hyalineskies

My mom called me on Friday of last week to tell me some rather interesting news: she bought a Treo 600 Smartphone from Verizon Wireless. Since she lives in a rather rural area, Verizon’s massive (and archaic) network has suited her well, thanks to its “adoption” (or, rather, apathy toward current technology) of the 800MHz Cellular Analog frequency, as well as its omnipresent CDMA mess. Verizon is the only cell phone provider aside from Nextel (yuck, iDEN) to put a tower in my small hometown of Manchester, Michigan. Yes, kiddies, that means that my Cingular phone doesn’t work within an 8 mile radius or so of my parents’ house.

Before the Treo, my mom owned a Motorola V720- one of the first color screen phones on any network, let alone Verizon’s. It was great in its day, but the phone was on its last legs. There’s a key difference between the Treo 600 and her old V720: the V720 was Tri-Mode; that is, it supported not only Verizon’s CDMA protocol, but the old 800MHz one as well. Simply put, that phone had service everywhere. The Treo, however - and I’m speaking from my own experience with the smartphone as well - doesn’t have service anywhere. (Well, unless you consider open fields and main interstates everywhere you want to be.) The Treo didn’t get service in my apartment, didn’t get service on North Campus (we know it’s the middle of nowhere but come on,) didn’t get service on East Medical Center Drive, in the S. Forest Parking Structure… Alright, you get the point. Simply put, the Treo’s service is terrible. (Ironically, it works with a full signal strength only from my parents’ house in Manchester.) I’d say that at least 60% of the calls made on the Treo are dropped mid-sentence. My mom was irate in the car, telling me that PalmOne is dying because they can’t make a decent product. I spent most of the afternoon convincing her not to blame the Treo, but rather to blame Verizon’s utterly awful service. After all, my SI-HCI friend Aaron Rothman never had any nasty issues with his Treo 600- in fact, he loved his 600 so much that he stuck with PalmOne and bought the Treo 650.

Oh, by the way: Aaron’s on Sprint PCS. That reminded me: Sprint is a CDMA protocol as well, and they have coverage in Manchester. To make things even better, they’ve got the sweet charcoal-colored Treo 600. That’s when I had the plan of telling my mom about Sprint. I’ve been begging her to get rid of Verizon for years now.

She wasn’t going to give up on Verizon just yet. She’d been with them since they were part of CellularOne way, way back in the eighties when bag phones were all the rage. At wit’s end, she called a Verizon tech. The support consultant said all of the usual things: it doesn’t work in concrete/metal buildings (simple physics, it’s called a Faraday Cage), make sure the batteries are charged, yada yada yada. The tech didn’t convince my mom: she was a bit smarter than the average cell phone customer. The Verizon tech then offered to do some “tests”. His wonderful battery of tests consisted of hanging up on my mom with nary a callback. He couldn’t solve the issue, and didn’t want to be the one on the line when she said she was trying other services.

Trying other services. That’s the verdict: my mom’s sick of Verizon. When she told me this, I had honestly decided that there had been some sort of divine intervention that had spoken to my mom about how awful Verizon is, but it wasn’t an angel that helped: it was a little Treo 600, the semi-obsolete angel in disguise. After three days with the little Palm OS smartphone, my mom didn’t want to return to a regular old cell anymore. She was now seduced by this wonderful call of technological convergence, and she didn’t just want a smartphone anymore. After less than four days with the Treo 600, life without a smartphone seemed like not living at all. The convenience was just too addictive, and she wasn’t about to give up her newly discovered convergence because of a stubborn, useless, and utterly archaic cellular service provider who is at least nine months behind everyone other major provider (save Nextel and their “our service is for hicks and construction workers” iDEN protocol.)

Needless to say, her Treo 600’s being returned to the store tomorrow: quite sad for such a beautiful device that I don’t want to see relegated to life in a return bin after four days of use, but at least that Treo gave its life to show my mother just what real technology, and real wireless service is, and both of those are definitely not part of Verizon.