I have a shiny phone with more computing power than the first computer I ever owned. I also have a shiny brick, because the phone isn't working now, and when I took it back to where I bought it they gave me a phone number to call to fix it. (I call it my BrickBerry. It's so bricked, it doesn't even play Brickout.) There's nothing worse than talking on the phone, trying to fix your phone.
Get in touch, free of charge: Just dial 611 from your T-Mobile phone or call 1-877-453-1304. Customer Care representatives are available from 3 a.m. to 10p.m. PT, daily. Automated account help is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
You can either call Toll Free # 1-800-937-8997 or we here in Technical Care web chat can assist you.I am tempted to go back to the worst possible phone that could possibly work. I had an old, old Nokia candybar-style phone, which at one point I called my "WAP phone" because I had to wap on the side of it to get it to work. Yet it did work, and it made lots of phone calls, and it seemed cheap at the time. And it was cheap - it had a monochrome screen, only the most rudimentary games, no camera, nothing. Cheap but reliable.
JVM Error 517
An unrecoverable error on the phone.
T-mobile policy for this error is to ship a replacement phone.
An inconsistency has been detected in the VM persistent object store.
Smart phones aren't cheap, but increasingly they don't seem all that smart either. Shiny, yes; futuristic and wonderful, sure. But smart, not so much. Does your phone remind you of what you need to do, when and where you need to do it, but not so naggingly that you turn it off? Probably not. Does that smart phone make you look smarter when you're walking down the street punching buttons on it? Not so sure. Twittering from the bus to let the planet know which bus has squeaky brakes? Uh huh.
The trap, perhaps, is confusing "smart phone" with "smart person". Does a smart phone make you smart?
One possibility is to ditch phones with contracts entirely and go to a prepaid plan, which means that every call would cost something and I've have to be smart about how to use my phone. That turns out to be easier now that I have Google Voice, which gives me more tools than ever to not answer my phone but still get a message to me. Google Voice lets me direct any call to any phone, and thus the cell phone simply becomes another selectable destination to originate or terminate calls on the same number.
Other people's take on this:
My monthly bill says buying a dumb phone would have been smarter.
