At camp last week, Dena made the “unbiased observation” that I was always surrounding by multiple lady friends, and rarely ever any guys. I didn’t really mean to be, but it just always seemed to turn out that way.
Sunday, Nicole wanted to go hang out and get lunch, so we were about to leave when she said “Here, I’ll ask some more people.” Through some cruel trick of fate, when we left for Café del Rio…
…ten girls and no guys came with us.Â
So it comes that time of year again, when our cell phone contracts have expired and we can go ahead and swap providers. You may recall that we switched to T-Mobile last year, even though we felt Cingular did better with having rollover minutes and such. But by switching carriers, we got new phones and a cheaper plan with the same number of minutes.
Cingular gave us a really hard time when we tried to port our numbers, enough to the point where my dad told them we’d never be using them again. But unfortunately, as the time comes to switch, Cingular holds 43% of the Joplin market… and those free Mobile2Mobile minutes with everyone on Cingular and Cingular Blue look pretty tempting.
What makes it worse is that in our new house (which is only 3 blocks away from the old), we get no reception with T-Mobile. If we did, we’d probably just stay with them; the plan is a good one. But it looks like we’ll be moving back to Cingular.
I have a nice phone from T-Mobile that I really like; it’s a Sony Ericsson t610, with Bluetooth and a camera. However, it’s locked to T-Mobile, meaning I couldn’t use it with Cingular if we switched to them. And the phone Cingular would give us for free was fairly bad, and even the next model up with Bluetooth wasn’t that great. I’ve got a car charger, a Bluetooth headset, all for my old phone 
I wanted to keep it!
So I finally found Howard Mobile Forums and in the T-Mobile FAQ, they mentioned that T-Mobile will unlock their phones after 90 days of contract. We called 611; the phones were unlocked 24 hours later. Can’t beat that! Nice phones AND free backups from Cingular, with rollover minutes and lots of people to talk to Mobile2Mobile.
New phone carrier, here we come.
Please note that the InvisionFree IRC has moved to irc.freenode.net #invisionfree
We feel that FreeNode provides a more professional working environment and will be working in the coming weeks to legitimize the IRC channel as a supported point of contact for InvisionFree staff. Stay tuned.