I need help picking out a cell phone. It doesn't matter what kind, but the features I want are caller I.D., voice mail, and the ability to download ring tones off the internet. Any suggestions?
Get the Nokia 3360, its about the cheapeast thing that will do that. Get AT&T service, really the voicemail and caller ID aren't that dependant on the phone, more the type of service you have.
The following cell providers are ones I think are decent: Cingular AT&T T-Mobile Stay away from the following like the plague: Verizon Sprint Other than that I can't offer much more help.
Now there's an honest statement that I can agree with. I used Verizon/PrimeCo for about 4 years with no problems. I had a tragedy befall my phone, so I asked the local Verizon store if I could just pay for a new one without cancelling my existing service. I had pretty cheap rates with a plan that no longer existed. They said that I'd have to pay $300 or $400 for the new one to keep my existing plan or switch to a more expensive plan to get the same phone for $99. I switched to AT&T at that point. I then canceled my service with Verizon and the person on the phone said what they had told me at the store was wrong. Oh well... train your employees better and you'd still have my money coming in every month. When I worked in the telecom industry, all I ever heard was b****ing about Sprint, but I've never used them. I always had good reception with my Verizon service and never had a problem with billing or anything else. Like Pole said, they all pretty much suck somewhere sometime so it's a crapshoot.
I use Sprint and have never had a problem. They have cool phones compared to some other carriers, online billing so you don't have to go to the store or mail in a bill and I rarely lose my signal. A couple carrier/phone notes to keep in mind: AT&T is generally more expensive & has an aging network. Verizon(my girlfriend has them) often has crappy/no reception. Sprint has the newest network, but don't go to their store unless you have to because they are always busy. Get a phone from Best Buy/Radio Shack and activate it on their website. Also, Nokia phones suck.
AT&T has recently changed their pricing along with introducing Minutes Without Limits. Also I know that they changed out a lot of their antennas recently so they would be ready for 3G. I think that fixed the aging network problem. AT&T isn't my first choice, but they're not totally a bad option.
Good article there Pole! I have used T-Mobile (Voicestream/Aerial) for the past 2 and 1/2 years and havent had many complaints at all. I have been using the Nokia 3390, which is the phone I love and havent had any issues with it at all. My whole family has different carriers. My mother has Sprint, my sister has Cingular, and my other sister has AT&T. All of them have been just about the same. The only complaint I have is that Sprint has a weak signal in the house.
One thing about VoiceStream that caused me to drop them - they are on some type of frequency that not everyone uses. In other words, if you travel, you may get a "no signal" even though you're standing next to an AT&T cell phone tower. We we down in Port Charolette, FL - no signal for 3 hours on the main interstate even though we were going by tower after tower. I called them when I finally did get a signal, and they said they were on some type of frequency that is not nationwide. I've used Cingular since and haven't had a consistant outage problem.
I had Aerial when I was in Houston and they used the standard you're talking about (by the way, it's called GSM). I hated it back then because you basically had be near freeways and within a certain fairly tight radius of the city for the thing to work. And if you went down to Centerville, Tx., you were SOL.
I thought AT&T uses the GSM network still. They are working to upgrade their network, but are hundreds of millions of dollars away from 3G.
I know that at many sites they are using a dual antenna system which will operate at the lower frequencies for GSM and at the higher 3G frequencies.
The cell phone industry is one place where the US lags behind other countries... for the time-being anyway.
Verizon is probably the best IMHO. Their network is pretty large and they win JD Power customer service awards quite often. One word of advice in picking service though is not to pick a reseller. They're a waste of time and really can't help you with network problems without going through the real provider in the area.
Here's a recent Sprint article with a few mentions of GSM(no AT&T though). http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?channel=artcol.jhtml&doc_id=209742
