Russell Beattie

So AT&T Wireless sold me with their great online deals and the fact they have EDGE. T-Mobile doesn't have as good coverage here in the Bay Area and I don't think I'm going to use so much data that $19.99 will be worth it to me, so I decided to go with AT&T Wireless instead.

For $70 (including tax) I was able to get the EDGE-enabled Nokia 6200 and the slick-as-hell SonyEricsson T610 with just a year contract. They came in the mail this morning. So now as I'm doing mobile development, I have a full set of the most popular phones out there. I can test my sites on my Series 60 phones, on the Series 40 phones and on the super-popular SonyEricsson phone as well. Perfect. And now I also get to have first hand knowledge of EDGE and how it works in real life.

I now have to cancel my GoPhone account, which I'm a little wary of because *everyone* has that phone number. It's a shame I can "swap" numbers with one of the contract numbers, but to get the deal online I had to go through their standard ordering process which meant 2 new phone numbers. I now have (for those of you counting at home) a total of 6 new phones and phone numbers since coming to the U.S. This is ridiculous of course, but that's how it worked out.

I'll take a picture of all of them when I get a moment. And then (I swear) I'm not buying another phone for a while.

-Russ

Update: I just connected to the EDGE network to try it out and its *definitely* a lot faster than just plain GPRS. Noticeably so - it works like a real dial up connection with no timeouts, etc. GPRS is nice, but is just too slow to do anything but the most basics like Web or Email. Via EDGE, however, I had chats going, my aggregator running, my email up, web pages downloading and I ran a DSL bandwidth test at the same time (3.6kbps). Very, very cool. Another person who's on the EDGE is Brian Jepson who did the same thing about a month ago in Rhode Island.