Well I had hoped to blog here with some thoughts on my 5th anniversary on Hiptop Nation, but instead I was in phone carrier call center hell trying to restore my Sidekick service after trying to drop it down to the data-only plan and moving my phone number to AT&T on the iPhone. It took seven phone calls over many days to cluesless reps who made false promises each time just to get me off the phone. Despite repeating over and over that I wanted to continue doing business with them on the $29/mo plan, they still tried to sign me back up for the $59 voice plan without telling me. They claim I'm back on month-to-month without a new cancellation penalty, but I can't even be sure of that until the next bill.

I has been great being a part of this little Hiptop Nation community, and I enjoyed for a long while the new freedoms that the Hiptop/Sidekick gave me. But after five years, T-mobile is still raping customers, and quite frankly, Danger's pace of innovation isn't compelling to me anymore. It's inexcusable that there's still no e-mail spam filtering. The web browsing on the Sidekick is as slow or slower than it was five years ago. I am completely mystified as to why the camera sensor didn't get significantly better on the Sidekick 3. The Sidekick photo gallery limps along when I have more than 50 photos in it, while my iPhone glides effortlessly through 900 photos. I wish Danger luck as it now has to face Apple's formidable entry into their turf.

I'm a faceless amoeba to the mega call center-equipped T-mobile, but it gives me comfort that the giant lobby I work for is setting its sights on the scamming ways of the cell phone carriers. I hope we're able to divert some attention from the wars on Shiites and Spinach to a new war on the cell phone industry.

I'm going to keep blogging here until the iPhone gets instant messaging and hopefully a better solution for text entry will come by the first quarter of 2008. But I've decided not to go after the new LX and be locked in for another two years.

- mike lee - in cambridge, ma again doing business at the mit media lab . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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