T-Mobile Family Plan & MyTouch 4G review
January 22, 2012
This time last year, I started the research to consolidate all our phones (his, mine, my parents’) into a consolidated plan in order to streamline the finances and save money. I had always been pleased with T-mobile’s customer service in the past and the cost of their plans so I suspected that would be the service we would end up with.
In June the right plans and the free smartphones came up so we committed to a fresh set of phones and plans.
The first phones we picked were PiC’s G2s but I absolutely hated mind and swapped it for a MyTouch just in time before the month was up.
It was much lighter and the functions were a little smarter: it had copy and paste, the text messaging function showed time and date, unlike the G2, and some of the apps were more useful.
Using non-Gmail email clients is a pain, though, as this phone doesn’t allow you to respond in-line; you can only write completely new emails that include the previous message when you like it or not and the web browser is incredibly clunky. It doesn’t accommodate multiple tabs or windows very well at all, it loses the open windows or freezes up.
In general, it still handled fairly nicely at first.
Seven months later, the thing is like a half functioning brick. The phone itself freezes up regularly – the touchscreen becomes non-responsive so I have to plug it into the charger, unplug it, repeat several times, etc.
The battery life is nearly non-existent. Without use, the phone lasts on stand-by no more than 6 hours (if that) – and only 1-2 hours with any use so that it’s often completely drained to the dregs before the end of a workday. I can’t ever go to work without a charger. Same for overnights: it can’t last overnight even after being fully charged without discharging itself entirely.
The visual voicemail function is pretty much a joke – it only works part of the time, it may or may not actually convert messages to the visual function but it also duplicates voicemails to the dial-in version and the notifications for the dial-in portion will go off constantly. And I don’t know about you but I’ve gotten to the point where I am completely over receiving and checking voicemails the traditional way – I hate hate hate dialing in and listening to the messages and having to use the menu to save/delete/skip/etc.
We had a relatively decent plan but it rather got my goat that I couldn’t cancel my mom’s line after she passed. Evidently, it just doesn’t matter who the phone line was intended for – because I was taking responsibility for the plan with all the lines, the death of the user of a line counts for nothing so far as the phone company is concerned. I suppose I should have known that would be the case, it’s just another thing that’s draining a resource that could be better used some other way. I’m considering taking the issue up with them again through corporate but haven’t had time.
It’s all a bit disappointing really. We haven’t saved much money (if any) since switching to T-Mobile and it’s been one annoyance after another with the less than smooth transition, the poor quality phones and the rapidly deteriorating performance. The decision was made knowing that the switch was going to be a bit inconvenient but I figured it’d just be a month or two of transition. This seems like it’s going to be a rough year and a half to ride out the rest of the contract.
This time, the “smart” financial decision feels pretty dumb.
I’m surprised they wouldn’t cancel your mom’s line. Is it worth it to you to try again?
I rather like my BB 9900 although it’s a bit large for my (small) hands. But I’m still partial to a physical keyboard and the email features of the Blackberry.
@Karen: I keep thinking so…