buck for my needs right now.
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gauvaine said:
Re: I hear ya…
It seems the more you have going on, the more you need to combat it to make it less intrusive. I get the feeling my phone is going to start buzzing constantly once I get things straightened out at church regarding hometeaching assignments, PPI’s, meetings, etc, etc. Not to mention normal things. I’m tempted to get rid of my homephone altogether and just use it for DSL.
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Lady Ozma said:
Wow, thanks!!!!
That’s good to hear. 🙂 I do like the sound of your phone. That’s cute! I like phones that are nifty. It’s why I got the chocolate. I mean it’s blak with red glowy stuff. Hello Knight Rider phone. I mean that’s hot! But I like art deco blinkey!!! Cool! yes, I am a geek gurrl. I’ll admit it.
The good review from several years is nice. Verizon is OK, but urgh. Their customer service is fantastic, these people can’t help what hte company is doing. You know? I just don’t like the way they are screwing you over. And they are megabucks!!!
Now that you can number port to boot, it’s fantastic. HEHEHE
Of course if I switched to TMobile currently I only know two people with it. You and my closest friend. So I probably wouldn’t use it as much. HAHA But I know my mum is only so-so happy with Verizon so she’d change. HEHEHE
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elle_cosette said:
Re: So they do offer mobile to mobile?
yes, all my calls to any tmobile line are free. I think some plans charge extra for that though.
I haven’t noticed ring tones being weird. Every song I’ve looked up in their directory was availble, although they do cost $3 each. There is a website that does it free though. I was scared to use it but it actually works. (It isn’t affiliated with any of the phone companies.) It converts any mp3 into a ringtone and sends it to your phone.
One thing I have liked is, if it looks like we are going to go over our minutes, I can up our plan to the next tier for that month, and then put it back down the next month. That’s much cheaper than paying for overage minutes. That’s only happened once but there are a lot of phones on our plan so I’m glad it’s there.
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Lady Ozma said:
Re: So they do offer mobile to mobile?
I went in. They said unlimited mobile to mobile is 9.99 for every phone on the plan. Rock on. So if we had TMobile people, that would be good. Right now I think I know three people on tmobile. You, another friend who just cmmented, and my closest friend here. So *shrug*
I convert songs myself, and so that’s cool. But with Verizon you can’t send it to the phone without a cable, a driver, and a hack program. GRRRR> If this company can send to your phone though, then that makes it super easy. Woot.
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Lady Ozma said:
Re: I hear ya…
HAHA yea as EQ dude you will be constantly rung rung rung. When DH was in that calling he always wanted a mobile. It just wasn’t in our budget. ROFL.
We have a home phone just for DSL. I almost never use it. Get this. Tmobile will give me all calls in my house for free over my wifi. That’s cool!
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gauvaine said:
Re: I hear ya…
U keep going on about T-Mobile. I think you might have made your mind up already.
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Lady Ozma said:
Re: I hear ya…
Well it’s my only real choice aside from Verizon. Cingular…er… AT&T here wont’ give you service in the city center. Erm, OK, out in the sticks? I’ll buy that. But the middle of town? That’s unacceptable. And I’m not shelling out the bucks for Sprint/Nextel. We’ve used them for work in the past and have known many others who used… YUCK!
So it’s Verizon or T Mobile. There are no other choices.
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elle_cosette said:
Re: So they do offer mobile to mobile?
btw, the website for the ringtone thing is mobile17.com. The only drawback is, it takes about a day for it to come through. But for free, I figured I could put up with that.
My whole extended family is on tmobile, including my parents, 7 siblings, their spouses, their kids, etc. and then there’s my own brood which just keeps growing…so the mobile-to-mobile works out super well for us.
When it comes to coverage, each area will be different. I’d ask tmobile if you can try it out for a few days to see if you get good coverage in the areas you go to the most, before you get locked into a stinkin 2 year agreement. For us tmobile has the fewest drop spots but in other parts of the country, it could be completely different.
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Lady Ozma said:
Re: So they do offer mobile to mobile?
That’s cool. I make my own so if you can just message it to your phone that will work for me. 🙂
Yeah, see right now most of my phonebook is Verizon. So M2M is awesome for me. It will be painful to switch. I really don’t want to, but I’m very upset and frustrated.
Though I know my FIL and his wife are looking for new and my parents would switch and one of my most called people is in the market for a new company. Soooooo…. HAHA
TMobile guy told me I have 14 days to try it out and change my mind. The problem is how much of a Pain is it going to be to grovel back to Verizon?
