The Treehouse Blog

I went to a local AT&T store last Tuesday and signed up for service on the G1.  I put the phone on the counter and after the sales guy asked if it were unlocked, and I said that it was, things moved on quickly.  He took my information and began the process.  I walked out with a G1 on AT&T’s network and a receipt for $0 for the SIM.  I checked out data in the car, and it was working despite not having the “wap.cingular” APN settings, which I added later just in case.

I checked my online account access upon getting home.  The sales guy hadn’t setup data access, so I quickly selected the unlimited data and text option.  It also seems that the phone hadn’t been branded a “smartphone” so all of my options were for non-smart phones.  I asked the tech for detailed billing to be enabled (apparently there’s a fee for that in AT&T land) but I couldn’t tell from the website whether it was or not.  Later detailed call logs became available, so I guess it is enabled.  Unlike Verizon, only outgoing numbers are listed, which is a lot less helpful.  UPDATE: Either I missed them before or they didn’t work before, but the detailed call log does seem to have originating numbers now.

I am understandably nervous about data usage charges until I get the first bill.  Recently the bill amount was listed – something like $114 – but I can’t see the bill itself for a few more days.  Some quick figuring suggests this is reasonable for a month’s worth of service and an activation fee, but I’m not sure that’s what it is listing.  Even more recently, itemized data sessions began appearing in the details, all under my unlimited data setup, so I think things are setup correctly at this point.  UPDATE: I have now been able to see the whole bill, and everything seems to be in order.  The changes I made to my account seemed to be retroactively applied on the date I made the change (ie, the date of service start).

The number port from Verizon took about 14 hours.  This was a lot longer than Chris Z. had experienced.

I’ve purchased a few accessories – an adapter to allow both 3.5mm audio and power to be connected simultaneously – for occasional audio use in the car.  Also a mini-USB car charger and additional mini-USB to USB cables for use at home and work. I have not bought a case.  The slide-out keyboard seems to make the possibility of a good skin-type case almost nonexistent.  I also didn’t buy a charging cradle, so even though I have two batteries, I’d have to swap them to charge (like the VX8600 which I also had two batteries and no charger, and unlike the X30 which I had two batteries and a charging cradle).

A few software migrations (updated in previous entry) have been completed, so the X30 will be placed in deprecated status this week.  The 5 items I always check my pockets for before going to work can now be reduced to 4.

One other minor annoyance is that I’ve already found some places that AT&T has lower signal strength than T-mobile had.

I might be turning into an Android fanboy.  The iPhone is still much prettier though.