Subscribers

First the glowing testimony. Virgin Mobile is a great carrier if you are on a budget. I just hopped onto their Texter’s Delight monthly plan for $15 and added 50Mb of data a month at $10. The coverage is good and the phones are cheap: I bought their Shuttle at $79. All that with no contract.

(If you enter my Virgin kickbacks referral code at your service activation, we both earn 60 minutes free. My code is wLdvPMq5.)

Bad news #1: Twitter

Not all websites support Virgin Mobile SMS services—especially monthly plans. My local paper offers SMS updates of breaking news to most carriers except Virgin Mobile, which is odd since Virgin uses Sprint’s network (a supported carrier).

Most heartbreaking of all is that Twitter, at this writing, does not authenticate Virgin Mobile phones as a device. I’ve tried several methods to activate it—even changing my Virgin number several times online—to no avail.

I called Virgin’s customer service line regarding this issue and the representative was unfamiliar with what Twitter is and could barely hear me because it sounded like he was in a closet full of a hundred of his yelling coworkers. I have since assumed that this is not a Virgin Mobile issue, but a Twitter issue though I could be wrong.

Because of this unfortunate “FAIL,” I’ve tried many workarounds to access Twitter on my phone. Some of these work and some of these almost work, but a combination of these services is better than nothing.

Workarounds to Twitter posts

• Probably the best alternative if you have a data plan, is load Twitter’s mobile page on your phone’s browser. Unfortunately, you will have to enter your username and password each time you log on from your phone, but from there you can see your timeline and post updates. UPDATE: I found that dabr.co.uk is a fine replacement for the mobile version of the Twitter homepage. It remembers your password and offers a better layout for your phone.
• Twittermail.com is a free service that offers to send you a timeline of recent posts from those you follow and to post your tweets via email. If you can send and receive email on your phone, this is a great alternative. This of course, assumes that Twittermail works. Unfortunately, the service is unreliable. I became “a friend” of Twittermail (a $15 donation) because I wanted instant notifications of my Twitter replies, but that was a waste of money because of the service’s long delays — if replies were sent to me at all. Posting photos via Twittermail, which is also a feature, is also unreliable. Service requires providing your Twitter password.
• Tweetbeep.com helps to cover what Twittermail misses, so the services make for a good complement for one another. Tweetbeep allows you to specify keywords according to a full gamut of custom parameters, which is then used to search through all tweets coming in through Twitter. Any tweets matching your parameters are sent to you in an email, which you can set up in your phone. For example, you can enter your own name as a keyword and see all tweets mentioning you in replies. While Tweetbeep only checks once an hour, Tweetbeep’s free service has been more consistent than Twittermail and it doesn’t require providing your Twitter password.
• For tweeting photos, I’m using Flickr. After all is said and done, Flickr’s service is reliable enough for me though it is currently in beta. There may be other ways to tweet photos, but why bother when there’s one that works.
• I can’t recommend Twip.me, which offers to send tweets to your phone as IMs, but that service is less reliable than Twittermail. (I only received three tweets in 24 hours after providing them with my Twitter password.) Feel free to try it out, you might have a better experience.
• If you’re wondering about mobile applications for Twitter services, I’ve attempted to install them and failed. There are many and I haven’t tried them all, but you may have better luck. At one point it just didn’t seem worth the time and effort.

Bad news #2: Ringtones

I have a big gripe with any company who goes out of its way to take away features on its product in order to make money. Virgin Mobile is not alone in this, but shame on them for locking us in — or at least trying to.

Virgin Mobile does not make it easy to put custom ringtones on your phone other than by purchasing it from their store. I’ve tried transferring files by card, SMS, Bluetooth, and email to my phone, but Virgin does a good job in shutting those means down.

The only solution I’ve found to load your ringtones onto your phone is to use Rumkin’s Sprint PCS Vision Uploader. You’ll need to purchase Virgin Mobile’s data plan — at least for now — because you’ll need to browse to Rumkin’s website on your phone. Upload an mp3 file from your computer to their website and they will send you a code that you can then use to access the site via your phone. From there you can choose to download contents from the page and save it to your phone. Note: I am using Virgin’s Shuttle phone, and I’m not sure if other Virgin phones will allow you to do this.

So that’s it. If I go through more challenges I will be sure to update this post. In the meantime, good luck!

(Please don’t contact me for help — I’m not a help desk.)