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gauvaine said:
Re: I hear ya…
I say go with T-mobile then. I’m going to see what At&T has to offer. I had them before i switched to Sprint 4 years ago, though they are probably along the same lines. I just need a blackberry. The minutes and friends in my network and amount of texting per month are all neglible to me.
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Lady Ozma said:
Re: I hear ya…
I think everyone at this point has blackberries. They are so popular. I love that thing. I want one so bad. It’s 250 bucks. Wanna donate to my blackberry fund? HAHAHA I take paypal! 😉
Those things are important to me as I’ve built my contacts into Verizon. I’m a heavy user of the messaging features. I actually message people more than I talk to them. You know? Easier to be like ‘Hey what you want for dinner?” than to call.
I will tell you, from the geek factor I do like TMobile. They don’t break the phones as bad. They allow you to still do things. Like ring tones and stuff. I hate that Verizon has tried to completely lock you out of your phone. It has been getting increasingly difficult for me to function with my phone.
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java_fiend said:
I’m on T-Mobile and I can’t in good conscience suggest going through them. Their plans/contracts are ridiculous, their coverage area isn’t the best and they jack you up with a lot of fees and garbage. Once my contract is up, I”ll be looking at getting away from T-Mobile… which sucks, I really do like my Razor. 😦
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Lady Ozma said:
Well razr’s are everywhere
Their plans looked far better than Verizon. Verizon kills you with the nickles and dimes. Yay you can get internet usage on your phone… oh did we mention the 1.99/ mb? TMobile told me that net meant net, no extra fees. And then the unlimited texting is ten dollars more on Verizon than TMobile. The other thing I noticed was that TMobile allows you to make your own ringtones whereas Verizon continually attempts to stop you from having anything that does not come from their Verizon store. I noticed the blackberry plan is also cheaper at TMobile than at Verizon. It sure seems like someone walked into a Verizon store and said “Uh huh, now mark everything in here 10 dollars less for us.” LOL
My contract is up but my husbands is not because of the way Verizon staggers the family plan. Right now the only thing they have going for them with me is 1. It’s just easier to stay with the same service 2. contract stuff 3. coverage area. Their plans are super expensive. They won’t let you do anything. It is very much on the annoying factor.
I’m looking into the option of spending the eight gazillion dollars on an unlocked phone. Then I don’t have to be stuck on a contract and MAYBE I can access my phone. The problem is I cannot afford the gazillion dollars for an unlocked phone. GRRR
Unfortunately Cingular/ATT gets zip for service around these parts and Sprint/Nextel is just overpriced and crappy. So I figure my choices right now are Verizon and TMobile.
TMobile has going for it very snazzy non-gimped phones and cheaper plans. But their coverage is not as good as Verizon.
So I can have great coverage for more money with a gimped phone. Or i can have not as great coverage for less money and a phone I can do stuff on.
Of course at this point just having a phone that doesn’t make random phone calls, triples my texts, and costs me a ton of money in overages would be nice. LOL
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loadhan said:
Re: Wow, thanks!!!!
Still best to check the various cell phone coverage in your areas. Like, I know T-Mobile sucks in the middle of Pennsylvania, but I’m rarely there to worry about it. There are few places in the Cleveland area I’ve had problems – and I’ve been amused when only T-Mobile has reception in the newest Case dorms that for some reason have decorative copper on the exterior so they act like a Faraday cage (this on a building built with wireless communication already a staple of our culture). Many of my friends have had to lean against their windows or stand in the doorways just to get decent reception.
My phone has multi-colored LED’s on four spots on the exterior. I didn’t realize those weren’t just rubber grips but actually light up, in a colored sequence to go with the ring tone (different for each) or alarm. It’s been called by others as “a party in [my] pants”. I have the TNG theme music as my ring tone. 🙂
As for in-network calling… Well, it’s a nice perk and something to consider. It seems my friends are about evenly spaced across the major networks. Sadly, the vast majority of my T-Mobile friends live a few time zones west so I normally call them late at night after all calls are free. :p Nowadays, you can get your 5 to 10 or so favorite list for an extra fee and calling those numbers won’t use up minutes (and it’s amusing how the commercials advertise adding your five closest friends and family, ignoring the fact it should be the closest who are not already on your network! I’m sure some people didn’t think of that when signing up).
So… good luck!
