tonyballinger.com

I’m in the market for a new phone since my venerable SonyEricsson T68i has been misbehaving recently. It’s been a good phone to me, but it’s been dropping calls and the joystick doesn’t work occasionally.

The problem for me is that I’m not that excited about any of T-Mobile’s current phones. The reason I chose T-Mobile years ago was because they had the T68i, which was one of the first phones with iSync support and Bluetooth. But T-Mobile’s current portfolio of phones is a little lacking.

So after looking over the RAZR, ROKR E1, Treo 650, Sidekick II, and a handful of SonyEricsson phones – I’ve settled on the ROKR E1. Since T-Mobile doesn’t carry the ROKR, I’m left to purchase an unlocked one off eBay.

For the uninitiated, an unlocked phone means that you can use it on any carrier, as long as it’s the same type of network. For example, the ROKR and T-Mobile both work with GSM networks. The other hurdle on using an unlocked phone with your carrier is that it’s largely unsupported, and that’s totally reasonable. You can’t really expect T-Mobile to know how to get every little thing to work on every phone out there.

So to get the full skinny on what to expect from using an unlocked ROKR with T-Mobile, I called their tech support. They were really helpful, and mentioned that the phone functionality will work just fine using the SIM card from my old T68i, and they could push a code update to it and give me some settings to enter that would enable it to work with their T-Zones internet services.

The one hairy thing would be this: instead of getting a nice mail icon or something when I had voicemail – I would get an SMS with garbage characters in it. Then, once I checked my voicemail I would get another one. These SMS messages are understood by supported phones, and respond accordingly by toggling the mail icon. But unsupported phones just don’t know what to do with it.

The idea of this really bugged me for some reason. It wasn’t a perfect solution. It wasn’t seamless.

So I spent some time on Google looking for others who had this problem, and had done something about it. And I found a whole community of people who have tools and tutorials on modding their Motorola phones. So it looks like I’ve got my work cut out for me when it gets here…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 31st, 2006 at 4:18 am and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.