U.S. Cellular

I like the store and the reps here, however they do tend to be quite biased when it comes to opinions on phones. A few years ago, my mom and I went to get new phones. At the time, the only Windows Phone they had was the HTC 7 Pro. I really wanted a Windows Phone, so I chose that one. My mom originally wanted to go the same route, until a rep told her about his Samsung Mesmerize. He told her about the «amazing» features it had (all of which could be performed on Windows Phone 7, but at the time I didn’t know). Then he explained that most of the reps had that phone, so it had to be good. So that day I came home with the HTC 7 Pro and my mom brought home the Samsung Mesmerize.
Almost immediately she had problems. It froze often, it was slow, and to prevent more problems, she would have to restart it once a day. Additionally, Android was confusing to her. Meanwhile, I was having no problems with my Windows Phone.
We brought it in once to see what was going on, and they told us it had a bad version of Android. To update it, they needed to get rid of everything. By then I believe I updated my phone’s software once, and I got to keep everything AND I didn’t need to come into the store to do it.
A year or so into having her Mesmerize, she upgraded early. She got the ZTE Render, a low-​end Windows Phone. The specs on the Render are pretty poor, yet my mom was happy with her decision. It ran smoothly, gave her better voice-​controlled software, and doesn’t produce any problems for her. It’s great that the Mesmerize was a good phone for the reps, but it was NOT the right phone for her.