His and Hers Treo 650s?
My wife and I are about ready to make the plunge into a new mobile phone era by each purchasing Treo 650s. To give you a little background on our gadget habits, Kathleen and I are Blackberry users from the Mobitex era. We each had separate TDMA mobile phones at one point, then I made the jump to the Treo 180 on T-Mobile about three years ago. This gave me a single, integrated device, but my wife kept her separate gadgets.
At some point I had hoped to switch to a Treo 600, but didn't feel I had the money in the pre-Operation Gadget era.
My wife lost her Blackberry about six months ago when the reseller who had been servicing our Cingular Interactive Mobitex account shut down that part of its business. She's been chafing at her lack of mobile email access ever since.
Now we're looking at the monthly cost of not being on the same wireless carrier and it just doesn't make sense for us to keep paying for larger "buckets" of "anytime minutes" than we would need if we could call each other mobile-to-mobile. On top of that, the wireless data capabilities of converged devices like the Treo 650 are just too compelling to pass up.
Our intent is not to wring quite as much savings out of our telecom budget as Glenn Fleishman did a couple of months ago, but we want to knock at least 25 percent off the total. We're pretty sure we can do that.
I'm hoping that we can get this process underway this weekend. I'll report this effort in more detail when we start working on it.
Comments
My wife and I are both on TMO and like it ... I've considered switching us to Cingular for the EDGE data speeds, but the cost difference with Hot spot usage (as limited as it might even be) would be considerably more given Cingular charges more than twice as much for PDA data access (45/mo vs 19.99/mo).
I can't get my wife to take my 600 btw now that I have the 650. She thinks it is too big and uncomfortable to talk on, regardless of how cool the data usage would be...
Posted by: Jonathan Greene | March 18, 2005 11:04 PM
Hey Dave, I got my wife interested in the Tmobile Sidekick back when it first came out and so she bought hers just a few weeks after I bought mine in late 2002. When I moved to the T600, I gave her my color Sidekick and several months later got her the Sidekick II. She is not nearly the gadget freak I am and the Sidekick has a lot of internet functionality without having to do much configuring. I guess I'm more of a tech hobbyist so I don't mind it that much.
Recently I convinced some other family members to move to Cingular because I was thinking of switching because of faster EDGE speeds for my T650. We have to wait until our contract is up, but by that point my wife will be close to having a baby, after which she'll be home for months, so she won't mind not having such a connected phone (The Sidekick can't be used on Cingular except maybe for just the phone part). Unfortunately, the clarity of the calls I've made with the family members that switched to Cingular are not very good. They are in NYC so maybe the problem is local, but the voices to me just sound fuzzier and sometimes clip off a syllable here and there. I'm also a bit concerned with Cingular's data rates. We pay $20/month for unlimited data, but it seems that Cingular is very confused as to what it wants to charge for the same unlimited service...
Posted by: Levi Wallach | March 21, 2005 10:52 AM