A Good Word For Sprint

With all of the grief Sprint customer service takes, I thought it only fair that I pass on a couple of good words.

Last month, I purchased a Spint USB wireless internet card. I spend a lot of time waiting on boys at their various activities, and with that and a netbook, I plan on being more productive.

At any rate, when the device arrived, I couldn’t get it to work. So I called Sprint, got a representative within a couple of minutes and he was quickly able to get me up and running. As it turns out, I wasn’t doing one of the procedures in the correct fashion.

Yesterday, I noticed that my current bill had a couple of charges on it from an unknown third party. I called Sprint, and after poking through an automated menu (about thirty seconds worth), immediately got through to a customer service rep. She found the charges on my bill, reversed them, and blocked the third party from any further activity. I was done in no time.

The third party charges apparently came from something Mrs. GolfBlogger clicked on in Facebook. So a warning to FaceBook users: there’s some shady business on that site.

Sprint has been my carrier for a couple of years, and I’m really very pleased with the company overall. Prices are good and the service in my experience has always been excellent. Even better: I have never, ever had a dopped call, and even “Up North” in sparsely populated areas have always had a signal.

Next on my wish list: a Sprint Palm Pre. I’ve been a Palm (Pilot) user for more than a decade, and am ready to make the move to gadget that will combine my Palm with a phone (one less device to carry). What’s sold me on the Pre is that it actually will run all of my Palm OS software through something called Motion Apps. There are tens of thousands of mature, useful and fun applications for the Palm OS, of which I am running a couple of dozen on my current device. This backward compatibility puts to the lie the Apple propaganda that the Pre is short on applications. And the fact that you can write a Palm Pre application with just HTML and Java means that there are far more coming in the near future.

One Palm app that I can’t live without: Documents to Go, which lets me use my Palm work with Word, PowerPoint and Excel files in their native format.