Phones

After almost eight years of having Sprint as my cell phone provider, I finally canceled service and switched to Verizon. I have nothing serious against Sprint - despite how much they are hated among tech savvy internet types, my switch was not due to spite. Their call quality was simply too poor in my house (as well as my parents' house in the poconos), and I've never had good luck with their low grade phones that they give out for free (or close to free). On the other hand, I've seen how strong Verizon's signal is in those same places, and they've done a ton of work to improve their phone selection. Add in the fact that so many of my friends and family use them (meaning free calls), and the choice made sense.

I know anecdotes are proof of nothing, but I actually felt bad about disconnecting with Sprint. Until the last few years, they have been a solid provider, and I've never had any bad customer service issues. I would add and cancel features easily, and never had my contract renewed behind my back. Hell, when I called them up last night, they didn't even try to stop me from leaving! That is not to say that they haven't been a nightmare to other customers, but it also makes me wonder how much it comes down to one's ability to pay attention to their bill and contract.

On the other hand, I feel like they brought it upon themselves. They don't have any really good exclusive phones, so there's no reason to stick around with them and deal with potential network troubles. On that note, some of these network issues are inexplicable for such a big competitor in the cellular market. I once thought that my call troubles at home were because of the brick walls, but my roomates had a clear signal with Verizon and AT&T, while my signal was flaky with two different handsets. Put these two issues together, and there isn't much reason to stick around, unless one of their plans is particularly good for your needs (and to be fair, they're actually cheaper than I previously thought).

But if that was all there was to it, I could still understand. The tipping point, then, is the fact that they're losing tons of cutsomers and posting massive losses, yet still deem it fit to spend what is likely a ton of cash in advertising. Not only are these ads annoying, but they also don't work very well. If you show me a commercial that boasts of all the cool things you can do on a Sprint phone, you probably shouldn't make two out of the three examples be Blackberries. All that says to me is that Blackberry makes good phones, phones which I can go and get on other networks. It also isn't smart to brag about how they can use apps, because the cultural consciousness knows that the best place for apps is the iPhone. Telling everyone that you have some too isn't enough. Are they better? I wouldn't know. It's a sad day when I would rather see an iPhone ad over one from Sprint.

An a related note, they might save some money by dropping support of the NFL and NASCAR, neither of which can be cheap. Bottom line is that I felt like they were more worried about suckering new customers than taking care of their existing ones.

So now I'm on Verizon. I'm going to be paying more each month, but these days I use my phone constantly, and that's just for making calls and texts. Being able to rely on a better network has already come in handy on the first day. I feel like I can actually use my mobile as a primary phone without making compromises. That's worth a couple more bucks.

Next post, I'd like to talk about my phone of choice.