Speaking of phones with keyboards... My BlackBerry Q10 arrived yesterday!
I texted a picture of it to my 26-year-old daughter. Her reply was, "Lol, buttons."
I was going to go with the Classic, but Gettington had an unlocked Q10 on sale for $232.00 off. I've been lusting for a Q10 since it came out, I haven't used Gettington in a while, I actually like them as a vendor, and I'm a notorious tightwad: So I figured "why not?"
My reason for waiting this long was actually that I couldn't get a BB other than the one I already had (a Curve 9310) on prepaid. VZW told me flat out that they wouldn't activate a Q10 on prepaid, and because I loathe cell phone contracts, that meant I was out of luck because VZW was the only game in town here.
But AT&T planted a 4G / LTE tower just north of Sparrow Fart about a year ago, so when I saw the Q10 on sale, I decided to check out that possibility, either directly with AT&T or through Straight Talk (which has an MVNO agreement with AT&T). So I called Straight Talk first.
Straight Talk told me that BBs definitely were not supported on their 4G GSM service. But surprisingly, they also told me of a workaround that
sometimes worked, but that almost certainly wouldn't work in my ZIP code for a variety of technical and contractual reasons. Apparently there are some device restrictions on their MVNO agreement with AT&T. But they offered to send me a SIM card for the cost of shipping if I wanted to gamble.
It didn't work. Anyone need a Straight Talk SIM card?
AT&T, on the other hand, assured me that the Q10 would work just fine on their prepaid service. But because they
still haven't updated their database to reflect the new tower they planted, their system wouldn't let order the SIM card online. The map has been updated, but the database hasn't.
But they helpfully put me through to an engineer in Texas and told me that if he concluded that the service would work, they would override the system and sell me the SIM card. Because I hadn't actually purchased the phone at that point, it seemed like a good idea to me to make sure it actually would work first; so I let them put me through.
The engineer was so helpful that he knocked my socks off. He took my address and told me exactly what kind of reception I could expect everywhere within a 40-mile radius of my house, right down to the obstructions and topographic depressions here and there where the signal would drop off. I was impressed by his competence and helpfulness -- especially considering that we were talking about a single prepaid line.
I also was pretty surprised that he was as forthcoming as he was about the tower locations. I used to install stationary EVDO service years ago, and sometimes getting accurate tower locations and capabilities was like pulling teeth. Not any more. The engineer read off a list of all the local towers, where they were located, their heights, and their capabilities. He even asked me for other addresses where I spend a lot of time so he could check the coverage in those areas. Very impressive.
The engineer suggested that I order the phone, try ST's SIM card first (which he also predicted wouldn't work) since I already had an account with them, and then buy the AT&T SIM at a store and let them activate it so the store would get the credit for the activation. As predicted, ST's SIM didn't work, so I headed off to an AT&T store. Their SIM card worked just fine with no manual configuration at all.
But because the store was quite a distance away from my home, they advised me not to port my number until I got home just to be sure that the phone worked here. It did, so I called customer service and they ported the number. It took about five minutes. The CSR stayed on the line until the port was complete and called me on the new phone to make sure it had gone through. Also very impressive.
The AT&T deal is for unlimited talk and text plus 4GB of 4G / LTE data for $60.00 / month, including the taxes. That's not horrible at all. I probably could have gotten away with the 1 GB / month plan (I rarely use more than 500 or so Meg in a month); but I don't know how data-hungry BB10 is, so I went with the 4GB plan. I think it's only like a $5.00 / month difference, anyway.
One other thing I noticed right away is that the FastMail push is working again. On the Straight Talk account, it had stopped working about a month ago. It still collected the mail, but the push wasn't working, despite FastMail being enabled in Dovecot on my servers. Apparently Straight Talk (or TracFone, or VZW) is no longer supporting it on pre-BB10 handsets (or maybe not at all). Whatever the case, it's working on the new handset.
Life is good.
Rich
