Nope, not a new phone number – fortunately, although there is a story to go along with that as well – but I finally made the switch from Sprint to Verizon. For 12 years with Sprint, all the way back to the “Pioneer” program (flat rate, 35c a minute, no monthly fee sounded great back then even if there weren't any towers) I've been putting up with their fair-to-poor coverage areas because their prices tended to be better than the rest – as well as the usual inertia. But the last straw was moving in to our house in Mt. Washington – about three miles from downtown LA – and not being able to get coverage. Often my phone would ring and I couldn't answer it – usually it just switched to analog roaming mode and the battery would die. Of course it didn't work well at work either, in the Arco building, tho it had been working okay in the new offices. It had gotten so I was used to not being able to get through an entire conversation without the phone hanging up on me. I even started using the (shudder) land-line phone (cordless, of course, but). Everyone I've asked as reported best coverage from Verizon, so that's who I went with. Wish these phone companies would learn that my #1 priority from a cellphone is being able to make and recieve calls – which means I require great reception and great battery life.
Of course, I still had a contract period with Sprint, for which the customer service people wanted to charge me an early termination fee. But I'm told in the store that that fee is waived if you can't get service at home, tho CS won't tend to admit it. Apparently it's a catch-22: if you want to cancel your service because of bad reception you can, but you'll lose your phone number. But if you go to another carrier to switch numbers, you get cancelled automatically and there's a termination fee. In any case, after calling support several times and visiting Sprint stores several times in search of a better solution, I dropped in to V and they got it moved in minutes. Called Sprint and they wouldn't waive the fee unless I had a store person make a note in my account. Which, amazingly, they were able to do. So until I get the bill, the assumption is I'm off the hook, so to speak.
But while I was at it, I decided to make the leap back to Palm and get a Treo 650. Tho it will never equal the Newton, the Treo is a damned good phone (as far as I can tell by 2 days worth of field testing). The phone works reasonably well (despite the tiny buttons), the bluetooth headset is great (tho it seems to sound pretty bass-intensive, and the controls – or lack therof are a little hard to decipher). But here's the thing: the phone sync's with my Mac. Not only that, but after some fiddling, it does it wirelessly, over bluetooth as well. So for the first time in my history of phones and cellphones – I can actually move my contact list from the phone to the computer, and back! Which means now I've got to actually go back and clean up my address book, and move all the contacts from my old phone on to the computer, manually.
It also takes pictures – fairly poor 640×480 resolution – and plays MP3s – not as well/as many as an ipod. Keeps a to-do list, if I bother. If it'll remind me of my mom's birthday, which I always manage to forget, it'll be worth it. And there are even some advanced applications – like one that records calls (if you have the space on tiny memory cards) or runs Skype to do VOIP calls; there's a (optional, haven't bought it yet thank you) navigation package that hooks to GPS as well. All in all seems to be a clever bit of kit.