I have Cingular and the good part is that there is no charge when talking to any other Cingular customer. Since all my family and most of my friends are on Cingular, we use very little air time.
It does seem I had better continuity of service before Cingular and ATT merged. Overall, I'm pretty happy with it, but I always research the others each time the contract is due.
Scott, I had no problem getting free phones from Cingular with 2-year aggreement.
DonM