Changed wireless carrier

And so my contract with Cingular has ended. I had high hopes how I will get new cool free phones, just the way one would find on Amazon, LetsTalk or Wirefly... Silly me! Calling customer support and pointing them to those resources and stating clearly that I intend to go to thgeir competitor did not make a difference. What does it mean?

Look, the math is quite straightforward. I wanted them to match the deal offered by Amazon, which would be a difference of $400 as compared to the best deal they wanted to offer me as upgrade (they had Moto Rokr and Sony Ericsson W600i at $149). They would not, even though I would have paid them over $2000 during next 24 months. What gives? Did they become so big and arrogant with aquisition of AT&T that they're no longer making deals? Screw that.

I went with Sprint. Got an awesome deal at a store nearby (had to go to the store to have my old cell ##s transferred). I did not mind at all paying $150 for 3 Sanyo MM-8300 cell phones. These ones are rather good looking :)

I was put off a fair bit by the fact that these phones can not use MP3 files for ringtones, but a couple days of research on the Internet, and I had all our cells stuffed with ringtones that I not only made myself, but also written a servlet and 2 JSPs to serve those off of a Tomcat server running on my old Athlon 700 machine. (Friend asked why did I have to go though all the trouble with WAV->AAC plus doing the server setup when there's sprintusers.com/focus. My reasons were two: 1) because it sounded easy to do, and 2) because every time I give somebody my phone # to send an SMS to, I feel rather suspicious... This always reminds me how Jamster scammed all of the Europe.)