Man, I thought my home network setup was pretty sophisticated, but this Canuck blows me away!

Don't you just love the advent of number portability?  It makes it so much more convenient to hop from one mobile phone provider to another!  Combine that with Amazon's great mobile phone offers and a one-year contract, and you've got the makings for some pretty slick deals.

Case in point...every year for the past 4 years, I've received a brand new mobile phone absolutely free.  In fact, I've often even been "paid" to pickup this brand new phone.  You see, the mobile phone market is so competitive that the players in the market are willing to heavily subsidize phone costs in exchange for a one year (or more) contract.  If you are willing to switch providers each year, you are basically guaranteed a free (often quite nice) phone every year, and you can still keep the same phone number.

I've just gone through my annual mobile phone procurement, and made out quite well, if I must say myself.  Last year, I got an amazing deal through Amazon, and was able to pickup an Audiovox SMT-5600 for free after rebate when signing up for a year contract with AT&T Wireless (now Cingular.)  Now, this phone absolutely ROCKS.  It's a Windows Mobile 2003 smart phone, which means, it basically does everything my old Pocket PC did, including Outlook synchronization, mp3/wma playback, MSN Messenger, etc.  Granted, I don't have a data plan, but still, this is a great phone, all in a compact form factor and a large screen.

Of course, when it came to Cingular's GSM network capabilities, I wasn't too impressed.  Service was decent, but from my condo was often pitiful.  I longed for the days of my prior T-Mobile service.  No worries...my contract with Cingular would be up soon enough.  It ended today :-)

Needless to say, I planned on keeping my 5600 phone, but there was one problem.  It was locked for use with AT&T/Cingular service only.  Never to fear...the "internets" are here!  A simple Google search lead me to this rockin' site.  It worked BEAUTIFULLY!  In a matter of minutes, I had unlocked my phone for free!  Another site allowed me to get rid of all the nasty AT&T branding, setting me up for a seamless transfer over to T-Mobile. 

The last step was finding the best deal on a new T-Mobile phone.  Again, I went to Amazon and found this excellent offer, which will PAY ME $50 (after rebates) to pickup a Motorola RAZR V3 phone with a year contract.  I saw that these phones were going for over $200 on EBay, so I knew this was the offer to grab.  Got the phone today, popped my new T-Mobile SIM into the Audiovox, and I'm back with T-Mobile superior network.  Filled out the rebate cards, mailed them, and put my RAZR up for auction on Ebay.  In the end, I figure I'll make around $250 or more just for switching carriers.  Rock on!!

[UPDATE:]

The phone went for $186 and $12 shipping.  Not bad, eh?

After a nice long weekend of camping near the Dells, I arrived home, fired up the 'ole Tivo, and was pleasantly surprised to see that my box had FINALLY recieved the software update enabling TivoToGo.  After announcing the feature back in January and rolling it out to most Tivo boxes shortly thereafter, I noticed the "small print" on the website.  All Humax, Toshiba, and Pioneer units would receive the update "later in the year."  Well, after waiting about, oh 8 months, the update finally arrived!

Just in time, too.  I've been hoarding quite a few episodes of Arrested Development and Chicago Stories with the intent of archiving them on my pc as soon as TivoToGo showed up.  The hard drive was so full it was getting to the point that a newly recorded show would be auto deleted the next day, and that's with 120 GB! 

I've been pretty happy with TivoToGo after playing around a bit.  I realized why my HD was so full...a simple 30 minute episode recorded at high quality is over a gig!  Man at that rate any HD DVR's are going to have to have 500 gig or larger hard drives!  The large size of the shows stem my biggest complaint with TivoToGo...namely, it takes a good 2 hours to transfer a 30 minute show over to my PC.  Granted, I'm using an 802.11b adapter (finding one that worked with Tivo was a nightmare in and of itself!)  Time to upgrade to a 54g, I suppose.  Other than that, Tivo uses some sort of DRM solution preventing my shows from being played anywhere but my PC.  Hmm...time to read up on a little "extracurricular" activity for my shows :-)