I'm having some dejavu here, because I remember being a Cellularone customer back in the day when AT&T wireless bought them out (at least, where we were).
Then AT&*T became cingular and we signed up with them after a short while. To be completely honest, I couldn't stand Cingular because when I signed up, they gave me a 1 year contract - a day later when my bro signed up, we told them we wanted the same thing, they lied and gave him a 2 year contract.
He ended up using my phone because his POS nokia crapped out just as the contract ended.
I've had nothing but $H!TTY experiences with SBC/Cingular and don't really expect anything better out of them these days, thus I can't believe Apple sided with them over something so **** stupid as visual email. You know, my VoIP service (sunrocket) has "Visual Voicemail" - and Vonage had it 2 years ago. WTF is so amazing about Visual Voicemail when it has, and was already being done long ago that only AT&T can do it, and thus we should be pleased at the "privilege" of paying $500 for a phone, and then getting tied to a 2 year commitment that adds up to $1600?
That's about $2100 for 2 years of iPhone. Granted, the other companies also charge $30 a month for internet, the one I'm at includes free wifi hotspot coverage (something AT&T should've had the balls to do). If you don't think AT&T is rolling in the big ones (even with Apple's "unfair" deal according to Verizon), let's just mention that up until about a year ago, AT&T would pay retailers about $500 in subsidies to sell a 2 year contract, and only a little less than that for a 1 year contract. Yes, I'm probably wrong in the numbers by about $50, but I recall it being such an insane amount, that if you talked with a retailer nicely enough, the manager would give you a huuuge discount.
Recently, it dropped to about $250/$350 IIRC. The point being, AT&T can afford to do that, and then still make insane amounts of money.
Then AT&*T became cingular and we signed up with them after a short while. To be completely honest, I couldn't stand Cingular because when I signed up, they gave me a 1 year contract - a day later when my bro signed up, we told them we wanted the same thing, they lied and gave him a 2 year contract.
He ended up using my phone because his POS nokia crapped out just as the contract ended.
I've had nothing but $H!TTY experiences with SBC/Cingular and don't really expect anything better out of them these days, thus I can't believe Apple sided with them over something so **** stupid as visual email. You know, my VoIP service (sunrocket) has "Visual Voicemail" - and Vonage had it 2 years ago. WTF is so amazing about Visual Voicemail when it has, and was already being done long ago that only AT&T can do it, and thus we should be pleased at the "privilege" of paying $500 for a phone, and then getting tied to a 2 year commitment that adds up to $1600?
That's about $2100 for 2 years of iPhone. Granted, the other companies also charge $30 a month for internet, the one I'm at includes free wifi hotspot coverage (something AT&T should've had the balls to do). If you don't think AT&T is rolling in the big ones (even with Apple's "unfair" deal according to Verizon), let's just mention that up until about a year ago, AT&T would pay retailers about $500 in subsidies to sell a 2 year contract, and only a little less than that for a 1 year contract. Yes, I'm probably wrong in the numbers by about $50, but I recall it being such an insane amount, that if you talked with a retailer nicely enough, the manager would give you a huuuge discount.
Recently, it dropped to about $250/$350 IIRC. The point being, AT&T can afford to do that, and then still make insane amounts of money.
