21 days, still no phone

Called Bell Mobility Customer Service this morning where a lovely girl called Mercedes passed me on to a talkative guy named Dmitri who then "escalated" me to some customer experience improvement person whose name I didn't bother remembering at this point, that offered me to take a month off my bill for the inconvenience.

Awesome - I don't have a phone, I don't receive my business emails, I can't talk to my friends and family, but I don't have to pay for it. Customer satisfaction at its best. To make a long story short - the HTC Touch, or rather Bell UTStarcom MP6900 phones are still "on back order"...

Update: Stopped by another Bell Mobility store on the way home - as long as I was willing to become a new customer, there were phones-a-plenty for me of "HTC Touch" models in both black and white colors... I feel so appreciated as a customer that's been with Bell for 4 years right now...

Yeap - Bell HTC Touch is not an HTC phone...

Did some digging online and here is what I found - just like the last few HTC devices sold by Bell (for example HTC Apache being sold as UTStarcom PPC 6700), Bell Mobility customizes and re-brands HTC phones through UTStarcom before selling them. Whether they save money on the warranty this way, or there are some other shady reasons behind it - I don't know, but here is the evidence - all the Bell HTC phones are listed under different names on the UTStarcom website: http://www.utstar.com/pcd/DataDevices.aspx

Now my broken HTC Touch is a still broken Bell UTStarcom MP6900. Peachy.

Update: Called Bell Customer Service. Lady on the phone pleads ignorance about the phone not being an HTC device.

Update: Looks like Bell Mobility pulled a fast one on us - Bell is no longer listed in the list of available carriers on the UTStarcom page. However, HTC still refuses to recognoze Bell HTC Touch serial numbers as HTC product.