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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MaxKaladin" data-source="post: 1437913" data-attributes="member: 1196">Thanks for the info.We've had the plan long enough that T-Mobile will give us new phones and we're willing to pay extra to get phones that will give us better reception, but we don't know which ones those are.  The T-Mobile reps are pretty unhelpful as they mostly insist there won't be any difference between any of their phones.  We know this to be false as we've seen a difference between phones on their plan and even with the same model phones -- my stepmother's phone is the same as mine and my father's but gets better reception.  When they offer any suggestions at all, its to offer to change out a chip, but they're pretty evasive when it comes to describing what, exactly, this will actually do to help.  Their description of the phone losing its memory makes it sound like its an EEPROM or some other kind of memory rather than anything that will do any good so I'm chalking that suggestion up to the old trick of doing something that won't help just to make the customer shut up and go away then hope they come back on someone elses shift so they're not your problem anymore.  Our phones have no external antenna.  My father bought an antenna that has an adapter that clips on the back of the phone with a wire that runs to a roof mounted antenna and this basically did no good.  I don't know if the ones you're describing actually draw any power from the car to boost the signal strength or not.  I'll check the manual about switching modes manually.  Otherwise, I'll need to find some sort of place where I can get information about the relative merits of the various phones so we can make an informed decision about replacing ours.  Right now, we have Nokia 3390s, which were the basic phone at the time and, I think, have been discontinued.  I don't know what the current "basic" phone is but I doubt it's much better.  The two phones that have currently gotten the best reception are one with a short antenna that isn't on T-Mobile but rather on some smaller regional company and a flip-phone that is on T-Mobile.  Thanks for the info.</blockquote>

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