Howard Rheingold wrote recently about his troubles with his Treo 600, and his even greater troubles in trying to extract reasonable customer service out of Sprint.
Fortunately, I’ve run into few problems with my Treo, with none of them serious enough to require me to run the Sprint PCS customer service gauntlet. My only recent experience with their call center was when I was trying to change my service from my old phone to the Treo. Two of the people I spoke with were reasonably helpful, and both were very friendly. Too bad I was just calling for info. One was beyond useless. I dumped him as quickly as possible and called back in hope of not getting another mouth breather. The final person I dealt with was a bit shifty. While he told me that Sprint probably wouldn’t give me the rebate (they actually did honor it), he told me I should go ahead and submit it anyway. He did manage to get my phone programmed and working pretty quickly, though. Based on what I have and heard from others, I was extremely lucky.
I’ve seen a lot worse in the Sprint stores. While buying my last phone, I overhead a salesperson guilt trip a young kid into buying a far more expensive plan than he needed. Half of the other salespeople sat around and chatted while a line of about ten people waited for service.
If Sprint didn’t offer such a cheap all-you-can-eat data plan, I would almost certainly switch carriers.