[Wing, P4350 General] run2zion:
Who am I? After almost 40 years, I wish I knew.

I just typed up a nice response that I thought was rather humorous only to be bested by the ieSpell button of death that causes me to have to retype this post now that I've installed it. So since I am not in the mood to be creative anymore, I'll just state the facts.

Who am I? Who is Who? I haven't expected to be asked such a philosophical question since I met my most recent wife, or the when I took that philosophy class in college. I will answer it in my normal meandering way that gets most of my emails ignored.

I am only posting because the thread requested we do so. I've been a member for a while, and don't post. I am on my 5th to 7th wing. Once had a cracked screen that I actually caused and didn't have insurance at the time. That cost me $275 (don't recall if that was inclusive of the $110 deductible). At least they let me replace my phone without charging me full prices ( which is horribly bloated now -- its still like 500 bucks ).

TMobile always sends you a refurb. And mine have always been bad. There is a reason they got sent back. My theory is that they weren't able to find the reason, slapped a clean case on it, and shipped it back out. Then I find the problem again. I've had all sorts of nonsense like Thumbprints on the screen even when the phone was off; sort of like the touch pad was forced against the external protective screen from the inside. I've had two like that.

I've had some with horrible sound quality, some with uncharacteristically bad reception, and some that would do strange things like behave fine until I open the keyboard; then the screen would act like an LCD at the wrong refresh rate.

But ABSOLUTELY ALL of my phones have done these lovely things.

1) call out when you don't expect it. It is a random guess who its gonna call. It is either the first person in your address book, or the last in your recent call log, or something like that. And my wife - who gets the calls a lot - actually has listened for 10 minutes while I was in a business meeting. I really steamrolled her on that one. Locking the phone doesn't appear to help much cause its done it anyway.

2) same thing as above except it will execute programs with the screen locked.

3) It likes to fail in ways that make tech support say "we've never heard of this before". And then I have to fight to get it replaced because they insist I dropped it my aquarium despite the fact my dot is still white.

BTW: Side note, I actually did dunk a Motorola Razor in my coffee. Like completely submerged once. Another time, the phone broke free like Wiley and spent the only rainy weekend in the bushes outside of work. That phone always worked after the phone dried out. It did have some odd peculiarities after that, but it wasn't a wing so they are irrelevant here.

so do I like my wing / herald / Hera 110 ... oh whatever the hell its called? After 2 years, I am still not sure. I like having the Internet full time. I like the screen size being large enough to actually be able to read stuff when opening the keyboard. I like the tethered modem capability. I've only used it a few times.

It has a lot of features I hate though. I can't stand the way every time I change an exchange server I lose all my contacts, even though they were backed up ( or so i thought ). I think I've just had bad luck.

Now, onto kitchens and cooking. Thanks to the dozens or hundreds of you who own kitchens and actually cook. I don't own your kind of kitchen and all I can cook is serial (um cereal ) or perhaps eggs.

So to those of you who provide your hard work with tons of late night hours for free, I salute you. It has made my acid trip 2 year tour of duty with HTC's re-branded T-Mobile wing almost acceptable.

As a UNIX system administrator, I have serious doubts about windows phones. I was surprised how much I liked it. I also liked being able to SSH in remotely and reboot servers from my phone. That really messed with a lot of co-workers heads. I had a valid reason for rebooting them ; of course. However, they just thought such an event would require a laptop with the appropriate VPN client. I guess they never heard of someone having access to the firewall configuration settings and a random port 22 open. Don't worry, it was secured by MD5 or blowfish or something nice like that. I love SSH.

Thanks again to everyone out there who works so hard. I don't know what I'm going to do in a month or two when my contract with T-Mobile finally runs out. Its been the most expensive phone contract of my life. And the worst one. But the phone was .... um .... interesting.

Regards,

Richard (aka run2zion & snorelock )