After moving to NYC I started realizing the limitations of Cingular’s “fewest dropped calls of any carrier” claim: you need to have reception to place or answer a call before you can drop it.

Now I’m not saying Cingular is necessarily bad in New York. If you look at the coverage maps for any carrier, you’ll see Manhattan as one big block of max signal strength. I think it’s these damn high-rises and prewar buildings everywhere that severely degrade indoor reception.

So after being annoyed w/Cingular for about a month for my lack of even semi-constant reception, I decided it was time to take action and make a switch. Now given my reason for changing carriers, you’d think that I would seek out and subscribe to the carrier with the best service in New York.

Well… I thought about it, but the best/only good carrier is Verizon. Unfortunately, they also have the worst phones… So instead I decided to go by my usual criteria… (the reason I switched from Verizon to Cingular three years ago even though Verizon was still better back then – and the reason I decided to go with T-Mobile)… A COOL ASS PHONE.

So check it… the Blackberry “Pearl” (8100). I can’t say it’s “The Perfect Phone”… but it’s by far the closest thing I’ve seen to it. You can configure everything from fonts, to the menu layout, to even reassigning any key to be whatever you want it to be. Combine that with an unlimited data plan and push email and I sometimes wonder if I really care about whether or not it can make phone calls…

Unfortunately, that’s the one thing it can’t do well. Don’t get me wrong… again no complaints about the phone itself whatsoever… But if talking on Cingular felt like being a kid trying to play telephone with tin cans and string; T-Mobile leaves me feeling like a retarded kid trying to have a conversation with the radio.

I’ll admit, at first I was irate about this even more inferior service and ready to smash my phone up some T-Mobile rep’s nostrils. Then I discovered how ‘useful’ an unlimited data plan can be. Now, I’m instead learning to adapt my phone usage habits to cater to the limitations of the service [read: addicted to crackberry].

So if you find that I don’t call you, pickup, or return your phone calls… it’s for one of two reasons:

1. I don’t have reception.
2. I have reception but it’s so spotty that I don’t wanna deal with trying to have an unintelligible conversation.

Now if you email/IM/text message me on the other hand… I’ll be all over that shit.