I was less-than-impressed with Cricket's technical expertise. I have worked in the telecommunications' field for over a decade, in both engineering and sales, and encountered Cricket personnel at a job fair. They were recruiting for sales folks and regional personnel. I asked them some basic questions about their company's technology, the most basic of which was "GSM or CDMA?" Their recruiter looked at me, supposedly looking for technical folks for a variety of roles, and said "neither, we're 3G." I mentioned that 3G is not a real underlying technology, but rather more of a marketing term than anything. I rephrased the question to "do your phones use SIM cards or do you have to program them?" to which he said "you don't need that in 3G." I took a breath...and then explained as technically as I could that the major technologies are either GSM as used by AT&T and T-Mobile, or CDMA, as used by Verizon and Sprint. I then blew his mind and mentioned IDEN from Nextel. He said "yeah, well, we're just 3G. You don't know the new stuff."

So, not only was this fellow wrong, he was rude as well. I know recruiters don't always know technology, but, this was like Intro to Wireless 101 that I asked him. Good luck to anybody who needs support from this company.

I think it will be a while (if ever) before I would be tempted to look at offers from this new entry into the market.
I am someone who uses prepaid phones only, mainly because I will not sign a very one-sided contract for two years with a company that will always choose profit over the best interests of it's clients.
But apart from that I will look at the same things everybody else looks at. Price, reliability (quality) and customer support. Sadly it seems that Cricket does not excel in any of the three categories.
Hence I will continue to use companies that do. My current favorite is Tracfone with very competitive pricing, excellent coverage and fairly good customer support combined with great ease-of-use.

I've been on Virgin Mobile for about a year, and I switched to cricKet because they have a better rate on plans, offer better phones, and my current phone is dead in the water. They've set up a storefront at Fayette and St. Paul, so I popped in there to get a hands on look at the phones. They had three that met my criteria (2 w/a qwerty keyboard, and one touchscreen phone), and after reading reviews on cnet I picked the Samsung Messager - a "chocolate bar" slider.

I went back today and purchased my phone - they activated it in-store. My plan includes unlimited talk, long distance, global text, web, mobile email, and 411, online backup of my contacts, all of their call features and 30 minutes roaming for $50, plus insurance on the handset for an additional $4.95/month.

The phone is pretty sweet - cnet did not lead me wrong. But they are having trouble with their network - most of the time when I try to place a call I get a message saying "Thank you for calling Verizon" and that they will connect me to a representative to pay for my call. I called customer service and they said they're having issues with their service in MD, but they're working on it.

I'm patient, and when the service has worked it's been nice - on par w/Virgin (and don't get me started on Boost - unless something has changed in the last year or so they are a disgrace to wireless providers everywhere). I'm going to give it a couple days for them to work the kinks out.

Cricket definitely has a good offer for certain people in certain areas. I'd like to see their coverage expand. Customer service is definitely something that most carriers, postpaid and prepaid alike, can improve on. For those seeking to review their options, here's a free resource:

www.prepaid-wireless-guide.com/compare-unlimited-plans.html

Not a particularly good deal, I recently left Virgin (who suck) and bought a new Straight Talk Unlimited package for $45 which includes unlimited texts and 30mb of data. A far better offer than this cricket wireless and I don't have to worry about any extra daily charges.