And to end this little saga (with a possible post-script), the phone's data was still down as of Wednesday. I went through three levels of Boost customer support over a 45 minute period, and the supervisor told me that even though there was indeed a problem with my data service and admitted Boost had failed to deliver the service I'd paid for, all he would do was offer me a credit towards next month's bill and tell me to keep waiting for a technical fix. When I got to the selling dealer a few minutes later, Boost had credited my account for a whopping $10 towards my next month's bill.
Fortunately the selling Boost dealer (Tony at Wireless Hotshots at 8001 Laurel Canyon Blvd in North Hollywood, CA) was so embarrassed by the entire fiasco he refunded the phone price, gave me the $10 out of his own pocket, and activated my barely used Verizon Droid Pro on Page Plus at no charge. He did what he could to make things right, which was what was needed.
I'm still out $45 for nine days of Boost "service", but I now have a phone that works and live people in customer support at Page Plus that seem to have brains, are here in the U.S. (in Toledo, OH, actually), and have the authority to fix things that are not right without a lot of grief. I don't have to go through 12 layers of automated phone replies trying to figure out how to talk to a live person, and make one phone call instead of ten getting cut off in the Boost que.
I can also use FoxFi with the Droid Pro and get the hotspot active without having to root the phone, and have the much-better (from my experience/areas, at least) Verizon network for $55 a month with unlimited talk, text and 2GB of data, which covers my needs. I have a brother in Ohio I set up on Boost talk/text a year ago, and he's also gotten terrible service from Boost, and wants me to switch him over to the $40 Page Plus unlimited talk/text plan - I'll oblige him, as his prior Verizon service worked well but was too much $$$.
I read the language in the Boost Terms Of Service brochure before I returned the XPRT, and it's so broadly inclusive in Boost's favor I believe there's a significant chance a product liability attorney could have it thrown out as unenforceable.
The bottom line is that as soon as Boost has your money, you'll never see it again no matter how bad their service is, and the only way to ask for it back is through their binding arbitration - where they are the ones paying the arbitrator. I know arbitrators who work in these roles, and they often take pride in how little $$$ they award customers - after all, it's the companies who keep them employed.
I'm not in a position to let my service be at Boost's total discretion and have too many Web-related items I need reliable data service for, much less be told even if they fail to deliver paid-for services, they still keep my money. The one thing they did efficiently in the entire process was to release my number to Page Plus for porting. I think the XPRT's a great little 3G phone, it's just too bad it went onto such a disaster of a network in Boost. After ten years of being a Sprint smartphone customer and selling them hundreds of phones as a consultant and tech writer, I've said goodbye.
