Goodbye AT&T and fairly easy initial setup

The longish wait to move away from AT&T has come to an end, as at about 16:45 PDT yesterday, I called Sprint to initiate the number porting process on both lines and was told that could take up to 15 minutes to complete. About 15 minutes later , I powered up the two new HTC Evo Shift 4G phones and finished the activation process. Calls made to the new ported numbers rang the appropriate Android phones, nice and smooth.

During the 15 minute wait, I powered down my iPhone 3G and removed the AT&T SIM from the SIM tray, turned on the device and went into the settings to disable all of the cellular data and 3G settings. At that point, my iPhone 3G is now a glorified iPod Touch. I’ll hang on to the phone, jailbreak the bugger and see what kind of fun I can have with it. At some point, I’ll probably sell or donate the phone. I’ll be doing that with the Palm Treo 750 that has been sitting in a drawer with other old Nokia phones from AT&T and T-Mobile. I doubt if the phones can be re-used, but if they can’t, at least they can be properly recycled.

Of course, I went through the process of taking the contacts off of the other AT&T phone, plopped it on to a new Google Account and had the second phone sync up with that new account. Pairing with various Bluetooth hands-free devices was easy for both phones, as well as pairing up my phone with the MMI in my S5. The only problem is that the 3G MMI does not handle contacts that only have a company name (no first and last name) very well, as it just shows up as a blank contact name. So, I went through the offending contacts in Gmail and re-worked them to, hopefully, make them come up properly in MMI.