After 12 years with Sprint, Fred makes the switch to Verizon and a Treo 650.

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. It had gotten so I was used to not being able to get through an entire conversation without the phone hanging up on me.

Of course, I still had a contract period with Sprint, for which the customer service people wanted to charge me an early termination fee. 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.

But while I was at it, I decided to make the leap back to Palm and get a Treo 650. The phone works reasonably well (despite the tiny buttons), the bluetooth headset is great. But here’s the thing: the phone syncs 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.

It also takes pictures — fairly poor 640x480 resolution — and plays MP3s — not as well/as many as an iPod. If it’ll remind me of my mom’s birthday, which I always manage to forget, it’ll be worth it.