My poor wife. Not only does she have to deal with me as a husband, she's got a 2.5yr old boy who loves dumping baby powder on everything at 7am when I'm trying to get ready for work and drop him off at day care, plus a newborn baby boy who some days won't let her put him down. On top of all of this, she has to deal with T-Mobile.

Let me back up a little.

I like T-Mobile. Let's make that clear. Their service is decent, call quality is good, and their Android phone selection is pretty great. And the fact that their spokeswoman, Carly, is also Canadian, y'know, just icing on the cake.

What they DON'T do well, however, is handle customer service when it comes to insurance.

Backing up a little more: in early 2010, my wife and I switched from AT&T to T-Mobile after several years of AT&T "service". Or, as some might call it, "serv..hello? hello?" I got the HTC Nexus One as my first Android device, and my wife got a Motorola Cliq because she needs a physical keyboard on her phone. Over the years, we've both been using Google services more and more, and the idea of sharing a calendar directly on our phones was extremely appealing. Unfortunately (for her), the Cliq was already close to end of life (EOL) but T-Mobile never told her that. They also sold her a $5/month insurance policy against loss/damage. A month later, she needed to get her Cliq replaced because the touch screen wasn't responsive. A few months later, she lost it, and T-Mobile told her to go through the insurance group, Assurion, to get a replacement. Assurion sent her a refurbished model with a broken keyboard. They replaced *that* one with one with another unresponsive touch screen. Finally, they had one that sorta-kinda worked, but the Android 2.1 update was just coming out and then her newest replacement phone started having serious lag/responsiveness issues.

We called T-Mobile, who told us that because THEY hadn't replaced the phones, they could only exchange the phone at a store for another refurbished unit, and that they'd have to replace it in-store three times within 90 days to warranty getting an entirely different phone, but that they got to choose the model and couldn't guarantee it would have a keyboard. Or even be an Android phone. We tried in vain to argue with the customer service rep about how Assurion was sending out bad replacements, and they told us they couldn't do anything about that, and the replacement phones given through Assurion didn't count towards T-Mobiles 3-in-90-days replacement guarantee.

So why the heck were we paying T-Mobile $5 a month for insurance if they weren't counting those replacements?!

Bewildered, we gave up trying to argue our point. I tried to convince my wife at Christmas to let me get her a new phone. I had already written a review for Sprint's Epic 4G for AndroidPolice.com in August 2010, but she didn't want to spend the money at Christmas. Thankfully, Sprint ran a special through March and April this year where porting your number to Sprint with a new contract would give you a $125 credit to offset any ETF fee. Since her ETF with T-Mobile after one year was now only $100, we actually came out money ahead in that regard. So, we got her the Epic 4G, and she loves the AMOLED screen and the bigger keyboard. Now if we could only get Froyo/Gingerbread on there for her without rooting it and going to CM 7...

Update: April 27: Speculation is that since Sprint is launching their Nexus S 4G on Mother's Day, May 8th, and Google IO is on the 10th, that maybe Google will be giving away the Nexus S 4G at IO2011. If that's the case, I might offload my T-Mobile phone, too, and switch to Sprint. If that IS the giveaway, and if it comes with 30 days of free service like the giveaways last year, it'll give me some time to see whether the Sprint version has better coverage than T-Mobile at home and office.