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(5/12)

Knock on the door - it's UPS with the phones! (No signature required.)

I'm happy as can be like a kid on Christmas. I open the box and find brand-spankin' new T-Mobile branded boxed phones (I had thought maybe they would be shipped in some brown-box refurbished cartons).

To be a good phone user, I plugged in both MDAs and waited an hour to charge up the batteries. Then with great excitement, I turn on both phones and started the WM5 (Windows Mobile 5.0) OS orientation. This is definitely NOT a phone-phone, not even a PDA-phone. This is really a micro computer with a phone taped to it...

Now I should mention that in the past, my home gets reception with all carriers ranging from the CDMA to TDMA to GSM carriers with phones that I've owned or those that my friends and family bring. At this point I hadn't heard of any issues with reception or the slow network registration issues that plague the T-Mobile MDA.

Just to make sure my numbers were ported, I checked with my old phone and sure enough, when you placed a call, the analog roaming message that plays wanted something like $2.00/minute to make a call. Yeah, right.

I pick up the landline and call my cell number (or mobile number for you guys overseas) and my outgoing message has been replaced by the default T-Mobile one. Looks good so far.

So here I go to make a call and I get this "Please try again later" message from the MDA. What? Maybe I should've realized, but the phone was trying to register onto the network or searching for signs of life with the four sequencial blinking dots that appear from the bottom of the signal strength meter.

Now remember, I'm under the impression that not only should the phone work, there shouldn't be any problems with reception in my home. So here I go and call Letstalk and ask about the number port. The nice lady said the number port looked fine and to be sure, she also did a three-way call with T-Mobile.

T-Mobile confirmed that the number port looked fine and that maybe we would need to wait some more - perhaps another 24-48 hours. Fine, but they also get me to talk with the MDA specialist and tech. support departments at T-Mobile and they confirmed that everything was fine. They made my reboot the device over and over again and even had me attempt to acquire a signal manually (at which point all that showed was Cingular). No one could figure it out so they said to wait some more pointing to the number port as the cuplrit. BTW, now that I think back, I mentioned numerous times of the blinking dots under the signal strength meter. I guess they even made the assumption that I had a signal. Oops...

Elapsed time: 1 hour

If you make minimum wage ($8.50/hour) = $8.50
If you're a hot-shot partner at a law-firm ($400/hour) = $400 (crazy, right?)

Overall satisfaction meter: :|