Category: Rant

A few weeks ago, I borrowed Dan’s truck for a trip to Whitby to pick up my dad’s power tools that he doesn’t have room for in his new house. On the way out, I saw a HUGE traffic jam on the 401 in the return direction, so I took the 407 Express Toll Road on the way home. I figured I’d just get the bill from Dan when it came, and pay it. Big mistake.

It turns out that there is absolutely no way to pay this bill without creating some sort of account profile for Dan. I’m not Dan, and I don’t want to create a profile for him. I don’t know him well enough to answer the security questions, for one thing. Plus while it’s unlikely that he is going to be a regular traveller on the 407, I don’t want to be the guardian of his account (ie. I know the PIN) if he does. There is also no way to enter the name on the credit card – if it’s not the same as the person named on the account, it isn’t going to work. There is no way to just send in a check or, if you don’t call from 9-5 on a weekday, to talk to a customer service rep. It seems to me that driving a borrowed car on the 407 should be something that the systems designers might have anticipated happening once in a while and designed in a method to resolve this short of making the owner of the car pay.

I guess in future I should either remember my 407 transponder, or just risk the traffic jams on the 401.

When I call you to report that I can’t receive phone calls in my own home, and you decide to call me back, it probably isn’t a good idea to call me back on my Sprint phone, since, you know, I can’t receive phone calls when I’m in my own home. Is this a hard concept to grasp?

When I call Sprint support, the voice mail menu cautions me not to call with my Sprint phone because it might be needed in other ways to diagnose the problem. So why can’t you figure out that simple fact yourselves?

Update: It gets better! As well as leaving me a voice mail (which I got when I went out to run an errand), they also sent me a text message that says to reply to the text message to let them know when they can call me. When I attempt to reply to the text message, it tells me that it’s not a valid phone number to text. “Your MSG could not be DELIVERED because Invalid Destination Account”. Yes, with the StupidCaps(tm) and the fractured syntax and all.

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!”

Tonight, I was driving down to a person’s house near Moravia, NY to pick up a used kayak. I’d never been there, so I decided to borrow Vicki’s car charger and see how the Pre’s “Sprint Navigation” works on a real test. And because my car has an “Aux in”, I decided to use the Pre to play music at the same time.

If I’d stopped to write this review about 1 mile before I got to my destination, it would have been pretty glowing. On the way down there, I loved the fact that it would fade out the music when it had to give me a direction – I could listen to my music as loud as I wanted and not miss a turn. It took a different route than Google Maps had given me, but it avoided some messing around in downtown Auburn, and I got a nice view of Skaneateles Lake. But it was slightly annoying that it preferred the local road names over the highway number, so while cruising along SR 5/20, it kept telling me “In 1.9 miles, continue along Clark Street Road” and the like as the road changed name every few minutes. On the other hand, the voice prompts were so clear and frequent that I could just go by the sound and not look at the map. On the gripping hand, the phone got uncomfortably hot.

But I was cruising down State Route 38A when it started counting down to a turn. Now, I’m pretty sure it was telling me it was Pine Hill Road, although when I try it now it says Decker Hill Rd. I couldn’t for the life of me see this road when it said to turn, although looking at Google Maps there is a Decker Hill Road around where I was at that time, although I think I might have been at the driveway south of Decker Hill Road. Whatever, I couldn’t see anything I’d want to turn onto, but the GPS stopped showing the road I was on, only the one it thought was there and that I should have turned on. And so the GPS said that it was recalculating. And it said it again. And again. At this point I figured it couldn’t recalculate because of the lack of cell phone coverage down there, so I quickly punched the address into my car’s Garmin Nuvi and it got me to my destination.

On the way home, after I stopped for gas, I decided to try the Pre again, but I was mostly using the Nuvi. When I first fired up the GPS on the Pre, it told me that my ETA was 9:20, but the Nuvi was saying 9:13. As I got closer to home, the Pre kept adjusting my ETA downwards until it eventually agreed with the Nuvi at 9:13, and I got home pretty close to that. I don’t know why the difference – maybe the Pre thinks people drive the speed limit or something crazy like that. Another slight annoyance was that unlike the Nuvi, the Pre’s GPS doesn’t have a “night mode” map with a darker colour scheme to preserve night vision. So I left the screen off 90% of the time. As a side benefit, the phone didn’t get as hot with the screen off.

As I got close to home, I had my second major disappointment of the night. Every GPS in the world (and Google Maps) thinks I should exit from I-590 north of home and come back south, but I prefer to exit to the south and continue north on our neighbourhood streets. And so when I leave I-590, the Nuvi says “Recalculating” once while I’m on the off-ramp as it tries to convince me to take the on-ramp back onto I-590, then “Recalculating” again after I turn onto the road and shows me the neighbourhood route that I normally take. The Pre didn’t handle it quite as well. As I left I-590, it said “Recalculating”, but didn’t actually manage to recalculate a route. It didn’t even show me the street map – all it showed me was a very thin red line pointing in an exact straight line back to the nearest segment of the original route, which for most of the route would have involved smashing through somebody’s house, then their back fence, and then hopping over an embankment onto I-590. And this time I couldn’t even blame poor cell phone coverage, as it was showing a strong signal and EVDO data coverage.

My final verdict on the Pre as a GPS navigator? I’d say about 8/10 when you’re on the proper route, but 0/10 if you accidentally get off the route it originally calculated for you. I suspect based on my experience with other GPSes that it might be better when you get off route to tell it to stop navigating, and then tell it calculate a new route from where you are to your destination. I don’t know why, but I’ve gotten better routes that way from Garmin GPSes than by allowing them to recalculate and it might be the same for the Pre. Or maybe Sprint/TeleNav will just fix the damn software.