dumb question

I asked a Sprint rep this question recently. When I bought my 4900 I wanted to give my dad my old Samsung 8500. He said, my dad could take it into his local Sprint store and have it reprogrammed. Since my dad is already on Sprint there wouldn't be any charge. This was actually true for the 4900, since I had it reprogrammed for my old account, and didn't switch to the Vision plan for a few days after I'd bought the phone. If you're not a Sprint customer, it's probably a matter of signing up for a plan and they'll program the phone. If there's not a Sprint center nearby, you can call their toll-free number and have the phone activated (888-211-4PCS (4727) ). But according to their web site, new Sprint customers pay a $35 activation fee. If you go into a store, there's usually a couple of options to get the plan without an activation fee (e.g., switching to Sprint long distance -- which is a non brainer since you'll probably make all your LD calls on the cell phone!).

 

If you are an existing customer just looking to switch phones, you can activate on sprint's web page. www.sprintpcs.com Select the option to activate a new phone, there is then an option for a new account or existing customer. Selct the existing customer option and it will put your new phone on your old phone number. Or just dial *2 from either phone and have customer care do it for you.

 

Just call customer care,now that its free its no big deal. (Though back when I switched mine I had to use my "back door" method to get around the phone type detection hee hee). The guy was really cool,he gave me some numbers to plug in to the 5250 when I switched over from Kyocera 6035 and I was set in less than an hour!

 

I sell the phones out of best buys and circuit cities and they are actually supposed to ask you if it's a new or existing account and then offer the service of activating the phone for you. If no sprint rep is present circuit city reps are trained to activate sprintpcs/att/cingular phones for FREE...i believe they have a sign saying "activate your new wireless phone here for FREE" aside from any activation fees the service you're signing on to might have. If you buy a phone from c.city, it will usually be cheaper, doesn't affect the rebates and if you take it to a sprint store, they might actually try to sale you the same phone at a cheaper price with a better deal sometimes, because technically the guys activating your phone in the sprint store is doing it for free because they didn't sell you the phone...if the rep is a real jerk he might pass you off to someone else or try to match the deal and make it better than whatever retail store u purchased the phone from. I've had this happen to me a lot of times so i invest the time to activate all of my customers' phones. If a rep doesn't invest time to activate a phone on an existing account, once again, it's usually cause that rep isn't getting paid for exising or probably getting paid 4 bucks at best to activate your phone which could take him 10-20 minutes where he could've made another "new" activation which could pay him 10-20 dollars! And if the c.city rep isn't offering the activation as a service, he's just being lazy, cause they make commission regardless if it's a new or existing, but activating it at home, as said b4 by other board members, is no more difficult that going online or using *2 or using the 800# which has become faster so activations over the phone usually won't take more then 10-20 minutes!