Owned by My Phone: I am now a Verizon contract customer with a Windows 7 HTC Trophy phone. I am also paying roughly 10 times more than I was for my prepaid T-Mobile on an old school RAZR. With a 2 year lock in, it had better be worth it.
I have to confess once I managed to convince T-Mobile I was really who I say I am, which took a couple of days, it was pretty easy to get my number switched over. The phone cost me exactly one penny through Amazon Wireless, whom I recommend if you're in the market; they are offering the one penny deal on some pretty sweet phones. In the future all stores will be Amazon.
Setup was pretty easy. I never referred to a manual. I got my email/facebook/twitter all set up fine. It took me a bit to realize that the only way to get the latest version of Windows Phone 7 (Mango) was to hook up to the Zune service on my laptop, but that too went off without a hitch. Kudos to Microsoft on this. They've done well. I suspected they would. They did a good job with the late, lamented (but not lamentable) Zune player. I still use my first gen 30 gig hard drive model to store all my music.
In combination with Verizon, which has awesome coverage, even for me out in the sticks, it looks to be a pretty solid combo. Still, I gack at the $80/month. I just have to keep reminding myself of how many calls I missed thanks to T-Mobile's parsimonious coverage. After two years, it'll go up for re-evaluation. I can survive with it that long. My big fear is that I find myself dropping $80/month and only using it once a week or something.
And I will NOT get addicted to Angry Birds. Not gonna happen. I swear.
