As I mentioned in the last blog, I got a new phone recently. For some people they switch phones pretty frequently. But I tend to keep mine for years at a time, so this is kind of a big deal. People know me. I have many leather bound books and my apartment smells of rich mahogany.
What prompted the change was that the headsets on my old phone kept breaking. I went through at least 3 or 4 new headsets in the life of this phone. I blame the design of the plug, with all the little flimsy pins and awkward hooks on the side of the connector. I know they need it for data capabilities and stuff, but it was much better when it was just like a simple mini-headphone jack.
Ironically (or stupidly, depending on how you look at it), my new phone uses the same exact headset as my old phone, so I guess I can look forward to having the same problems in the future. But first, more on my headset replacement saga.
Both headsets pictured above were ordered online during the last couple weeks, after my last one stopped working. They were both advertised as OEM, had the exact same model number, Nokia HS-5, and the hardware looks the same, but outside of that, the two could not be more different. You can see the packaging is different, but more importantly, one works like it's supposed to and the other one is absolutely horrible.
The one on the left was ordered off eBay, from some vendor in Hong Kong or China. It sucks. The sound in the earpiece is all echo-ey, the person you're talking to gets buzzing noises, and if you try to jiggle the connection, the call gets dropped. The one on the right, I got off Amazon. Works perfectly, no complaints at all.
You would think that a headset is one of the easiest things to make as far as electronics goes. It's just a wire terminated into pins at one end and a speaker at the other. Can't really mess up design that badly right? But I guess you can, and quality still makes a big difference.
To make me more mad, I thought at least I paid a lot less for the eBay one, but after going back and adding it up, I paid pretty much exactly the same for both. The eBay headset was something like $1.99 BuyItNow Price + $7 shipping + $2 insurance = $10.99 total. Insurance was mandatory too, when did sellers start pulling that crap? Amazon, the list price was $8.95 + about $1.50 for shipping and $.60 for tax = $11.15 total. Would have saved on tax too, if Illinois didn't happen to be one of the chosen states.
I always thought it was weird how the market culture on eBay or late night infomercials are so different from "traditional" retailers, at least in the way they price things. You don't usually see Amazon.com or BestBuy.com mark down the prices on their products and then jack you by rolling the cost into the shipping and insurance. In fact Amazon offers free shipping for a lot of orders and still has a pretty low price on everything.
So why do the buyers on eBay let sellers get away with all the BS shipping charges and mandatory insurance? There's no way it costs that much to send a little piece of wire to my house. It's not like it even got here that fast either. And if I wanted my shipment to be "insured", I would have asked for it. Am I the only one who thinks it's mentally retarded to pay $2 for insurance in case my $2 item gets lost?
Anyways, moral of my original story, if you're buying a headset for your cell phone, don't trust Chinese people on eBay. Not only will they sell you a terrible product, but you can get the the same thing, except better quality, for almost the same price on Amazon.
As for my new phone, it's pretty similar to my old phone. Looks similar, about the same size and shape. But it has a lot more features - 1.3 MP camera, takes videos, stereo mp3 player, MMC flash card slot, bluetooth and infrared connections, and more. My favorite feature, though, is that it lets you use any mp3 as your ringer. I think it goes without saying which song I copied onto my new phone first.
I'd been holding back on getting a new phone because most of the new models have cameras, and camera phones are banned from my work facility. But this one got such good ratings and had all the features I wanted, so I just had to pull the trigger. I guess I'll just have to keep it in my car when I go to work or leave it at home during the day.
On the plus side, I'm hopeful that the convenience of having a camera with me at all times will lead to more pictures taken and posted here. Can't say for sure if that will happen, or promise that the pictures will be interesting, but at least I know a blog with pictures is better than one that's just filled 100% with my tedious writing.
One last note, I know I've ripped on a lot of companies before, for being shady or having bad customer service, but in an effort to be a little more fair, here's a positive recommendation for once. I've been with 3 different cell phone providers now, and in my experience, I'm definitely most satisfied with T-Mobile.
They haven't been perfect, but overall, I have to say they are much better than Cingular or PrimeCo/US Cellular. You'll have to check for yourself if their coverage is good in your area, but I get very few dropped calls where I live.
More importantly, their customer service is very good. The plans and contracts are pretty straightforward, without a lot of the silly hidden fees I had with the other providers. And their reps at the stores are generally pretty helpful.
If you call up 611, they do give you that silly Kramer-Movie-Phone-esque "Why don't you just tell me your question" system that we all hate. But you can always press 0 and go straight to a live person, which is what I do, and from there the people are usually nice and knowledgable too.
So yeah, if you are completely confused by all the wireless provider commercials out there that accuse each other of having dropped calls, fees shorty fees, or bad customer service, that's my opinion. T-Mobile gets a Dudo509 blogspot thumbs up.
