dude, thanks. warms my heart even though it brings my hopes up! DON'T FAIL ME NOW AT&T.
@drex, do you know if Best Buy gets orders in from different carriers at different times or all pretty much the same? I'm looking to go through Best Buy mobile route as it may seem as if easier than going to an AT&T store where everyone else would seem to go. That and also I reallllllllllllllllllly dislike the sales people at my local store, extremeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeely terrible and disrespectful service.
Regarding Best Buy...I've seen 3 different scenarios (e.g. 1) Best Buy offering at the same time/release date as the provider, 2) Best Buy offering 1 week or more after an "exclusive" release directly through the provider, & 3) Best Buy offering before the provider). I know this really doesn't help much, but what I can tell you is that I haven't gotten an upgrade directly through Sprint for the past 4 years! My experience going directly through Best Buy Mobile far exceeded any experiences I had going directly through Sprint.
Even better, for us die-hards, the Best Buy reps have been more than accomodating when I ask them to just activate based from the box, so that I can take home and set up myself. For the past few phones I've upgraded for me and my family members (Photon Q, iPhone 4S, Photon, Optimus S, Epic 4G, EVO 4G), they accomodated my request without questions, so I was able to take everything home, open everything carefully myself, fully charge the phone before powering on, and set up from Point A-Z.
Not a lot of people have realized how great it is upgrading through them. Even my friends were joking about how I may be one of the few people that still purchases from Best Buy, but I had to school them on how easy it is going through them, how their price matching is so simple and pretty awesome, and how they usually have better promotions than many of the other stores (save for online deals, which I still have yet to try).
Just to give you an example, I've been upgraded to Silver Rewards the past couple years, just because of my upgrades on phones and tablet purchases. Even though I didn't necessarily spend $2,500 worth at the store, they have counted the full retail price of my phone upgrades, in order to continue offering me Silver Rewards. Even better, they had a program in Feb/March this year, where if you registered your phone number on their website, it would automatically indicate a $50 credit towards your next upgrade within 2012 (expiring at the end of December). It was called "Phone Freedom." Lucky for me, I had seen the promotion on the last day and registered the phones that would be eligible for upgrade this year. So, on top of the Best Buy Gift cards I got from Credit Card points, and the money I got from selling my OG Evo...there's not going to be any extra money out of my pocket to get the Note 2.