Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Getting a New Samsung Phone from Metro PCS was a Painless Process Compared to Dealing with AT & T

Up til last August I got my AT & T cell phone service through a Fort Worth agent called Hawk Electronics. In 2013 Hawk Electronics went bankrupt. During the bankruptcy process I was told my cell phone service would smoothly transition to being handled directly by AT & T.

That proved to be un-true. I did not like the way AT & T handled, or mishandled the transition, so I transitioned out of having AT & T being my cell phone service provider.

For several months a Google phone was my phone option. This is not a mobile option. Unless one wants to haul ones laptop from its home location to some other wi-fi connection from which one can make a call.

By February of 2014 I was tired of the Google phone and not being mobile, so I walked across the street to a Metro PCS store which I'd long noticed and which recently was advertising Smart Phones for $29.99. And $40 a month for unlimited talk, text and data.

My last experience with getting a new phone had been at Hawk Electronics, a very bad experience which took a couple hours. It was bizarre. I was not shocked when I learned Hawk Electronics had gone bankrupt.

With Hawk Electronics being my previous phone acquisition experience I sort of dreaded what type of time suck nightmare Metro PCS would be.

Well.

Totally opposite of my Hawk Electronics experience. No wait. I walked in the store and within seconds I was in the getting a new phone process. About ten minutes later I walked out with my new phone. The process would have been even shorter had I not been having fun talking to the Metro PCS sales lady.

One of the things I did not like about Hawk Electronics and AT & T was the billing and payment method. Once a month I'd log into my account to view the bill. Often there would be charges which made no sense which I would have to hassle over to get removed. The bill would fluctuate for no explicable reason. The bill had a long list of charges, surcharges, taxes and fees.

So, I logged into my online account to pay my first Metro PCS bill to find there really was no bill. Just fill in credit card info and pay $40.00. I did so. The next month I got a text message advising me that my bill  was due and that I could pay it by texting "PAY 40.00". I did so and instantly got a text message thanking me.

Like I already said, Metro PCS has been dead opposite of the phone experience I had for years with Hawk Electronics and AT & T.

As for learning to use a Smart Phone. I'd never used my previous phone to send a text message. I may have received a text message or two. With the Smart Phone I was pleasantly surprised to find out both how easy it is to text message, and how useful it turns out to be.

I had no idea, til using one, that a Smart Phone is basically a very small, very powerful computer that can pretty much do anything I can do on my laptop. Except blog. The Blogger app for the Smart Phone does not seem usable to me. Maybe I need to give it a longer try, because blogging on the go would be fun....

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