Free Lunch? Myth. Free phone? Fact.

The general rule of thumb is if you’re on Myspace and you see a “I got my free iPod in the mail!” bulletin from one of your friends or as an ad banner, don’t click it. 1) your friend was the victim in a phishing expedition and 2) there’s just no such thing as a free lunch. So imagine my surprised when Cingular sent me a free phone to test their mybluenotes.com music features. I mean, for really free. I’m a real person. I really got a free phone. This is not to say YOU are going to get a free phone, cos you’re not.

So a few years ago I got involved in word of mouth marketing for Disney. And since the word of mouth space was new, we did a lot of bad stuff like SPAM message boards and email random people in various online communities uninvited and not be 100% transparent. But, they/we learned from our mistakes and learned the best thing to do is partner up with people who have a voice and get them to talk about our products, good or bad.

So that’s what we have here, give the girl with the computer a free phone and free access to this service and see what she thinks. So I got my free phone today. It’s an LG CU500 and at first glance I’d guess it’s LG’s answer to the incompetent Razor phone. Let me just say this much. I hate Motorola phones. I had a Motorola phone before the phone I have now and I hated how when you pressed end in the middle of dialing a number it took a few seconds to end the call. Anxiety much? Like OH FUCK I DIDN”T MEAN TO CALL MY EX RIGHT NOW! So anyway, back story is I WAS with AT&T, and I LOVED them. Imagine my dismay when AT&T become Cingular. And Cingular won’t extend the plan I had with AT&T, which was far superior, number of minutes, night time hours etc…so I’m by default a Cingular customer with an AT&T SIM card. So they won’t let me get a new phone unless I get a new Cingular plan. Undaunted, I get a cingular phone from a phone reseller and pop my SIM card in. Not surprisingly, I hate my new phone, which came recommended by a drunken crack whore named Jiminie. Seriously, that’s her name. Anyway, I despise my new phone (Samsung SGH D307) which looks a lot cooler than it is. So I hate that thing too. AND it doesn’t even have a camera. Not that I need one, but sometimes its helpful.

So anyway, I got my new phone now. It’s really pretty, but not very user friendly. But it’s not about the phone, it’s about the Cingular Music experience. They even got me a super cute music premium pack accessory thing. I’m very excited. Now if I can just get the damn thing to start working.

Love,
Gen