I paid for overnight shipping and what arrived was a nightmare.

The phone came in great conditon with a screen protector, nice holster, and a house charger. Phone was almost fully charged when I powered it on and everything looked great — it was even upgraded with the latest version of Windows Mobile. If this phone was used for more than 4 months I’d be surprised.

I called Alltel (now Verizon) and went to activate it. “We’re sorry but the account this phone is on has an outstanding balance.” What the hell? It appears this guy got the phone discounts and bailed on his contract. Not only is it on someone else’s account but that account has been closed due to unpaid bills. Just great! Usually when someone defaults on a wireless contract it’s not over some small amount like $20. I figured he probably owed hundreds of dollars but still asked the rep. if I could pay whatever balance that’s owed. Nope. I can’t pay it, find out how much it is, or anything. Only the account holder can call in and I can’t even get their name to see if that’s my eBay seller.

I got on the hook with the seller on eBay and went as far as threating small claims court. I was furious and without a phone. He ended up settling on a partial refund which was $50 short of what I paid. After picking through his auction with a fine tooth comb, it turns out while the phone is only 4 months old, he never claims it can be activated and guarantees absolutely nothing. Shady business considering that this phone with a bad ESN would’ve fetched about $50 instead of $200.

Now, there are ways to activate this phone — by “flashing” or upgrading the phone’s software to another carrier, such as Sprint or possibly hack it up to work on some pre-paid deal. You could even change the phone’s ESN to a different phone and put it back on the carrier but that’s highly illegal and against FCC rules since 1998.

The seller hasn’t said anything since I accepted his partial refund, but he’s sure as hell not getting his paper weight back. I’m going to keep it around — probably sell it for parts and try to recover the $50 I’m out of. On a positive note I bought another, identical HTC Touch from a different seller, in the same almost new condition with an ESN I verified with Alltel as clear to activate. FedEx should be delivering my new phone in the next 2-3 days. Lesson learned here — if for any reason the seller of your next cell phone is unable to provide you with the internal details you need, such as the ESN or serial number, or any identifying information: fuck ‘em or else you’ll end up fucking yourself.

I spent $20 on a program called Black & Whitelist for my BlackBerry to block numbers I don’t want to talk to but on some phones, especially “regular” phones, this isn’t an option. Sometimes you can call your wireless provider and have them block the number but most of the time they aren’t going to waste their time with doing this often. I noticed a lot of phones have the ability to hide Address Book entries and then I had a stroke of genius — The Silent Ringtone.

Simply add the numbers you don’t want to hear from in your Address Book and assign them this unique, completely silent ringer and say goodbye to interruptions. If your phone supports advanced profiles, you can turn off vibrate and notifications as well. This is probably the easiest (and cheapest) way to keep some callers at bay. I’m including this silent ringtone in both MP3 and WAV format.

Got a better solution? Let me know! Love this article? Feel free to leave your feedback.

War driving to get faster data by hopping on insecure wireless routers? Come on, now. That’s less than the perfect solution to poor speeds. And I’m not too impressed with the faster 3G iPhone. I own an HTC Titan (PPC-6800) and while Windows Mobile just plain sucks, third party applications like SPB Phone Suite and Missing Sync make it usable day-to-day, it’s still a lot better than your iPhone. And Steve Jobs is still calling this thing a smartphone. Why all the issues, downtime, etc. if this thing is supposed to be so “smart?” I expected more from Apple on this new toy. I would’ve rather seen the Apple Tablet than see everyone working on that project shuffle over to the iPhone team and create this rather… interesting device on a rather poor network.

So, I’m going back to Redmond. Back to Bill Gates. Back to another Windows Mobile phone with all the toys. The PPC-6800, also known as the HTC Titan, “Mogul” and a few other carrier-specific nicknames. Paired with Windows Mobile 6.1, threaded text messages, multimedia message support, 802.11b/g wireless, high-speed EvDO on the Alltel/Sprint EvDO network, unlocked (hacked) GPS ready to roll with Google Maps or Windows Live, and Skype for international calling anywhere in the world from anywhere in the world? Now that’s a phone. Or should I saiy, that’s a small laptop with a built-in phone.

I’m looking to order the new HTC PocketPC (PPC) in the next week or two. Mmm, features.

With my Treo, I used ChatterEmail to get push e-mail using IMAP IDLE (RFC 2177) and with that combination, I could barely keep it going an entire day. Since the Canadians check my mail for me, I’m only downloading messages that have already been compressed and specially cooked for my BlackBerry (Just like Mom used to make!). While the only “true” push e-mail is offered on your @<carrier>.blackberry.com address which comes free with when you join the BB club, I’ve noticed only short delays, maybe 5 seconds to 5 minutes in most cases, for receiving mail on my SSL IMAP server. Considering to save battery life on my Treo I had to set mail checking intervals to 15 minutes, this is a good thing.

