AT&T knows you aren’t happy with your iPhone service. It’s making videos to try to explain away some of your woes, but the company may also be looking to add new iPhone-exclusive features to improve the user experience.
According to a story at Apple Insider, Apple and AT&T are looking into a software update that would add features to improve customer satisfaction. Among the rumored list of features are overage alerts, which would offer push notifications if you’re past your text limit, for instance. There’s also the potential for a “Voicemail” tab in the settings app, allowing you to disable the custom voicemail greetings on your own phone and bypass those greetings when you call other AT&T subscribers.
From what we know so far, this plan is a joke. The phone is fine. These features might be nice additions, but as almost every single survey has shown, iPhone owners love the phone and loathe AT&T. Adding these features to the phone will just exacerbate that issue. Sure, callers can get to my voicemail faster, but if I can’t listen to their messages what does it matter?
I don’t need features to improve my experience, I need more reliable service. When AT&T stops wasting time and money on gimmicks like this and allocates those resources to network improvement the average iPhone user experience will improve.
According to a new study, consumers are finally getting over their infatuation with looking completely ridiculous while using a hands-free headset. Bluetooth usage is down, at least in the headset sector, and so is satisfaction with most Bluetooth headset styles.
Only 26% of Bluetooth owners now use their headset every day, which is down from 43% a year ago. That’s what I call a sharp improvement. While there is the occasional comedic self-talker, I find most regular Bluetooth users to be among the rudest people I’ve ever met. Females are the worst, and usually only because they have long hair, which hides the headset from view. While bartending in Cleveland last year I actually had a woman wave her hands just inches from my face and snap at me because I interrupted her phone call when I asked her if she wanted a drink. Needless to say, she didn’t get one.
It seems it’s not just the social misconduct that’s turning people away from headsets – it’s style, too. “The style and design of the Bluetooth headset remains a pain point for consumers,” said Chris Schreiner, a Senior Analyst at Strategy Analytics. “The number of Bluetooth headset owners that are satisfied with the style of their device dropped 27% since 2008.” In lieu of their once coveted headsets, consumers have turned to in-car sets for their higher quality microphones and speakers.
T-Mobile’s Sidekick got the smartphone treatment today with the addition of Facebook and Twitter applications to the Sidekick Download Catalog. As one of the most prominent phones to implement a full keyboard and some proprietary messaging features, it’s really been a long time coming. The applications work with the Sidekick 2008, the Sidekick LX, and the Sidekick Slide.
The Facebook application is free but the Twitter app will run you $2 a month. I gotta say, $24 a year for Twitter use seems a little out of hand. It’s also strange considering the Sidekick 2009 comes pre-packaged with free apps for both Facebook and Twitter. Was Twitter really that much harder to integrate into the old phones than Facebook? Did they just not have as much developer support? Is the app just that cool?
If you have an older Sidekick and the time to drop a comment, let us know. This is a strange one.
“Look we see the discussions on the web,” says Seth Bloom. He’s also known as “Seth the blogger guy,” and he’s featured in a new video by AT&T. The video attempts to describe the MMS delay we’ve experienced and explain away our complaints with talk of network traffic and increased smartphone use.
The video, which you can see below, is just flat out insulting. It seems to suggest that AT&T’s service sucks by no fault of their own, and that maybe if you just took the time to understand a cellular network you would realize that fact. I’ll grant AT&T the fact that the iPhone probably would have crippled any network, but the responsibility would still lie with the carrier. It’s time to stop pretending AT&T isn’t making billions of dollars by not providing the service millions of people signed contracts for.
If anything, Seth should be decrying American carrier exclusivity contracts or the ridiculously low standards to which our wireless carriers are held. But Seth won’t do that, because he’s only here to humanize AT&T, to explain away our woes, and to get us to really feel for a company that can’t provide what consumers are paying for.
The worst part of this video is that people are going to gobble up this bullshit and regurgitate it to all of their friends. Even reputable news sources, sources that should know better, are blaming the iPhone for strangling AT&T networks, like AT&T just watched as Apple muscled its way onto the carrier’s network and starting eating up bandwidth. Let’s not forget, people, that AT&T helped orchestrate this thing. The fact that they weren’t and still aren’t prepared to handle the network load is no one’s fault but their own.
Every time I read an article lauding the giant sums wireless carriers spend to upgrade their networks I want to vomit. These companies aren’t dying. They aren’t struggling. A lot of them are growing as much as 5% year over year in the face a recession. That’s not exactly the profile of a company I can feel sorry for.
As consumers we need to stop believing this trash. Stop listening when AT&T says it’s “working on it,” and instead continue to write letters. Continue to lodge complaints. Hell, continue filling lawsuits for breach of contract on the part of AT&T. Videos like this are doing nothing more than telling you to accept shit service lying down because there’s nothing to be done about it. There is, we just aren’t loud enough to make AT&T pay for it yet.
You may have seen ads for the Dish Network claiming its DVR service is actually “better than TiVo.” What you may not know is that they’ve been ordered to stop selling their DVR service after losing a patent struggle with the very company they claim to be better than. As a result, a judge has ordered Dish to pay TiVo a sum of $200 million as punishment.
About $110 million of that punishment actually accounts for profits Dish reaped as a result of patent infringement. The other $90 million is the slap on the wrist. Dish has already paid out nearly $193 million for previous infringement, bringing the grand total of damages to nearly $400 million. Dish says it plans to appeal this most recent ruling.
As you probably know, TiVo really needs the money. A few years ago it had been essentially left for dead. TiVo reported its first profitable year in some time early this year, but that was largely due to a few new contracts and some big lawsuit money from EchoStar. This win for Dish would keep the company healthily in the black, but as more viewers take advantage of web content, we’ll likely see TiVo struggling in the near future.
