My T-Mobile Sidekick!

I’ve finally decided it is time to make a post about my sidekick. Most everyone has seen a news article or something recently about the sidekick outage, and how terrible “living in the cloud” is, and how you should never trust a company with your information, and blah blah blah wank wank wank.

Whatever.

I love my sidekick. It is definitely the best phone I’ve had, ever. I actually didn’t lose my contacts like other people did, because I was smart enough not to freak out right away when I lost my G (means GPRS, has something to do with edge services, and I don’t really know. All I know is it means that if I lose it, I can’t surf the web or get email or chat on aim or any other cool ‘requiring data functionality things’). Instead I waited to see what was going on.

I was without data services for a total of 12 days, and even after that I didn’t get e-mail back until the 15th, making a total of 21 days with some type of outage for me. This is where my rant is going to come in. I’m a prepaid sidekick user. It is just the best option, really. I pay 30 bucks a month for unlimited data and unlimited text messages. I can surf the web, send email and texts, IM, and tweet, and hang out on Facebook for as long as I want, all the time. I like it. I don’t like talking on the phone so paying more for a contract just so I can have some minutes, doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.  But here’s where it starts to suck.

T-mobile doesn’t care about their prepaid users. Not one bit. I was reading some posts over at poweredbydanger and saw a post that said that during the outage, prepaid users weren’t having money subtracted from their account (prepaid users pay a daily fee of $1.00) by T-mobile, which I thought was odd, because I was still seeing the daily fee being taken out. So the boy creature called T-mobile for me and asked what was going on, and was told “to call back after my data service is fully restored to be credited according to how long I was without service.” So once I got service back, he called in for me. The rep from T-mobile said that prepaid users were only being credited $10.00 and that was that. So I’m kinda upset because that doesn’t even cover how long I was without service. But of course, T-mobile doesn’t really care about that.

Rant aside though, I still love my sidekick and really have no plans to ditch it and switch carriers. Where else am I going to find an awesome phone, with an amazing hardware keyboard, an interesting form factor, a fun OS, and a plan in which I am not forced to pay for voice minutes I don’t use, and can have unlimited data and texting?

Really?

Oh right, no where. Well, except for T-mobile.

So even though T-mobile doesn’t really seem to care about their prepaid sidekick users, I will still be sticking with my sidekick. It’s still my sidekick.

Skinit Sadness Strikes a Second Time

Last month, I ordered a super cool shell from skin it, remember?

Well, I decided that since skinit has never made with the badness before, I could totally try again. I mean, it can’t be terrible twice, right? Right! So I went on the shell maker thing again and made this:

Now it’s not the prettiest, but it’s very…me! And personally, I like me. So I had it printed and was excited because I figured that they really couldn’t mess this one up! It came today and I was excited and a bit nervous to open it, here it is:

It’s still cute, but why is it purple? ugh. Oh well. I guess skinit is just bad at pink? I don’t think I’m going to try this again though.

The Tale of the Terrible T-mobile Travesty

Let me preface this by saying that I know this isn’t really T-mobile’s fault, I just used the title for the alliteration.

Recently I got a sidekick shell from T-mobile through skinit. Since I have a Sidekick 2008, I can have replacement shells not just skins or snap on rubber things. Anyway, the shells are custom and printable. Now, I’ve gotten things from skinit before and been perfectly content. This time however, it was a complete disaster.

My friend John made me this really awesome picture as a desktop awhile ago. I love this picture, and I thought to myself, “how cool would it be to have a shell for my phone with this picture on it!” “Really Cool,” I answered. So I set about making a shell using skinit’s on site custom shell maker.

This is the picture in question, of course it was larger, much higher quality, and without silly text over it.

It’s a lovely picture, and I really do enjoy it oh so much. So I was excited to get the shell made. I went through everything and got it all made and this is the preview of what the shell would look like as shown to me as a confirmation upon checking out:

“I love it,” I say as I admire my handiwork. I give myself a big pat on the back and congratulate myself on my genius idea and place the order. I go about my merry way for about 3 weeks before I start to get really antsy and wonder where my wonderful sidekick shell is. Soon after that it shows up at my door. I’m excited, so ridiculously excited.

Until I open the package. What could possibly be wrong? This:

It is purple. Did anyone else notice? It’s purple? How did the picture that I made it out of, which turned into my lovely preview picture, get printed as that? Let me assure you, the coloring in that picture is correct. How does this happen? I’m so seriously upset over this. Sadly the paper I got with it amd the T-mobile/skinit sidekick shells site says that they don’t do refunds or exchanges for their custom shells, so I doubt that contacting them will do any good, but I will try. It just seems like a really terrible mistake to be made.