Cingular (ATT) support sucks, but the phone rocks!

Just wanted to give a quick update on my first day with the new phone (Cingular 8525).  I could not get the phone to hook up to the internet and sync correctly with my laptop.  Between last night and this afternoon I spoke to three different Cingular techs who knew nothing about networking and how this phone worked.  By the time they were done telling me what to do my networking settings were trashed.  I actually put the phone back in the box and was bringing it back to the store.  The store manager has the same phone and knows his stuff. He reset the phone to default settings and showed me where on line to get the tech notes. 

The phone worked around town today, but when I got home no internet again.  Worse I could not get more than a one bar of connectivity from my wireless LAN. My house has strong wireless signal throughout, so something was wrong.  I then spent another 2 hours on the phone with Cingular with two more people who did not know what they were doing.  At the end, they told me to bring my phone in tomorrow as the wireless NIC was bad and I had a bad signal here at the house. They took a trouble ticket on that and maybe they could do something about it.  I said fine and left it at that.

I then did some hunting around and found this site called 8525software.com.  It has some great free downloads and from reading around I made some discoveries. First thing I did was wipe out the wireless connection and reinstall it.  Bingo, I had 5 bars of connectivity.  Then I realized that the default internet settings were going through Cingular's MEdia Net (you can only get ringtones and stuff using it) and it uses a proxy server that was killing all of my outgoing requests on the net.  Once I redid the default internet connection settings (beyond me how the Cingular people didn't know this), it is screaming now.  I have customized the phone with a lot of custom touches and I am loving it. The camera is great, sound is great and I have not even used the office apps yet. Lets hope it keeps working now.

Oh, another bad thing from Cingular (ATT), they refuse to offer any insurance on this phone. If I lose it or drop it and it breaks, I am screwed.  Just one more reason why Cingular sucks.