I thought I would post my experience with orderig this phone through amazon. I had many doubts, so I hope this helps a few people out.Here we go:I was a verizon customer, with an expired contract. I wanted this phone, so I switched to cingular.I also wanted to keep my number, but I wanted this phone more than I wanted my number, so I ordered it knowing I might not be able to keep my verizon number. It turns out I WAS ABLE TO KEEP MY VERIZON NUMBER. It is true this phone comes "activated" and they even sent me my new cingular number in an email before I get the phone in the mail. As soon as I got this email informing me of my new number, I called cingular, explained the situation, and there were able to assign me my old verizon number. They also said Amazon will NOT charge me to do this. Things were looking good.I anxiously watched the tracking information and I was pretty upset because it didn't update for three days. On the 17th of feb, I ordered the phone. On the 20th it said USPS was notified of a package, but hasn't got it yet. On the 23rd, it updated and said my phone was in my city on the truck. So the tracking is pretty lame, but in the end, my phone came in the mail two days BEFORE the expected arrival date, another bonus.I opened it up, popped in the sim card, and within 10 minutes, I was able to make calls. Accessing the internet is another story. I called tech support and they were really nice. We tired everything known, and after an hour I was told to take it in and get a new sim card. Great.I took it into cingular, and they worked on it for about an hour. It would work with the sim card from the store managers cell phone, but not with mine. We tried two new sim cards, and nothing. Finally, another person came to the rescue, recognized that it wasn't authorized somewhere in the system. We had to call a special data technical service and they activated it. It now works great. So after about three hours, I had my phone and I was ready to go. First thing I did was install google maps, everything worked great. I don't know if the problem was becasue I got it from Amazon, but it eventually got fixed and the phone works flawlessly.I have never had a treo before, but I really like this phone. The camera is weak, but everything else is very functional. I would give this phone 5 stars except..............Next up, email. The push email client was very easy to setup. The problem is that it drains the battery life like crazy. It is essentially useless becauase the battery only lasts about 8hrs with minimal use (10 minutes, internet, 20 minutes talk time, 10 minutes playing with the contacts/scheduler) This won't even get you through the day. If you leave your house at 8am, your phone is dead at 4pm. Not cool.I did some searching, and it turns out the push email client drains the battery because it is constantly connected and sending information back and forth. Disabling this feature should increase battery life tremendously. Apparently the 8125 runs the same program without a problem, and because this is such an issue, they will come up with some kind of software patch.I am going to charge the phone tonight, turn off push email, and see if it makes any difference....i will update with results.UPDATE: Sorry about not updating, I forgot because my treo's battery is absolutely fine now. It turns out many people jump the gun and freak out about the battery life during the first week.After using it for a week and barely getting through an eight hour day, it seems the battery gets stronger and stronger. I also read to keep it plugged into the charger whenever you get the chance. It seems letting the battery run dry and then charging it is actually worse, so keep it charging as much as possible.After a week or two, I was able to get 24hours easily without charging. Just last night, I noticed my battery was about to die, but that was because I hadn't charge my phone in about 40 hours!So, bottom line: The battery will suck for the first couple of weeks, but stick with it and you will end up with a pretty sweet phone.