All Posts Tagged With: "t-mobile"

I had been a customer of Sprint for 6 years when I switched to T-Mobile in 2006.  I switched for several reasons – the main one being as a result of a customer service incident.  The fact that Sprint had limited the functionality on the phone I had, pretty much rendering the internet option on my plan useless, also influenced my decision.

I had heard good things about T-Mobile and when I crunched the numbers I was getting a better deal.  The fact that I could swap out the SIM card was also a draw as I have been known to take several international trips in the same year.  At that time I signed up for the $39.99 plan that came with 600 anytime minutes, unlimited nights and weekends, and free mobile-to-mobile minutes.  I also added T-Zones and a modest text messaging plan (200 I think).  And we lived happily ever after, right?  Not quite.

My contract expired a year and a half ago. I enjoyed the service but as of late have been having problems.

Internet

T-Mobile allowed you to set up POP3 email accounts to be read on the phone.  I also found that I could run the GMail java application on my phone.  Well apparently T-Mobile didn’t want users to be able to run their own apps to access the internet without having you sign up for a plan that costs 4 times as much and they blocked port 80 on the phones (or on their network?).  I’m not sure exactly when this happened but doing so also blocks their own email application which I had been experiencing but only recently found out the reason.

Mobile-to-Mobile

A few months ago I was surprised to find that I my bill was $40 more than normal.  I had no idea why.  After taking a good look at the bill I found that they were charging me for calls I was placing to other T-Mobile subscribers.  That particular month I had had a long conversation with a cousin who talks quite a bit.  That call in addition to calls to the BF that I thought were free had eaten up my included minutes so all subsequent calls during peak hours were charged.  One of the reasons the BF and I both got phones on T-Mobile is because calls to each other would be free – apparently not anymore.  I have no way to even tell when they removed this from my plan since I don’t get paper bills (this is exactly what I was afraid of in doing electronic bills only).  At the time I thought maybe I had misunderstood what was included in my plan rather than the plan had changed.

Phantom Text Messages

This one beats all.  I was in the Dominican Republic in May.  I made a few calls and sent a few text messages – being careful not to do too many as I knew I would be charged.  I got a bill for that include $22.35 in “Usage Charges” ($16.39 for calls and $5.95 for text messages) that I thought included all the international calling, etc.  The next month my bill included $39.29 of “Usage Charges”.  These usage charges included one call for $1.49 and 108 international text messages for $37.80 sent to 206-313-0004 which I understand is the T-Mobile SMS service center.  First of all, I don’t text like that normally so I definitely would not be sending that many text messages knowing that I would be charged for every one of them.  The ironic thing is that text messages tend to be free with international carriers but that’s beside the point.

I called T-Mobile and was told that they have no way of knowing if I really sent those messages or not and that there is no way to check the content of those messages.  How convenient.  They expect me to pay the bill though, right.  The customer service representative annoyed me because 1) she did not know that 206-313-0004 is the T-Mobile SMS service center and suggested that I call it to find out who received the texts from me and 2) she insinuated that I may have been able to send multiple messages within a minutes time.  She did nothing to look into the situation.  I have contacted T-Mobile in writing as well and received the same response that they can’t give me detail regarding the messages.

I did notice that I have have 400 included text messages in my plan.  I have no idea when that was bumped up from 200.

I had been a big cheerleader for T-Mobile when people asked me about cell phone plans.  I won’t suggest it again unless they show some effort to resolve my issue.  I had been agonizing over having to switch to AT&T for the iPhone because I thought that T-Mobile offered such good service but I think that loyalty was misplaced.  This is completely my opinion but I think cell phone providers don’t care anything about you unless you have a lot of services on your phone.  They don’t bat at eye at frugal little me who gets a cheap plan and likes to be without contract.  Oh well – it’s their loss.

If you read my previous blog entry (She’s Got a Habit) you know that I’m using a Palm LifeDrive and a Motorola RAZR to access the web when I’m mobile. On my trip to the Dominican Republic I realized how much mobile websites suck.

Mobile websites are designed to use less graphics, Javascript, etc. so that sites load easily on mobile devices including cell phones, PDAs, etc. Granted these sites are designed to be lighter versions of the actual websites, I’ve found that the absence of certain features have to be an oversight or design flaw.

My first example is T-Mobile. I was sitting in Dulles wanting to go online. I put my Palm LifeDrive on the WiFi available at the airport. After looking at the available plans I decided that it was a better deal to sign up for the $19.99/month access plan being a T-Mobile subscriber. I log into the T-Mobile site and it automatically puts me on the mobile version of the site. On this site there is no option to subscribe to a WiFi plan. The only options available were to add more text messages to my plan. I kept trying to get out of the mobile site but I was stuck in mobile hell. The problem with this is that my LifeDrive can display full websites (the site that showed the access plans was a normal website) so I should never have been sent to the mobile site. In addition, the mobile site should have more options to change or update your plan. T-Mobile lost $19.99/month from me.

My next example is Flickr. I took a photo of the Caribbean with my cellphone and sent it to Flickr. The way I sent the photo set it to private so I logged in to Flickr from my phone to change it. Flickr showed me that the photo is private but did not give me an option to change this setting. Flickr does allow me to add comments and the like through its mobile site.

I also used Yahoo!Mail and GMail’s mobile sites while on vacation. Yahoo!Mail was more reliable but it was down for an entire day. (I know I shouldn’t have been looking at it on vacation anyway.) I normally have trouble connecting to GMail’s mobile site so I was surprised that I was able to connect to it. When I was able to connect to it I had no problems.

Surprisingly, I had few problems connecting to Twitter’s mobile site (when it was up). My only issue with it is that I am not able to see replies and direct messages from the mobile site. Twitter does, however, allow me choose whether or not I access the normal site or the mobile site so I still have access to those features.

My main problem with mobiles sites is when sites use browser detection to automatically send me to the mobile site and then the mobile site doesn’t have all the options available. My suggestions are simple: 1) If you use browser detection to send people to your mobile site, give us a choice on the mobile site to use the normal site. 2) Add commonly used features to the mobile site.

As an aside: Since I did not experience this on the Blackberry, I’m wondering what about its browser is different that the browser detectors don’t treat it as a mobile device. I ran into problems with this when I actually wanted to go to United’s mobile site to find out where my connecting gate was in Denver as the actual site was taking too long to load.