Today, I shall not rant about Verizon.
What, I hear you cry? But Dave, you’ve certainly let your feelings about Verizon be known before, has something changed?
As far as their offerings and their choices for what to do with the subscriber base? No, for the most part, I’m still pretty annoyed at them. But, in the department of “If you do things right, you can avoid a world of hurt for yourself”, I’m in pretty good space today.
My Treo 650 has seen it’s share of bumps, bruises, and generalized abuse over the two years or so I’ve been an owner. I’ve had it replaced once (due to the just mentioned broken screen), and had a full zap-reload due to a bricked upgrade attempt, but considering the number of times the poor thing has flung itself off my belt, or off the table, whatever – usually against a concrete or asphalt floor, it’s a wonder it’s held up this well. Go Palm for engineering a great little device.
However, yesterday my current device took it’s final tumble (out of the van this time), and the keyboard stopped working. I couldn’t unlock it, though if a call came in, I could answer it by tapping the screen. Time to head off to the Verizon store.
Despite my misgivings about dealing with Verizon, my experience there was pleasant and productive. I waited perhaps 3 minutes for a technician, who basically did the “Yup, it’s broke” evaluation. Looking up my account, he saw that I did in fact have insurance on it (YAY), and gave me the option of a replacement, or an upgrade. The upgrade would have cost me a lot of money (noooo thank you), but he said the replacement, because of my insurance, would be free.
“How long would that take?” I asked.
“Oh, about 30 minutes. We have another 650 here.”
“SCORE. Go for it, I’ll be back in half an hour.”
35 minutes later, I have a shiny new Treo 650, that looks just like my old one, sans all the scratches, and my screen protector. They even put it back in the Seidio rubberized skin I use to keep most of the shocks from destroying the phone.
Unfortunately, they couldn’t copy any of the data off the old phone (can’t even turn it on, really), so I had a blank slate to work with.
No worries! Due to the wonder of Hotsync, I was able to re-sync the Treo using my mobile cable while enjoying wireless at Starbucks, and I was back in business. Because of my regular use of GooSync, I hadn’t actually hard-synced the Treo in 2 months or so. Fortunately, there wasn’t a lot that had changed. Hotsync happily restored all my applications, data, phone book, and settings on the phone. It’s like nothing has ever happened.
Goosync took a little fiddling to fix, because the device ID had changed, but I was able to resync my Google Calendars in no time.
Total time from walking into the Verizon store with a broken phone to being totally up and running as if nothing had happened? 90 minutes.
That’s technology I can be happy with.