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loadhan said:
Re: Wow, thanks!!!!
After reading some others, I should add that I only have T-Mobile as my bare-bones cell phone provider. I don’t text message (don’t even have the service to do it once in awhile), I don’t connect to the Internet, I don’t send pictures or video or music, I don’t have a data plan or download from those new 2-D bar code thing fad.
From my last looking around, my plan (which I don’t think is offered by anyone at the moment) is still pretty cheap. I could get a lot more minutes in current family plans, but for more money or loose my free evening and weekend. And since I usually don’t even come close to running through my current 500 minute allotment, I don’t see any need to jump it up.
But you may have other desires to use with your cell phone in addition to just calling people and chatting. If so, I don’t have much advice or experience. 🙂
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Lady Ozma said:
Re: Wow, thanks!!!!
Coverage is really funny. I don’t understand it. But here we have the trouble that there’s someone to scream over every square inch that that land is historic. Some union soldier or some revolutionary soldier or some founding father or someone bled and died there. Oh it’s historic. Let’s not put up a cell tower. So you’ll be smack in the middle of town and find no cell service pockets. Weirdo! ROFL
As for the Farraday cage, we joke that my dad erected one at my mum’s house. She gets horrible service in there. LOL
I did notice that if wanted my top 5 i could pay 10 bucks and get in network calling as well which then said “throw people not in network on the top five!!!” I know how to work it… hahaha I need to get everything I can for each dollar that I spend!
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Lady Ozma said:
Re: Wow, thanks!!!!
Actually your talking plan side of things sound really good and was helpful. Because first and foremost it is a phone and i need to be able to use the phone features. Everything else will fall into place after that.
as far as messaging goes, that’s pretty simple. As long as there is service, you can send a message. So see the first paragraph. 🙂 Their messaging package seems very sweet and ten dollars cheaper than Verizon’s. The net also seems sweet and way way way cheaper than Verizon’s. (With Verizon you basically pay 5 bucks for mobile web then 1.99 per megabyte. Or you pay 15 dollars for the “V Cast” and you get no megabyte, but can also access the TV stuff which have download costs. With TMobile you pay 5 bucks for mobile web with no per megabyte. I don’t know if they do tv type stuff on their network, but the last time I used that on Verizon was never. I have a TV, a DVR, a slingbox allowing me access to my tv and dvr anywhere i have internet connection, and an iPod. Why bother if I have to pay? Seems a no brainer to me. And the math sells itself. TMobile comes in cheaper.)
Once more, that works if you have cell service. See paragraph 1. ROFL.
So your advice has been great. How much other traveling have you done? I like the traveling information because honestly, while we don’t travel much we do travel. My inlaws live in south Jersey and middle TN. My parents are wanting to take the boys and me to Mississippi for two weeks this summer for a family reunion. And we drive all over VA and the Baltimore area. My husband works in DC.
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loadhan said:
Re: Wow, thanks!!!!
Well, I mainly meant how much the cost was for the service – a fact I did not know for texting, internet, data, etc. I am aware how widespread T-Mobile hotspots for connecting laptops to the Internet were well before the other cell phone providers got onto it. The main thing is, T-Mobile was (at least in 2005 when I got my phone) the really big heavy-hitter in the global market and built up a network for the traveling businessman to use; it was only in the US that they weren’t top dog.
As for traveling… Well, the only real problem I had was in the middle of Pennsylvania, as I said. And even then I often got logged onto Cingular or some local provider. I’ve never had a problem in Columbus or Indianapolis or Dayton or Cincinnati and rarely any dropped spots on the Interstates to there from Cleveland. From here to the center of lower Michigan was also fine. At the airports in Houston and LAX I had no problems. Rarely did I find a dead zone on the island of O’ahu (and usually then because I was in a volcanic crater or a tunnel through a mountain).
I have two friends who use T-Mobile throughout the greater Salt Lake area in Utah without difficulties. I have another who goes to school in Iowa though she sometimes has problems in her dorm, sometimes not.
Anyway, so there you have my experiences. T-Mobile used to have a map and their map seemed pretty good for the places I traveled – including listing two infamous dead zones in Cleveland Heights / University Heights that hit every provider!
(Yeah, we have an aesthetics ordinance up in Cleveland Heights prohibiting the rise of any cell towers. Lately, with miniaturizing technological advances, they’re able to hide antennae up on church steeples and towers so coverage has increased. 🙂
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Lady Ozma said:
Re: Wow, thanks!!!!
