T-Mobile, Verizon, and the Motorola Q
I recently switched from Verizon to T-Mobile. I switched because T-Mobile’s call quality and coverage sucked and because Verizon is currently the exclusive carrier of the Motorola Q. I’m very happy with Verizon’s call quality and coverage. It’s much better than T-Mobile in the city and the ‘burbs. However, you definitely pay for it. Verizon is much more expensive than T-Mobile.
I’m still on the fence with the Q. I like the form factor, but Windows Mobile Smartphone and the built-in applications are terrible. I should have expected as much from Microsoft. Palm’s software is vastly superior. I don’t know why people were waiting for a Windows Mobile version of the Treo. You can’t even sync Windows Mobile devices to a Mac without buying third party software. Microsoft’s Active Sync is inferior to Apple’s iSync. As far as I can tell, the only thing Active Sync can sync to is Outlook. This makes it impractical to sync my Google Calendar with my Q. There’s a utility out there that lets you sync your Google Calendar to Outlook, but I’ve yet to get it to work properly. Active Sync also does not seem to allow you to choose which Outlook calendar to sync with. I have a work calendar that Active Sync syncs with and I don’t want to put my personal events on that calendar. Basically, Active Sync ties you into Outlook and Outlook is far from the most open and standards compliant software out there. iSync syncs with applications that store their data in open formats (i.e. iCal and Apple’s Address Book).
I made a pretty big reduction in the number of minutes in my calling plan when I switched from T-Mobile to Verizon because Verizon is so much more expensive. Paying for an unlimited data plan doesn’t help matters any. So, I try to be much more cognizant of how many minutes I have left in my plan now. Whereas, before, I didn’t worry about it at all. Winston Huang has created a Firefox extension that shows you how many minutes you have used in your status bar. Now I can tell, at a glance, how many minutes I have used. There’s also a T-Mobile version of the extension for those of you who are on T-Mobile. You should all switch to Verizon so we can talk for free!
