Here’s my new phone. Looks great, huh? This is how UPS delivered it to me. I’m not sure if I should be mad at UPS, or Amazon. Who knows when this happened. Fortunately, everything was OK in the box.
What kind of phone did I get you ask? Well, here’s the story… Until a few days ago, I had a Sony Ericsson T610. I’ve had it for a couple of years, and overall it’s been OK. But, for several months I’ve had the annoyance of having to jiggle my power cord just right to charge the phone because the connection had become lose. And, my hands-free jack stopped working all together.
For months now I had been following the iPhone rumors, just like the rest of the Mac fan(atics) out there. I wanted to get a new phone, but I didn’t want to do that and have Apple announce the coolest phone ever right after I bought something else. So, I just held in there.
After the very disappointing truth came out about the iPhone I just went ahead and bought the other phone that I really wanted. To make a short story long, I bought the Motorola RAZR… in Black. Best of all, it was free from Amazon, after a $150 mail-in-rebate that is. I had to sign a 2 year contract with Cingular, but that was fine because I was ready to ditch T-Mobile anyway.
How’s the new Moto RAZR you ask? It’s awesome! It blows away my old T610. The speaker is much clearer than on my old phone. Calls are very clear on both ends. The camera is much better too, not that I really care about that. Syncing with my Mac (using iSync) via bluetooth was a snap. You could also sync via a usb cable, but I haven’t tried that. I’m very happy with the RAZR, and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a new phone. The one and only complaint I have is with the “address book”. It should really be called a phone book, as it doesn’t hold addresses… just phone numbers and email addresses. It also tends to scroll fairly slowly. By the way, the Amazon deal is still good, at least as of the time of this writing.
As a side-note, when the box arrived all beat to hell, I made a little video of it just incase I needed to return it, if it had been broken. Since I had the video already, I thought I would share it with you.
Watch the movie – 4MB QuickTime (QT6+)
OMG! That is nuts! Whats the story with insurance now?
How did you get that ODL banner on the bottom of your movie, I’d love to do that with .mov’s I make…
I use Adobe After Effects… which, as tools go, is way overkill for doing such a simple thing, but it’s what I use in my day-to-day work, so I already have it. I’m not sure what cheap / free tools are out there for doing that kind of thing. Maybe I’ll have to look into that.
If you find a free or low cost (less than $50 :P) alternative, please let me know :).
do you know if this deal is for just one phone or can you get a family, all with rebates or just the main phone?
I don’t know. My guess would be that in order to get rebates on multiple phones, you would have to sign up for seperate acounts for each person, as a new service agreement is one of the restrictions of the offer.
That’s an intense beating that box took, but good to hear it made it ok.
Hi, sorry about your dog. I was reading your archive about your new black RAZR phone and I watched the video of you opening the box that got run over by the UPS truck. Then I noticed your dog’s nose enter the video (as if it were helping you out, sniffing for bombs or drugs or other profitable paraphrenelia). Must’ve been a wonderful dog. Anyways, my question is, and I think it’s a big deal because I havn’t been returned rebates in the past, did you get your $150 rebate for your new phone from Amazon.com yet?
Thanks Kevin, Emmitt was a wonderful dog. I miss him. I forgot he was in that video.
I haven’t received my rebate yet, but it’s because I haven’t sent it in. I didn’t realize this, but the fine print of the rebate form says you have to wait a couple months before you can send it in. You have to include a copy of your second-months bill, from the wireless plan you sign up for. They want to make sure you don’t cancel right away. I’ll be sending my form in this week.
I have heard that Amazon is notorious for ‘losing’ rebates, or being incredibly slow. I’m hoping I don’t have any problems.
You won’t find this on Amazon.com, but a while back I managed to get a customer service phone number for them, it’s 800.201.7575. Try giving them a call on you missing rebates. Maybe you’ll get lucky.
Dude I love T-Mobile, hate Cingular!