Remind me again why we switched to Sprint?

just got off the phone with Sprint. Needless to say, I had to phone them from the house line because once again I’m getting no signal in the house for the cell phone. I’m currently having two problems with the phones –

  1. We get signal in the house about 50% of the time, the rest of the time we get dropped calls and missed calls.
  2. Currently (as in ever since I was using it plugged into the car’s audio system on Saturday), I cannot hear anybody who calls me unless I remember to switch to speaker phone. It’s as if it still thinks there is something plugged into the headphone jack.

Sprint’s answer to the first was “we’ll send a network engineer to drive through your neighborhood to see what the signal strength is”, which means he’ll probably see it during the few minutes per hour where the strength registers as 3 or 4 bars, and declare it fine. I asked about one of those pico-cells, and they want you to pay for the device, then pay a monthly fee for the privilege of using your own cable modem network bandwidth to fix their network limitations. Their answer to the second problem is that I need to bring it in to a Sprint store, so somebody can try all the trouble shooting steps that I’ve already tried and say “yup, it’s dead all right”.

Right now the only thing that’s preventing me from driving to the Sprint store and saying “give us our money back, we’re going back to AT&T” and buying two iPhones is that Vicki isn’t home yet so I won’t be able to slam both of them down on the counter.

It’s a real shame, because I love WebOS, I kind of like the Pre itself (although the battery life sucks and when I’m using the GPS and music it suck down power faster than the car charger can replenish it unless I turn off the screen), but I hate, hate, hate, hate the Sprint Notwork.

So to everybody within the sound of my voice, hear my cry: “DON’T SWITCH TO SPRINT – THEY’RE CHEAPER FOR A REASON!”