The upstage paired with no problem at all. I do pay for the phone as a modem plan. When they first activated the phone for me it wouldnt connect as a modem. Then after a restart it worked great. One thing you have to remember when using the upstage, its not an ipod! Don't try to use the touch panel like a click wheel. If you do it will do really funny things. Sprint's network is pretty fast I generally get 400-500Kbps, but sometimes during the day when the network is busy it drops to about 300Kbps. Overall I am happy with the upstage for now. I would love a blackberry but they don't support bluetooth DUN profile and I dont want to have to add software to make it work. The moto Q is really crappy and for some reason when I installed pdanet to tether via bluetooth I could only get about 150Kbps-200Kbps. And I constantly had to restart the phone because bluetooth would stop working.