I Have Left Verizon and Palm

One thing I haven't mentioned because of all the time I spent working and blogging about Frankenstein, is that I have had a major shift in my telecommunications life.

To recap:
* I have been a Palm user since 2000 (my first Palm phone was the Treo 650 in 2005)
* I had AT&T from 1997-2003 and HATED it -- couldn't make calls indoors
* I switched to Verizon and despite hating their policy of crippling all the good features out of their phones, their reception is pretty much perfect in NYC.
* I am a Mac user and as such am opposed to Windows Mobile for both philosophical and logistical reasons.

Then this happened:
* As I excitedly blogged in May, Palm released the Treo 755p for Sprint. My Treo 650 at that time was dying.
* Verizon was rumored to be releasing it in July, then it failed testing
* I bought a 700p and extended my contract because I seriously needed a new phone
* I was one of the first people to get the maintenance release for the 700p that supposedly fixed it. This blog made PalmInfocenter, which I thought was the coolest thing in the world, despite being labled a "he."
* The Maintenance release turns out to have some horrible bugs, and a relatively minor one which causes the phone to randomly make audible DTMF tones even when silenced.
* After way too much time they release another fix which still doesn't fix the DTMF bug (which I was able to notice within 30 seconds of buying the phone). It turns out the 755p also has the bug.
* At this point I give up on Palm OS.
* Months go by, the 755p continues to not be released, and the 700p continues to be buggy.
* Palm announces that their next generation OS is at least 12-18 months away.
* Verizon is rumored to be soon releasing the HTC XV-6800, known as the Mogul on Sprint. This is a Windows Mobile 6 device. By now (September) I've decided to turn to the dark side for multitasking and a modern OS. Meanwhile AT&T is about to release the Tilt (aka HTC Kaiser), which is the next generation version of the 6800.
* The 6800 fails testing. AT&T announces the Tilt release October 5.
* October 5, I call all over town before I find an AT&T store with one in stock and jump in a cab on my lunch break.
* I try out the Tilt for a month and decide to keep it and cancel my Verizon account, with 20 months left in my contract.


So my AT&T experience has been quite good. Reception is definitely not as good as Verizon's, but it's the difference between being able to make a call from the basement of a basement behind a cinderblock wall or not. My usage has shifted a lot in the last few years, too. I use my phone far more for data than for voice, and I find AT&T's 3G and HSDPA networks to be very fast. Overall my Tilt accesses the internet much faster than my Treo, which is probably more to do with the phone's hardware and software than the network, but the important thing is that it's faster.

I'll be posting more details about this whole experience in the future, specifically from the perspective of someone moving from Palm OS to Windows Mobile.

I'm Not Dead

I got called out by a friend of mine the other night -- "The Go Button, not updated so much, hmmm?"

Yeah. It's actually really embarrassing that it's January and I haven't updated since November. I've been busy, and to be honest, the Facebook epidemic swept through the Frankenstein company and took up most of my webpage-updating energy for a while.

Frankenstein has now been closed for a month, and I'm currently working on an adorable new musical called Wanda's World, which is billed as "a musical for the 'tween in all of us." The site appears to be down at the moment, but here's the tickets page. Anyway it's a very fun show, aimed at middle school kids, but with a great score and a very talented cast that I think will make it entertaining for all. We're currently in tech. I'm assisting (again!) so I'm sitting alone backstage while they work on a giant dance number. I really want to PSM something, but I'm going to be careful what I wish for because I could very well wind up doing a show in the spring right before going back to Reagle, and that means 4 PSM jobs with no time in between. I would probably be burnt out after the first show at Reagle. As it is, I've learned that it's best to leave a little cushion before the start of the summer. I had about 18 hours between my last show of the spring and when I left for Reagle last year, and I was worn out very early in the summer. A job is a job, but if I have a choice I'm going to consider the importance of my sanity for the rest of the summer. I had less than a week between Frankenstein and Wanda's World, so a week or two of intermittent sub work would be just fine whenever it comes along.

The best thing I can say about my career right now is that I have so many insurance weeks that it's a non-issue in considering job offers, and I have enough savings from Reagle and Frankenstein that I can afford to work at a loss for a while. This is very important, because every now and then the job that pays the most or gives you the pension & health points is actually not the most challenging or most helpful to one's career.

So that's what's been going on. Sorry to keep you waiting!