joeware - never stop exploring... :)

I finally went back to the Cingular site to look into ordering a new phone and this time succeeded. It seems the issue was a combination of things. My stupidity and Cingular’s stupidity.

Basically the site I go in through is to get our corporate discount on the Cingular phones. It is a special page that lists the deals we have available and the special rules, etc. As you get halfway or so down it starts talking about the differences you will get when ordering online versus walking into a Cingular outlet. Well I want the best discount and I love using the web to do ordering and handling support so I scrolled back to the top and clicked on the link that said PHONES. None of that worked well as I recently ranted.

I was trying to order phone and data services and that really seemed to be dorking it up so I decided to try and go through and just order simple phone services on a free phone, I got through all of that, then deleted the package and clicked on the continue shopping button and VOILA, I had images and things started working fine. Great! I walked all the way through the order and submitted it and BOOM it blew up. I was standing there and didn’t know whether or not it was ordered so had to send an email to our account reps and they verified it wasn’t ordered but could quickly finish it up so I let them.

They didn’t know why the order blew up in the end, but we did work out why I had so much trouble previously when I explained how I got it to work this time… At the bottom of that first page, unbeknownst to me was a little checkbox saying I accepted the rules and conditions… If you click that and then click I agree or something like that then it takes you into a different order process. They had two order processes hooked to that page, an old process and a new process. The old process was linked to all of the buttons at the top of the page, the new process was linked to the one button at the bottom of the page (when I say page I mean web page, it was several written pages of text). In the end, I never should have been able to get to any order screens without accepting that agreement.

Oh so what did I get? I needed something that was more useful for the times I did have to travel. It can be annoying pulling out the laptop in the airport or in the rental cars trying to find information or places so I went with the Cingular 8125. It seemed to be a popular choice at DEC when I was there in March and everyone said good things about it so I said what the heck, let’s go for it. So, Cingular phone service with PDA Data Connect and a super geeky phone. I wish it had a builtin GPS and mapping software but it appears I can get a blue tooth GPS receiver add on for it. At some point I should sit down and figure out what fun things I can do with my Exchange server to integrate the phone with it. To be honest though, phones and PDAs really do nothing to spin my propeller. You can ask my friend Dean, he has seen me trying to use my phones before and was actually shocked at how little I cared about it and how little I knew about it. When I want to get my geek on, I do it with full blown computers that are simply limited by how well I can program them. Phones and other small handheld devices just have too many limitations and I don’t feel like going blind spending much time looking at them. Once we get the OLED pull out screen tech in place with serious memory, storage, and processing power we can talk about getting geeky with PDA type devices.

   joe

 

   joe