Cingular Discount? Not!

My Treo 650 is starting to show its age. The browser is slow, the face is getting banged up, and really it's just not as 'cool' as it was 2 years ago. So I started looking at the 680 recently because Cingular sent me an offer to upgrade for $75. But it's not much of an upgrade. More recently, the 750 is available. It's better in memory and speed, but they still downgraded the screen resolution. And they won't give it to me for $75

So I looked a little more, and many people are raving about the Cingular 8525 (HTC Hermes). It really looks slick and like a real upgrade. Of course, it's $399 right now. But on Cingular's website, they have this box to enter your work email address to see if you qualify for discounts. In a couple seconds, I got an email that was my "exclusive link to our Cingular Premier website". Woohoo! I check out the 8525 in the shopping section and the above picture is what I found.

My discount read as: $1029.99 for the phone's base price, minus $630 because it's in a Package.

Let me repeat this: Any John Q. Public can go to Cingular's website and buy an 8525 to $399.99. With my "exclusive" access to their Premier website, I can now get it for $1029.99 - $630 = $399.99. Go me!