A couple of regular Operation Gadget readers [ Jonathan Greene and Levi Wallach ] have expressed some surprise that Kathleen and I are buying two Treo 650s to use on Cingular Wireless. There are a couple of reasons why we’ve chosen to do this that may not be apparent to others at first glance:
- Kathleen had a BlackBerry on the Cingular Interactive Mobitex network until about four months ago. Since then she has not had wireless email. We were paying about $40 per month for the wireless data service for her at the time the contract was cancelled, and we considered that a good investment. The total cost of her mobile phone and wireless data at that point was about $80 per month, so the total cost of phone and wireless data service for her Treo 650 will be virtually the same.
- My T-Mobile bill is between $95 and $100 per month. This is inflated by the cost of using “anytime minutes” to call Kathleen because she and I are not currently on the same mobile carrier. By switching to Cingular, I can cut my bill by $15 to $20 per month by reducing the number of “anytime minutes” for which I’m paying.
- Kathleen’s parents and sister have a Cingular Wireless “family plan”. By switching our phones to Cingular, we will reduce the amount of billable minutes that they and we need.
- We also expect to be able to save money on long distance telephone calls to Kathleen’s family and some of our other relatives by calling them on Cingular-powered mobile phones rather than on regular phone lines.
The way we’re looking at this, we are cutting our total mobile communications bill by 11 percent, getting two state-of-the-art integrated communication devices, and getting unlimited PDA access to the Cingular EDGE mobile data network for two users. The Cingular EDGE network operates faster than T-Mobile’s GPRS network.
In defense of T-Mobile, I feel that they have the best customer service of any mobile phone carrier in the United States and their handset unlocking policies are the fairest to their customers. These intangibles may trump a 10 percent cost savings and a faster wireless data network for some people. Also, T-Mobile’s billing plans are generally a bit less expensive than Cingular’s if you would not benefit as much from the savings associated with free in-network calling to other Cingular customers that is clearly beneficial to my wife and me.