She explicitly said that the data plan I chose would not work because "it says here you have an N97." I believe she called it a "dataphone".

Upon further questions, she said the $9.99 plan was an "upgrade" from the $4.99 plan, but that it would not support the needs of a "dataphone" like mine. I asked what those upgrades were and she babbled about "efficiency" and "more Web sites" but could not exactly tell me what the differences between the $4.99 and the $9.99 (other than the $4.99 did not exist anymore). Of course, the $24.99 plan would support my N97.

I am going from memory here and I usually have a hard time remembering what I had for lunch. But I usually try hard to avoid telling phone droids from T-Mobile what phone I have so I don't have to deal with limitations like they pulled on my N97.

The sunny side is, of course, that for now the $9.99 works with tne N900. For now.

Deutsche Telekom AG.

I thought the cheaper data plans (not the smartphone ones) were generally web2go plans (basically the web through TMobile's servers where things are optimized and content can be stripped out of its too heavy).

The main differences in the $10 and $24 plan is port access. Over in the Symbian camp, we've discovered that the $10 plan blocks certain ports, and also has a limit to the number of simultaneous connections that can be made.

I *think* they also throttle the speeds, but I can't verify that part.

For the record, AT&T also has a $15 'normal phone' data plan and a $30 'smartphone' data plan. They maintain that a smartphone has a QWERTY keyboard. I kid you not. For example, the Nokia 6650 (which runs Symbian S60v3 FP2) is not a 'smartphone' because it has a numeric keypad. However, the E71x (which also runs Symbian S60v3 FP2) is a smartphone because it has a QWERTY keyboard.

I can also confirm that AT&T knows what phone you're using, as one time I called in to do something on my account and the guy goes, 'wow, you like to switch phones often, don't you?' I said, 'excuse me?' and he goes, 'well, I see here that over the past 2-3 months, you've used' and then proceeded to read off every phone (by model name) that I'd stuck my SIM card in, lol.

Try this, login to the T-mobile website for your account. You can select the phone you have. Select a regular phone, not a smart phone, then it should allow you to add the 5.99 plan. In the past this is what I have done and it worked fine.