Me, Sprint and SamsClub

About a month ago I decided to replace my Palm Treo 755P because it kept rebooting every morning the first time I tried to use it. That got really old. On April 10, I was in the local Sam's Club and stopped at the phone Kiosk, which I found is run by a Radio Shack company. I left with a BlackBerry Curve 8330 and spent about a week with it. I was not really satisfied with it as a replacement for my Treo 755P so I returned it for a Samsung Instinct S520. I found the Instinct looked really nice, but didn't have any of the applications I used constantly and the news was through the browser rather than a standalone application like on the Treo and BlackBerry. Earlier this week I decided to take the Instinct back and get another BlackBerry. I went back to the Sam's Club and admitted my embarrassment at having to return yet another phone and get another BlackBerry. They said no problem and replaced the phone.

Some of the problems I experienced in this comedic episode were:

1. The Treo thinks of itself as the top dog and will accept Bluetooth address entries from anywhere, but won't share them with another phone.
2. The Sam's Club phone kiosk has no means to transfer your address book, but the Sprint Service Center is willing to do it for you.
3. The Treo had a incredible Address book capability and the Samsung address book was pathetic. Having more than a hundred entries in my address book and finding the Instinct stored them using the first name gave me nothing but grief. Quick, what's the first name of your dentist? You had to scroll through all the names on the touchscreen and not click on one and start a call. There was a tab thingy that allowed you to quickly change the first letter of the first name you were trying to locate, which had minimal usefulness.
   
4. The Instinct touchscreen takes a lot of getting used to. The day after I got it, on a Sunday morning at 6:00AM, I was trying to text my son. Somehow I ended up texting my son, a co-worker I hadn't seen in more than a year, and my wife's 70+ year old aunt in California. Thank God my wife's aunt's phone was a land line and the text message failed at 5:00AM on a Sunday morning. Later I got involved in a confused conversation with my co-worker who didn't know who I was based on my phone number and assumed he was talking to a relative of his.

Had a tooth pulled yesterday, so decided to go home after Sam's Club rather than go to the Sprint Service Center. On the way home I found my tooth was bleeding profusely and I needed to put more gauze on it and lay down to make it eventually slow down. Today it's not bleeding , but I had to drink a pot of coffee at room temperature.

Well I'm about to leave for the Sprint Service Center I'll follow up with how things go there? Still got some tasks and questions about the BlackBerry, such as:

1. Transfer address book
2. Setup email and make sure account is set up correctly for the BlackBerry
3. Ask how to add/remove apps (Doc2Go) using my credit card and not going to phone bill
4. Same w/ Ringtones
5. How to change the Background image
6. How to move apps (MySpace which I don't use and Facebook which I do use).

Well I'm back and the Sprint Service Center came through like a champ. They answered all my questions above. They showed me:

1. Done, quickly. Looks like they managed to transfer all the phone numbers and the email addresses including multiple for one person. The street addresses don't seem to have been transfered.
2. They showed me how to setup my email accounts using sprint.blackberry.com. I had to create a new blackberry account and then I just typed in the credentials for both my prime accounts.
3. Suggested I go to crackberry.com for the downloading and visiting the forums to get answers. They also recommended I visit the sprint downloads site.
   
4. See number 3.
5. See number 3.
6. The answer was easy, you find the app and click Move then use the ball to move it to where you want.

So I'm happy with Sprint and my BlackBerry. Not so with Gateway support as I'll explain in a post soon.