[sc:mobile-category ]I’ve been with Bell Mobility since my first mobile phone and somehow each year they make it harder to stick with them.
Their prices (like all of the big three) are too high and features that are really standard that are add ons (like 8 bucks for caller ID, a feature that costs them $0 to deliver).
At the launch of Windows Phone 7, Bell was a launch partner (which was good) but it took them 5 months to get a phone. When the second wave of phones came out, Bell didn’t get any of them, instead pretty much abandoning Windows Phone.
With Windows Phone 8, no Canadian launch partner was identified, however Rogers came out almost immediately with details that they would be carrying both the Nokia 920 and the HTC 8X, Telus came out shortly after that with the Samsung ATIV S being up as “coming soon” on their website. Bell was silent, it did leak that they would be carrying two WP8 devices but no details beyond that one of them would NOT be the 920. It finally leaked that they would be launching the HTC 8X on Nov 15th.
When the 15th finally came around, Bell updated their web site but that was pretty much it. They didn’t even update any of their rotating banners on their site. When you go to their phone page you can’t even see the 8X, you have to scroll across to find it.
I called around to pretty much every Bell store within 20km and not a single one of them had any stock. Nor could they say when they would be in stock either.
How do you launch a new phone and have no stock anywhere? One store indicated that the 19th might be the “new” date, but honestly who knows. I left my phone number at a couple of stores just in case they had some come in. I didn’t receive a call back but was by my local Bell store on Saturday the 17th so I decided to drop in anyway. Low and behold, they had stock!
So now I have my brand spanking new HTC 8X, in hand and am currently setting it up.
I’ll post my first thoughts on the phone in a few days after I’ve had a chance to play with it a bit.
