Bought the Motorola MPx220!

Well, the free headset did it. I just went out to Best Buy and bought the MPx220. What a nightmare. First the guy looks for the phone for a good 20 minutes to find out they are in lock-up instead of with the rest of the phones. I assume this must mean they are a hot item. Once he gets back he tells me it's no problem to sell me the phone without activation but it will cost me $500 each.

What the heck, if I like the phone, I can come back and do a return/rebuy with service. So he goes to ring them up and can't figure out how to ring them up without service and ends up telling me that Best Buy has a policy that they can't sell phones without service. He even calls the sales manager over to confirm this falsehood. I tell him I can't believe thats true and I start to walk. I get over to the phone display and there, at the bottom of the sign it says *$150 surcharge without activation. I point this out to him and another sales guy goes, "Oh ya, just hit this during the sale". So, $1000 later (ouch), I have two Motorola MPx220.

I got stuck in at an accident on the way home and decide to open the box and pop the battery and my SIM card from my T-Mobile phone in. Wow, it works, the phone boots (almost a full minute) and shows T-Mobile and my number on the display. Nice! I guess the rumors of this being a locked phone are greatly exagerated. I didn't find any problems with the sound as suggested elsewhere and actually had to turn it down at a few points. I tried the speaker phone and it worked great, unfortunately, as soon as I closed the phone to set it down on the dash, it hung-up. I will have to look into that later.

I got the unit home and started looking more closely. I had removed the troublesome plastic covers in the car and that made the speakerphone and ring volume work correctly. Next was a little charging and syncing. No problems there, I downloaded activesync (I didn't want to crack the seal on the CD in case that was grounds for not returning it later) and connected the included USB cable to the phone. Nicely enough it started charging. I can think this is good and bad for laptop users, nice to not have to bring one more cable but it would probably be hard on your battery life if you left it connected as the laptop and phone are sharing your laptop battery.

I decided to take a picture of Finn in time out. Yep, camera sucks, at least at full zoom. But, as most people say, I didn't buy the phone for the camera. I wouldn't have wasted the megapixel count but hey, it's a nice feature in a pinch. There is a conveniently placed button on the side that launches the phone app and then pressed again, takes the picture. Very slick. I was a little worried about putting too many minutes on the phone but can't find the minute counter for the life of me.

To Be Continued...