We have been with Verizon a long time, since before it was called Airtouch. Unfortunately, because Verizon is using the CDMA network, we can’t use their phones overseas without incurring ridiculous international roaming charges. The cheapest solution is to use a GSM phone and swap out local SIM cards. For that, I have been using a basic flip phone, which is kind of redundant with all my data still on my Verizon PDA phone. Now that I travel to Asia more often, I was planning to get a converged GSM device.

Recently, there were some work situations where I needed to communicate more immediately with our Asia managers, which could have easily been accomplished if I had a GSM phone and just messaged them via international SMS (Verizon phones can’t receive international text messages natively). So I decided to make the move even though I would have to pay a penalty to break my Verizon contract before end of term.

I decided to get the ATT 8525 from a local Chinese equipment vendor which saved me a bunch of money, and they were able to port my Verizon number over as well (Amazon doesn’t port numbers that easily). Unfortunately, the porting process isn’t as smooth as it should be. My voice calls were ported by the following morning but the inter-network text messages didn’t get transferred until the following day. On top of that, the email-to-sms gateway address that ATT provides “number@mobile.att.net” didn’t work and I had to find the updated address on wikipedia which is “number@txt.att.net”.

After a couple days of porting delays (which might have been avoided by just turning off my old phone, but that’s not what they tell you to do), along with some configuration and customizations, my GSM PDA phone is working nicely. Whereas, my old PDA phone, Verizon xv6700, still had some bugs that had to be worked out or hacked around, this new one, ATT 8525, is all that a PDA phone should be. The battery life is great, the processor is nice and fast, and the windows mobile version has been updated improving the overall experience (still waiting for the official update to Windows Mobile 6).

Of course, there are always a few things that could be improved:

• the data connection isn’t as stable or fast as Verizon
• ATT email-to-sms gateway strips the header information, which limits the effectiveness of PushEffect
  [update: through some email scripting, I've been able to program a workaround and now it's working efficiently again]
• contrary to most other user complaints, my headphone volume is actually too loud
• interference with nearby speakers whenever the phone connects with the network

Hopefully, some of these issues will get fixed in future updates. Also, we’ll see how it works in real world international testing when I go to Asia next week.

Until the perfect devices comes along, this will have to do