Well, that's what I meant by UMTS, which I suppose may or may not have been the right term to use. From what everything I know, though, Cingular doesn't have different tiers for their data, so signing up for MEdia Net should get you everything. But yeah - being able to get unlimited data on a pre-paid month-to-month is definitely pretty cool.

My comments about California:

According to PDAdb, you have both GSM850 and GSM1900, so you should be okay on either Cingular or T-Mobile.

I can't recommend T-Mobile on the West coast. They're using Cingular's old towers, and although Cingular's been building 850 MHz towers left and right, last I checked (a few years ago, when I was on T-Mobile myself), T-Mobile was stuck still using Cingular's 1900 MHz towers.

If you want to use your existing phone, as a result, I'd suggest Cingular. The pre-paid MEdia Net that smeg36 mentioned does, in fact, work on a SmartPhone/Pocket PC (although you might not want to mention beforehand that you'll be using it on such a device ) - all of the boards I've ever seen that talk about data for a Windows Mobile device suggest doing that. afaik, their attitude is that data is data - you get access from GPRS through to UMTS with the plan.

About smeg36's suggestion regarding phones: you'd need to take the PPC-6700 off the list. Sprint has deprecated the phone in anticipation of releasing the PPC-6800, so it's nigh-impossible to find the PPC-6700 anywhere.

That's total garbage - I can't believe Handango would do something like that. I may not have spent as much as you have, but I'll stick join you on that no-purchase policy. I've posted a couple of threads elsewhere - hopefully, we can get more people to be aware of stuff like that.

Say, maybe we can get Paul to post something on the front page too!

Having had one, I think I can fill in the gaps in this response, which is mostly correct.

The Danger Hiptop does, in fact, heavily utilize backend servers that are kept and maintained by the platform manufacturer, Danger, which afaik leases these out to various carriers. There are a number of carriers in the US (and elsewhere) beyond T-Mobile, but you must have one of these carriers, since otherwise you'll end up being forced to use the phone without any network access (which also means that you won't be able to take advantage of the network synchronization/backup system either). They don't sync with a PC, and so that would mean that if your phone ran out of batteries or such, you would in fact lose all of your data. From my understanding, they are looking for carriers in Europe (especially considering they are now multi-band), but I would strongly recommend waiting for a carrier there to pick it up if your heart is set on it.

The following carriers have the Hiptop:

• Cable & Wireless
• Edge
• E-Plus
• Fido
• one
• StarHub
• SunCom
• T-Mobile

List here

And, I do happen to know the pros/cons of the device. What is it that you're looking for in a phone?