Upon my arrival at the nearly empty Marina Del Rey Verizon Wireless store I was informed that the guy on the phone was wrong. The "theft special" was not on the Kyocera -- a fairly nice looking but basic phone -- but instead was a choice of the entry-level Samsung or LG phones, one of which wasn't in stock anyway.

After talking to three different people -- each of whom went on break immediately after I told them I would consider their thoughts and advice -- I decided to leave and get dinner with my brother and visiting cousins. Needless to say, none of these people gave me the same information and none of them could really give me information about the phones beyond "check out our website."

Overnight I checked out the website, which was fairly useless. Verizon no longer even provides downloadable instruction manuals for their phones, just mind-numbing flash presentations, highlighting the features they want to talk about. I had to go to the manufacturer sites to get any real info about such things like "is there any way I download my contacts list from Outlook into this phone?"

Eventually I settled on a couple of phones as possibilities and headed over to a different Verizon store to check things out again in person.

Finally decided on a mid-range Motorola. I suspect that my next "free" upgrade will be for either a RAZR type phone, or for the new Motorola "Q" device when Verizon finally offers them, so staying with the common Moto accessories made some economic sense. Verizon is well behind everybody else in terms of size, slimness and just about everything else, so spending a lot of money on one of their more expensive current offerings seems stupid.

The phone's nice enough and compact enough. Loading my contacts was a bit of a pain, but I got it done and it mostly worked. Except for picture messaging, which didn't work even though I made sure to add the $5/month messaging package while I was at the store.

It took about half an hour on the phone with tech support to resolve that one. Seems that most of the phones need to be reset -- both from the network side and from the phones themselves -- before data services work right. Why nobody does this in the stores before giving you the phone is somewhat of a mystery. I had the same problem with my old Treo, which required a hard reset before the mobile web feature could connect. The woman in line ahead of me was having the same problem with her new Treo 650, more than a year later.

Seems that somewhere along the line, somebody might have thought to include a slip of paper in the packaging for all these phones saying: do a hard reset (or whatever) before using in order to connect to data services. On a Treo, such a reset erases your entire PDA, so it's really something you want to do before you spend hours configuring and loading the thing.

But apparently at Verizon Wireless, even very common problems that tech support and store staff deal with every day aren't worth addressing, even when the solution is simple and obvious.

So much for service. And no wonder churn for all cell companies is so high.

-btc