Ahh, well seeing as though the other things are flat rates, I guess you can still give me the hook up as far as how the “five” helps out with the minute usage. Especially since the majority of my people are Verizon. Right now I don’t use up a lot of minutes for that reason.
TMobile hotspots are everywhere and you are right, they are global. They don’t have as great a coverage as Verizon in America, but they are across the globe and there’s something to be said about that.
Where were you in middle PA? off the beaten path going to BFE to visit someone or were you someplace you felt you should have service? (IE the interstates, towns that are of a fairly decent size not the one stop shop) But the fact that you get service is good. I was told that you can be in a roaming area on someone else’s network but you don’t get charged. Did you see that hold true if you got logged onto someone else?
I think dorms are a special situation. Look at what you said about yours. But that’s good information to know, too because dorms are special but so are teh buildings in DC. LOL I mean you know how it is with all that concrete and stuff. Did you know there are 26 inches of concrete in the floor of the Capitol Visitor’s Center which is below the Capitol building? Probaby not. I only know because DH was xraying it. Takes 3 hours to expose in case you were wanting to know. LOL
We have aesthetics ordinances as well. yay but boo all at the same time. I figure it’s only a matter of time before the antennas are like the size of a chip and you can smack them up anywhere and you can pay like a buck for them so every house in a america has one sticking on the doorframe or something to boost cell service. My mum needs that. HAHAHA
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loadhan said:
Well, I only had my cell phone one time I was traveling across PA. I was on I-80 and got off in Bloomington. I had signal in Bloomington (but maybe on Cingular, can’t recall) but there were some random dead spots on I-80 in the middle of the state – pretty much BFE, PA (which I thought about using that expression earlier, heh). However, I knew this would be the case from the T-Mobile map. At various times I had signal but it did keep dropping as it searched for a local provider it could share service with. But we are talking the peaks of the Applicians in PA and possibly one of the least densly populated areas in the north-east of the country. We’re talking near towns that have been abandoned due to decades old underground coal mine fires and probably not too farm from widespread Amish country.
My plan when I got it on T-Mobile included no charges for roaming – domestically. Sadly, it doesn’t jump onto another network until it absolutely cannot find any T-Mobile signal; so if I have intermittent poor T-Mobile it won’t look for Cingular. I believe the only time I ever jumped onto another network was during the above trip, back in 2005 (less than a month after I got the phone).
T-Mobile started this nifty plan last summer though I haven’t looked into it lately. It was to compete with Cingular (now AT&T again) being the only provider for the iPhone. T-Mobile had a new plan with new phones where if you made a call in an area you had wireless Internet access, you used the Internet to make the call and not the cell towers – so no minutes. The best of all was the fact that if you left the area of the wireless Internet, you automatically switched back to the cell towers but you weren’t charged for minutes because you started the connection for free (the reverse was also true if you started on a cell tower and walked into a wireless zone you’d still be using up minutes). The plan also came with the option of a T-Mobile wireless antenna in your home and you could use any Starbucks wi-fi for free. Another nifty feature was that this worked even internationally; go to any wireless hotspot in another country and your call was still free! That’s been the only plan that made me tempted to change – since the entire Case campus is wireless and I have it in my home too.
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Lady Ozma said:
I have heard of that issue
The mountains are bad. That’s why Verizon is loved by people who cut through west va. Apparently no one else get sservice. Of course that information is from before I moved here in 04. No idea what it is like now that it is four years later. LOL
You’d think the darned phones would go “strongest signal”. When they do that, that will be awesome. Since no one charges roaming anymore. I actually asked the Tmobile guy why they even bother talking about roaming anymore. ROFL
I saw that Hot Zone or whatever they are calling it. I really like that. I have wifi in my house. We have 8 million starbucks in my town. Two of the coffeeshops and one of the eateries I go to have free wifi. The game store I frequent has free wifi. I mean hello????? That’s HOT! I love that. I really am thinking about that. But they only offer it on certain phones it looks like. So there’s that additional charge. But oh how I want. Oh I want so bad. I think that’s a neat feature!!!
Something people don’t realize is every cell provider does this with minutes – the not changing. If you start out roaming, it stays roaming. You start out on non-night minutes, stays on non-night minutes. (Quick hang up and wait a minute at 9PM!)
I do know that Tmobile seems to lead the way with the newer features. They do some really innovative things and being a geek… I really like that.
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