The Full Enchilada

Are you tired of scrambling to finish writing all those Christmas and Happy New Year greetings cards for the Holidays? Frustrated with your printer jamming on your envelopes, mixing up addresses, having to run out to the post office and buy more stamps, and tired of paying a fortune by the time your done!? (Birthday cards, and greeting cards in general aren’t cheap, Hallmark and others make a nice profit it seems and even stamps are almost 50cents a piece these days, send a couple dozen holiday wishes and you’ll easily spend a couple hundred!!)

Doodle Wish
Well, I decided this ain’t (sic!) the stone age anymore, so I decided to send digital Holiday wishes this year, and it didn’t cost me a dime! You can use the same mobile app for Android I used, it’s called “Doodle Wish” and it’s available on the google Android Market. The image at the top was a bundled template that came with doodlewish but the android app easily lets you use any background to create your greeting card and add that personal doodle wish. You can take a photo to use as the background or select any image from your phone’s albums or start with a blank canvas and draw your own from scratch. I find its best to start with a photo background. Give it a shot, it’s Free!
Doodle Wish, for Android mobile phones

It was time.

I needed a ’smart’ phone. I had an iTouch, so it was going to be Android based not iPhone.

Luckily, even though I was on Tmobile, I wasn’t on a contract. Strangely though, it seems Tmobile stores have no idea about Tmobile.com sales and offers because when I happened to visit a local tmobile store to compare the Samsung Vibrant with the Google G2 and mytouch 4G, nobody told me tmoble.com was offering the Google G2 for free. (yes, with some fine print I’m sure, had to be a new contract etc and likely they wouldn’t waive the $35 activation and may even charge sales tax on highest msrp value around) It was later from home that I found out about the deals from browsing the tmobile website.

Unfortunately, even though I was on contract, I didn’t qualify since tmobile only wanted to offer that to ‘new’ customers, In other words, if I wanted to go from no contract to signing on for a 2year contract, they wanted to charge me $199 for the Google G2 instead of giving it for ‘free’, and yes I talked with Tmobile support. In fact a nice guy there even confirmed for me that, yes, I should do what I was thinking of doing to get the best deal…

What was I thinking? Well, I thought, why not just cancel my current tmobile service, and then go and sign up for a new 2year contract and get a nice FREE smartphone!? I found that BestBuy was giving the Google G2 for FREE also and the deal didn’t end on Cyber Monday like with Tmobile.com though they still charged for $35 activation fee and sales tax on the full price of the phone. This would bring the total cost to about $85 or so….but that’s not a bad price to pay for a brand new tmobile Google G2 phone with keyboard.

Wirefly had similar deals but they didn’t last as long, and what bothered me was that Wirefly seemed to ‘force’ you to buy into the “Unlimited” $30/month data plan. They would not sell you the phone at the advertised $49.99 plus tax without the $30/month data plan, and yes they charged the $35 activation also.

The sweetest deal came by way of Costco. Yes, thank God for Costco. No waiting for mail order, picked it up in store, price was $49.99 plus tax on retail (but their retail number was $399.99 which is set lower than other places) and Costco reimburses the $35 activation. The Google G2 actually was $69.99, but you can get the mytouch 4G for just $49.99 which is just as good if not better, but for the lack of a physical keyboard. So you can walk out of Costco with $86 less but a nice brand new mytoch 4G phone that would cost you about $550 + tax, almost $600 to buy on Amazon unlocked. Initially you do get a assigned a brand new phone number with your new 2year contract, but you can easily get your old number back by requesting it from your carrier. During the process, I once did a live chat with an operative that disconnected on me when I mentioned that it was a bit dishonest to list on their website that ‘A Web service is required in order to access this phone’s Web functionality and features, including Internet access and e-mail.’ when in fact they force you to enjoy those ‘features’ whether you want to or not, ie they won’t let you buy the phone without a data plan. On the other hand as I mentioned, on the phone I had talked to a very honest and helpful gentleman, and later I did talk to a pleasant support person on chat who helped fix some issues.

It is recommended to turn off “Mobile Network” ie 4G/data on the phone if you only have the 200MB/month $10/month plan since 200MB can go by fast and then surplus charges may be exorbitant. Since the phone has wifi, disabling Mobile Network isn’t a big deal if you’re around wifi spots often.

I didn’t explain how I made up my mind between the Samsung Galaxy S/Vibrant (which Costco was selling for $0.01, yes for one penny!), the Google G2 and the mytouch 4G….it will be the next post…so far the phone (mytouch 4G) has been great!