I have a blackberry 8830 with the SE plan. I have been a Sprint customer for atleast 8 years (I guess I just wont learn). I am opening a new office and I want to use my phone for a modem should our internet ever go down. I called the tech department the first time, and they walked me through the download. I hooked up my phone and it worked perfectly, no issues at all.

I decided to do a little more research about this program since my girlfriend saw this feature as a great opportunity for her as well. After reviewing my personal plan and its details online, I found out that my plan is not suppose to be able to have the PAM service. I spoke with a “Products, Services and Plans Representative” via sprints webpage chat pop-up, and she explained that “It may work as I am a Premier Customer” and then some more bull about “my case being different”. After I continually confronted her about the obvious discrepancy, she couldn’t close my chat window quick enough, and referred me to customer care atleast 4 times before she severed the chat connection against protocol. She even kicked me off the chat before I could have our conversation transcript emailed to myself.

Luckily before she closed it, I took a screenshot of our conversation with the day and time visible for my records! She didn’t close it quick enough I guess…

Anyway, I called the customer care line she gave me, and wouldn’t you know that it was after hours for the plan people! I decided to try my luck with the service technician option again, and this time I got a tech on the phone who explained in a round about way what exactly happens.

He said the Blackberry and Smartphones sometimes have a “glitch” where the PAM service will work for an extended period of time, even when the plan is incompatable. He said that Sprint assigns a username to the phone or laptop when you log on, which allows the user to connect. He also said that eventually, some phones are found out to be “incompatable” for the PAM service based on their plan, and the users will lose their ability to exploit the “glitch”. He did however mention that the Smartphones and Blackberrys quite often are the users who do not experience the glitch being correct soon, if ever. Hooray!

He did, however, “suggest” that if I am ever asked to update the software on the computer, just Select No. I think this tech was tired of dealing with Sprints crappy customer service infrastructure, and felt bad for people like us who continually get the freakin run around.

Anyway, hopefully some of you can take this information and exploit the “glitch” for yourselves… Stick it to the (Sprint) Man!!!

I went into the sprint store to add a line to my contract, and ended up getting my gf a BB Curve for $100, since they had a special this weekend where they did the mail in rebate instantly. I changed my plan up to the $129 1500 minutes plus the data card, and I was going to add PAM for $15.
Yeah, definitely wasn’t happening.
They rung me up for the blackberry, i sign the contract, and then the system tells the agent that activation was not successful. He gives CS a call, and lo annd behold, they cannot add PAM to a BB with an existing data plan. In other words, since I was getting the Shared plan with data, and I got a BB, they would not add PAM, which royally sucks, since my gf kind of needs PAM.
Apparently, the only way would be to make the BB it’s own individual plan, but say I got the $69 plan with 450 minutes, plus BB plus PAM, that’d be $115 before tax for just the BB! And she’d only get 450 minutes, instead of the 1500 minutes.
F’ing Sprint.
I guess I could return the curve, and get another phone, but it seems pointless.
any suggestions?

I like the PAM service on my Razr2. It pairs via bluetooth with my Dell Axim, and for the most part works pretty seamlessly. But, I only need that occasionally, and I’m not sure it’s worth the extra $35/month to keep it long term.

I still don’t understand why they made me switch to a Sprint Vision Pro pack. Both the Pro and my previous SprintTV claimed to have “unlimited vision data.” It’s maddening.

I don’t think anyone said the 5GB cap had anything to do with customer service. I think we are all pretty much in agreement though, that it’s pretty foolish for Sprint to implement such a cap when they have such horrible customer service.
As for Verizon and AT&T- AT&T also gives you free unlimited WiFi at tens of thousands of locations (including all Starbucks) so you have other options and don’t have to burn up your 5 gigs. They also announced they are in the process of upgrading their data speeds to 20 megs (and their data is already much faster than Sprint’s). Plus, they have MMS on their PDA phones…
Verizon is still high, but they did recently lower their data prices. They are also in the process of buying Alltel- so we’ll see how their data services compare to Sprint’s when that is complete. They do have MMS on the PDA phones though…
And this $15 PAM is still not something you can just call up and get (unless you get really lucky) on every plan. I tried several times to get it on my family plan and was told I couldn’t (just like lots of others I read about on various message boards). But with Sprint’s terrible customer service, everyone already expected this.
As for leaving, I did just that yesterday. After months of comparing, and searching for the best deal, I found a site that will give you a free Tilt if you sign a 2 year contract. No rebate crap, nothing out of pocket- and free 2 day shipping. I pulled the trigger on 2 of them, and AT&T is now in the process of porting out my Sprint numbers. It will cost me $20 less than I have been paying Sprint per month, and I got 2 free Tilts.
It will be nice to be able to talk on the phone while I surf the net. And it will be really nice to have MMS, and have that GSM flexibility of just popping in a SIM card on any unlocked phone that I want, and have access to the awesome GSM devices. And one of the biggest benefits of all is I won’t have to deal with Sprint’s crappy customer service ever again.