The form factor is probably what I love most about the phone and also what I hate most about it. It’s small, light, and so unlike a normal smartphone. I feel like I’m going to crush it or drop it constantly and that wouldn’t be good considering how expensive this little thing is. At the same time, I love being able to slip it in my shirt pocket — something I’d never attempt with my other smartphones, when I need to reach for it a moment later but don’t want to fiddle with the holster.

A lot of people complain about the cramped SureType keypad. It’s a full QWERTY layout midgetized. I’ve used QWERTY keypads for a long time now and I can tell you, it didn’t take but a few days to start blazing on this tiny keyboard. The secret, like I’m sure you’ve heard elsewhere is don’t look at the screen! SureType is pretty damn sure, getting about 80 to 90% of the words correctly with half the keys. Overall, I’m happy with the BlackBerry 8130. With a beautiful 2 megapixel camera, sleek look, and solid proven Operating System, what more could you ask for? Except for MMS, Wi-Fi….. I’ll just stop here.

I already downloaded Opera which I still swear by on the mobile platform as being the best browser period. I also picked up jmIrc, J2ME VNC, and a few other sweet programs that’ll make my BlackBerry zoom zoom.

I’ll keep you posted in a day or two on how well this little gem of a Pearl works out.

And to add insult to injury, the phone doesn’t even support multi-tasking.

So, I’m left with two choices: 1) Go back to Windows Mobile, or 2) Go back to BlackBerry. While I’m quite experienced with Windows Mobile, the BlackBerry Pearl and new BlackBerry Curve look very appealing. The big draw back for me with RIM’s BlackBerry was that it didn’t have any real multimedia options. You couldn’t take a picture or capture video with it. For the corporate world, that’s acceptable, but as more and more people “gotta have” what they see on the hip of Hollywood, BlackBerry is more than a phone: it’s a status symbol.

While my Treo is good at doing some things better than most (BlackBerry), like lightning-fast web surfing via the Blazer web browser and zooming through Remote Desktop and VNC sessions with the touch screen, I just think now I’m ready to go back to a multi-tasking smartphone where I can leave applications running in the background without special memory hacks (Thanks, Palm).

While the future of the Treo looks bright, they’ve been promising ACCESS Linux for years and every year I think about keeping my aging Palm OS around is another year they push my expectations to another date. Thanks a lot, guys.

Google Checkout

The amount of items returned on a Google Product search is amazing. I knew the price range I was looking at was going to return a ton of stores with the exact same no-name items so I went digging. I ended up finding a store called EZ Chargers that sold phone supplies and supported, you guessed it, Google Checkout. It was the cheapest price of them all for the same leather case and it was on sale for $6.99 + S/H.

100% Brand Name

My case took a 4-day trip via USPS from West Texas to Southeast Georgia. To my amazement, not only did it come in a very nice packaging and include both a “normal” belt clip and a swivel clip (interchangeable!), but it was BRAND NAME! This was a brand new Cellet leather case. Cellet has had their name all over “mobile” for a while now, offering things from memory cards to batteries and so on.

And here it is in living color! If you look close you can see the dock of my Hackintosh on the monitor. Google saves the day again!

The Easy Route

It used to be simple. Let’s say your job required you to pack up and move to New Mexico next week. When you arrive at the airport you realize you have no service! Oh, no. You still have about 15 months left on that Verizon Wireless contract and you can barely get a signal if you stand on your head.

Most mobile carriers have written into their Terms of Service that they don’t guarantee that service. This means if you move to an area which has no service on that “Nationwide” coverage, you’re still responsible for paying. Just because you can’t use your phone doesn’t mean you should stop paying for it, right? Yeah right!

Military Movers

Nowadays, with more and more military men and women moving overseas, most cell phone providers are willing to cancel out the contract early without paying any additonal fees as long as you don’t owe them money. Just fax in a copy of your orders or bring them to a local retailer. Some providers also offer a “vacation plan,” where they suspend your service until you come back to the United States and you’re only responsible for a small monthly fee of $15 or so to keep your service and phone number rather than the whole thing.

Contract Swapping

The easiest and most recommended method of getting out of your long cell phone contract is by giving it to someone who wants it. A friend or family member might have little or no credit and is stuck using a pre-paid phone because they don’t want to shell out $500 for a deposit. There’s your way out. Charge them just what the bill is, and call your mobile provider to have the “credit limit” on the account reduced so they can’t go all out and run up a $2,000 bill. They get a free slightly used phone, a new paid contract with more minutes, and you get the freedom to move elsewhere.

And there’s always faking your death, which as a dead person you might find it difficult to establish a new line of credit or enter into any legal agreements. Antarctica’s looking better all the time…

I started to search around looking for an end-all loud and annoying tone to replace my handful of default alarms which sound more like an old Nokia ringtone than something that’ll wake the dead. I ended up creating my own 10-second tune. Feel free to download it as a large WAV or a small MP3.