I've now spent a couple of weeks with my Sprint Treo 700p, and am largely in love with this amazing phone. I've had some technical challenges, and some frustration with the hold time at Sprint techical support, but otherwise, I'm a happy camper.
First, the technical problems. Problem number one arose when I decided to put some music onto the SD card I installed in the phone. I have over 10,000 music files at home, and almost all of them are in AAC format. The installed music player, Pocket Tunes, can't handle AAC. I don't expect it to play the protected songs sold by the iTunes Music Store, but the bulk of my collection has been ripped from CDs that I own.
Searching the net, I found a suitable alternative, AeroPlayer. This plays AAC files just fine, mostly. I've had trouble playing files that I encoded in mono, mostly old songs that were never mastered in stereo. I use mono on these to save space. AeroPlayer was playing mono encoded songs at double speed. However, I see they've released an update in the past few days. I'll install it soon.
To check out the sound quality, I plugged in the supplied headphones, and although I don't like earbuds, was pleased with the sound. Until I unplugged the headphones. The phone still believed the headphones were plugged in! I couldn't use the handset or the speakerphone. After talking with Sprint tech support, I headed over to the nearest Sprint store.
Imagine my surprise when I was greeted by name! The magnificent operatic tenor, Eric Perkins, was working there! I know Eric from the days when I acted with the wonderful and sorely missed Marquee Theatre Company, in which Eric was a fellow performer. Alas, few of us in the arts can survive on our talents alone, so I found Eric at his day job. Needless to say, I got fantastic service at the store. The phone was serviced while I waited, and worked fine in the store. But when I got out of the store, it failed again. I was promptly given a new phone.
The new phone has performed well. However, for two days last week, I was without internet service. The first day I spent 25 minutes on hold, and another 35 minutes talking with advanced technical support. We did soft resets, hard resets, the support person tried to reprogram my phone remotely, nothing worked. He then deleted my Power Vision account and put in a new one. He said that could take up to four hours to take effect.
By the next morning, I still had no service. So I called back. I spent one hour and twenty-five minutes on hold!!!! That was rediculous. The tech support guy was very nice, and helpful. After 30 minutes of trying stuff, he discovered a service alert about an outage in the Chicago area! So in all, I spent over 3 hours on the phone with Sprint, over a known outage! Sheesh.
Next morning, everything was a-okay. But I dread the next time I have to call Sprint.
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