Hasta La Gadget!

By federal law, wireless carriers must allow consumers to port their phone number when switching to a different carrier.

That doesn’t mean they have to make it easy.

I recently ordered an iPhone 3GS. Since my previous phone was a BlackBerry on Verizon’s network, I had to switch from Verizon to AT&T in the process. I found that, although both the Apple and AT&T Web sites let me order the phone online, and both offered the chance to port my existing number, neither site would actually let me do it.

An AT&T spokesperson confirmed that this is normal and expected. It turns out that if you originally registered the number in a different state than you live in now–which I did–instead of ordering online, you need to process it over the phone with an AT&T sales representative. You do this via what amounts to a literal procession of various AT&T engineers and support personnel, who “hand off” the transition from one person to the next like a wireless baton. A very slow one.

In fact, the entire procedure took several days, including call backs, setting up a temporary AT&T phone number in my current area code, waiting for the iPhone to arrive, and about an hour of total hold time with four separate support personnel as they switched the old account to the new area and disabled the new temporary number. Some notes on getting through this with your sanity intact after the jump.

Good news, of a sort: the Android 2.0 operating system is coming to Sprint’s HTC Hero and Samsung Moment, but in the first half of 2010.

The announcement was made via Sprint’s Twitter account on Friday afternoon. The company said that the date of the upgrade was officially “TBD” (To Be Determined) but “roughly” in the first half of 2010.

Given the abbreviated nature of the Twitter medium, Sprint did not disclose exactly how it would make the update available. I’m not sure if a major OS revision like that could be pushed out in an over-the-air update, or if users would need to perform a more complicated bootloader operation via the USB cable.

Android 2.0, of course, is a feature of the Verizon Droid. With Google making its turn-bu-turn Navigation system available for Android 1.6 users, the need for Android 2.0 is somewhat lessened. Still, it will be a welcome upgrade for Hero and Moment users, even if they’ll have to wait months for the update.

An AT&T executive said Wednesday that the carrier is planning to tighten data usage controls for heavy smartphone users, according to USA Today.

It’s no secret that carrier networks are fragile beasts. Thanks to AT&T’s excruciatingly slow 3G build-out and the wildly successful iPhone, it’s probably the worst off of the four carriers in this regard. But even as AT&T struggles to catch up with network upgrades, head of consumer services Ralph de la Vega told investors in New York that it’s planning “incentives” to get high-bandwidth users to cool it, the report said.

This probably has something to do with how data card subscribers (at $59.99 per month) have a 5GB cap, whereas right now smartphone users don’t. De La Vega said that just three percent of smartphone users are eating up 40 percent of available capacity, and that most of it is thanks to high-bandwidth video streaming apps.

“We need to educate the customer … We’ve got to get them to
understand what represents a megabyte of data,” de la Vega said in the report. If that’s the case, rather than blaming his customers, he should probably have a talk with Apple–which is currently featuring CNN‘s video-heavy mobile app as “Pick of the Week.”