I had been with AT&T for many years, starting with dumb phones. I gave up my Daytimer for a Palm PDA long ago, but I hated carrying around two devices – which usually meant I left the Palm home. I have been using a Treo 680 smart phone for a few years and liked it pretty well, but it did have issues. I really like having a desktop calendar on my computers, but I didn’t want to use Outlook, which I use for work. So I was syncing my Palm with a desktop at work, a desktop at home, and a laptop wherever. Then I started having issues with the USB cables. The contacts seemed to get corroded, and I had a heck of a job getting the device to communicate. Bluetooth was slow, but when I got a Vista desktop at home, I had to use it, as there was no USB suport. After a while, I started getting error messages (very common according to the number of complaints in different forums) and it didn’t work at all at home. Finally, I had to sync my Palm at work and take the files home on a flash drive to be installed manually. Real pain in the rear! Then Palm decided to dump the whole desktop application with the Pre and force users to ‘cloud’ computing.
In addition, most of the people I know with Verizon service get better signal strength at a number of places where I go camping, so I had incentive to switch carriers. Finally, with the buy a Droid get an Eris free deal, I could update Ynette’s phone from the old flip hand me down she has been using on my second line.
So long AT&T, hello Verizon and the Droid!