The Life of Ed...CreepyEd

This post could also be entitled: In Which I Return a Phone and Discover AT&T Employees’ Heads Are Filled with Very Small Rocks.

On 7/2 I bought a new phone.  I was thoroughly excited about it, but somehow refrained from telling everyone I know.  I bought the Palm Pre.  Those who lived with me senior year know that I loved Palm’s web OS.  It’s so clean and user-friendly and the Palm videos made it look drool-worthy.  Plus it had that nifty Touchstone thing that carried the promise of never having to plug my phone in again, I would just set it down on the charging-thingy!

So, I bought the Palm Pre, supposedly fulfilling all my mobile dreams.  The first thing that irked me was the Touchstone charging station.  No matter how I moved the phone, I could never seem to get the Pre on the Touchstone so it would charge.  One night it went from charging to not charging about 7 times before ultimately deciding to charge.  The phone never moved.  Since I could still plug the phone into an outlet and charge it, Touchstone issues weren’t a make it or break it thing.

Last Sunday night, while my dad and Greg were here, I plugged the Pre in before going to bed (as I do every night).  When I went to sleep, there was a notification that it was charging.  When I woke up, the phone wasn’t charged.  Unacceptable.  I didn’t notice until I was unplugging it to take it to work.  I had about 1/3 of a full charge.  This day would need for lots of coordination, due to taking Dad and Greg to the airport and running errands afterward.  My phone would have been a real time-saver instead of me having to drive all over Lakewood and Littleton.  As soon as the phone didn’t charge on Monday morning, I knew it was going back to AT&T.  Due to my hectic schedule, I didn’t plan on even being able to find time to get to AT&T  until Friday.  Unfortunate.

Even before making the decision to take back the Pre, there were some things about it that really started to rub me the wrong way.  The ringtone selection is limited and pretty pathetic.  I think there were about four long ringtones and short versions of each one.  Along with that, the sound settings aren’t very customizable.  I want to choose the sound the phone makes when it receives a text message.  If that setting is customizable, the Pre instruction manual (which I read) didn’t do a very good job of making that known.  The battery life is a joke.  I’m not allowed to have my phone in my office, so for most of the day it’s sitting in a phone cubby not being used.  Even so, I would get home and the notifications would start, letting me know that the battery was at 18%.  Again, this is after a day of mostly non-use.  The phone application itself even has some issues!  When the phone application is open (and the keyboard is closed) you can only dial numbers.  There is no contact searching based on the letters that are associated with the numbers.  If you want to search for a contact in the phone application, you have to physically open the QWERTY keyboard.  That’s an entire extra step (and not just a swipe or click step) to do something that I feel should be inherently done.  Speaking of the QWERTY keyboard, there is no on-screen keyboard which means that if you want to do anything involving writing (email, texting, finding a contact, updating Twitter, typing in a website address, etc.) you have to slide out the keyboard.  That’s a lot of effort just respond to a text message with an “OK.”  Although the web browser is better on the Pre than on my HTC Fuze, there is no side scroll bar.  Scroll bars serve so many great purposes, like letting users know how far down a page or email they are so they know that they won’t be infinitely scrolling.  Finally, the alarm.  I use my phone as my alarm, especially now since my normal alarm clock isn’t unpacked yet.  I’m aware that there are plenty of alarm applications in the app store, but I really didn’t want to pay for one.  I downloaded an alarm app for my HTC Fuze, but I didn’t pay for it.  The times available to you on the Palm Pre alarm app are all multiples of 5.  I’m one of those people that set my alarms for 7:02, 7:04, and 7:07.  The alarm also doesn’t let you decide how long to snooze an alarm.  It’s set at 10 minutes, but that’s way too long for me.  I prefer the snooze to be set for 6 or 7 minutes.  I just don’t think it’s too much to expect that the alarm app that comes with phone is decent.  These may be small issues that you think I’m nitpicking over, but it’s these small details that make a user experience positive.

I don’t want you to think that my entire Palm Pre experience was negative.  There are some things I like about the Palm Pre.  It has a physical QWERTY keyboard.  Apparently that’s very hard to find these days in smart phones.  Palm’s web OS does a great job with multitasking and letting the user see what applications are open and easily switch between them.  Overall, web OS is very slick.

Now that you’ve had the backstory, back to the present.  This morning I received a text that I had used 100% of my data plan.  I was quite livid about that and realized that I would have to go to AT&T to get that taken care of before work and I might as well take the phone and return it at the same time.  I got that data plan thing taken care of, I now have the 2 GB data plan.  I told the guy helping me that I want to return my phone and look for another one.  I told him I’d like it to have a physical QWERTY keyboard, decent battery life, and I’d like typing in a phone number from the phone app to search contacts at the same time.  He said the only things available from Palm were going to be the Pre and Pixi, so I let him in on the little secret that I wasn’t brand specific, although I wouldn’t mind not having an HTC since the hardware on my Fuze started puttering out after only a year.  He showed me a Motorola Windows Mobile phone and an older HTC Android phone, along with HTC Aria, an Android phone with no keyboard, but a more recent version of Android.  While playing with the Aria, I asked about multitasking, which it could do.  I also asked how I look to see what applications are open and how do I switch between them.  That question was met with an “I have no idea” and the next 5-7 minutes were spent searching online for how to do that.  During this time, he asked a colleague if he had an expertise using the Aria.  The colleague responded with a resounding no that made me wonder if he had any expertise using phones at all.  Let me recap so far, I asked how to do something (relating to a pretty cool feature of the phone and OS) and at least two AT&T employees had no idea which result in searching the HTC website for basic phone usage instructions for about 5-7 minutes.  Is it just me or should employees in a mobile device selling store have a little bit more knowledge of the phones they sell?  I was severely disappointed with the knowledge the employee (both employees really) possessed and the options available to me based on what I wanted.

I started thinking, I could try out that Aria for 30 days and see how I like it and if I can live without a QWERTY keyboard.  I proposed this to the employee, “So, I could get the Aria and then bring it back within 30 days if I don’t like it, right?”  Apparently not.  I can bring phones back within the 30 days of the original purchase, the original purchase being the Palm Pre.  Evidently that’s done so people can’t just keep coming in every 30 days and get a new phone without being on a contract.  I didn’t really understand the explanation, but I do know that I’m on a family plan, so I’m not sure how being on a contract through the family plan would ever equal not being on a contract.  Perhaps logical operators work differently.  Similar to how math is different at Verizon (you know, because 0.002 cents is the same as 0.002 dollars).

In the end, I just returned the Palm Pre and put my sim card back in my Fuze.  Perhaps tomorrow I will go back and buy the Aria to try for 30 days, return it after two weeks and keep going like that through all the phones in the store just because I can.  This entire awful morning experience, not being able to find a decent phone coupled with AT&T employee incompetence has nearly brought me to tears.

Here is a request:

I’d like to stay on the AT&T network to stay on the family plan.  I’m looking for a phone with a physical QWERTY keyboard and something that allows me to simultaneously dial a number and search contacts.  I use my phone for email, web access, social networking stuff, texting, and even making phone calls.  Any recommendations?