iPhone Details: 5 Years on AT&T, Verizon's Answer?

[jklps]

Only one carrier in my area works while down in the subway system(Verizon)..

I don't love their phones(getting a little better) or their customer service(I only order new phones online that are shipped to me) but being able to use them on the subway plus in-network with nearly everyone I know having Verizon(plus, equally important, unlimited text messages)..

I think I'm just gonna get a phone that's a phone..ie to make calls.

And seriously, I don't want to walk around with an item that could be this delicate...at times, uh, I walk under the influence,..so I beat up my phone a bit and get a new one every two years...I would just care too much about the iPhone.

Any flash based mp3 player doesn't interest me personally that much..I want the 100gb iPod.

That all being said, I'll gladly check out any iPhones that my friends get to see it and marvel at it..just don't like the price/storage size and do not want to be that careful with my phone.

 

[xfiftyfour]

Sucks that I won't be able to get my deposit for 30 days after, but its a $1000 deposit.

And I thought our $200 deposit sucked.

 

[kamiboy]

Given Apple's cultlike following, however, Verizon isn't taking any chances. Strigl says Verizon is already working with a manufacturer — he declines to say which one — on an answer to the iPhone.

The copy products never succeed, never have never will. The phone manufacturers had 10+ years to develop something as attractive as the iPhone, but they were too clueless to get it. Instead they flooded the market by just squeezing out one mediocre device after the other sporting only marginal improvements. After I saw the Keynote by Jobs I can't look at other phones the same way again, they all look and feel like children's toys to me.

 

[DavidLeblond]

So, you can't read, either? And, while it is not the latest data, unless you want to be a cultist anti-mac person and split already split hairs, these numbers are reasonable. Yeah??

Did you actually READ my post? Try reading it before you decide to post something snarky, you'll avoid making yourself look like an idiot.

I'm not anti-mac, far from it. I even said in my post that I hated Verizon, so I'm not even pro-Verizon. Of course, you didn't read my post so you wouldn't know that.

 

[notsofatjames]

5 years is an awfully long time, especially in a market that moves as fast as the cell phone market! It sounds like AT+T have got a good deal on this, as long as the iPhone is as successful as the iPod

 

[Sweetfeld28]

My contract has been up for months. I am just waiting for the iPhone to get to stores so i can play with it. Then i will determine if i want to blow $500 on a phone or not.

I honestly have had Verizon since high school, and have had excellent service any where i have gone. However, i do have a coup-le of friends that have had Cingular in my area, and they claim that they have had alright service.

I just hope that if i do throw down for an iPhone, i will have good service. This is why i am so going to use those 7, or 14, Trial Days from Cinular before i fully jump ship from Verizon.

 

[yzp]

they better never got it to CDMA...... it aint 31337!

also, I guess moto or nokia is working on a phone which will try to be as h0t as the 's

 

[jettredmont]

Mmmm.... "Never use ATT because the service sucks." I guess that is why they tie for number one!

The assumed qualifier is "in my area". It is assumed in any and all conversations about cell phone service quality. It's why "least dropped calls" is meaningless, even if a respectable third party could give us a verdict.

I live in northern California. I have never, ever met a person happy with Cingular's coverage anywhere between the Golden Gate and Tahoe. As crappy as Verizon's interface-mangling is, their network works perfectly in at least 95% of the places I go, and passably well in all places I go. Cingular works barely-passably in the vast majority of places I go. How do I know? Because I pay attention to people when they lose their calls places, or are holding their phone out trying to "raise the bar" on the screen. They tend, by and large, to be Cingular customers (or RAZR owners ... yes, crappy phones get crappy reception too). And Cingular's market share in this area is significantly below Verizon's, so if it's a noticable majority of service failures that means that the percent of dissatisfied customers is huge relative to Verizon. Therefore, in my area, the AT&T service sucks. Period. Nothing is going to change about that until they buy more quality airwave bandwidth here (and who is going to sell that to them?) and start putting up towers in the slightly-remote areas.

I think that the "I won't use..." 'cause "such and such sucks" is pretty puerile. Anyway, no skin off Apple's or ATT's noses. They are going to have to gallop full speed right out of the gate. You don't have to be in the race, mates, the field is already crowded.

Yes, all great marketing ideas start off with excluding all hope of reaching huge portions of the market for an artificial five-year period. You're right.

The point is this: just purely from a service perspective, in different regions and sub-regions of the country there are clear winners and there are clear losers. My understanding is that if you look at the company who bought the first low-band licenses in an area then you'll et a pretty good idea of the best service providers (assuming tower saturation, certain bands provide better reception) ... I'm too lazy to look up the details again, but suffice to say: hereabouts that was Verizon (well, the company that was bought by the company that merged into the company that was renamed Verizon). Elsewhere doubtless it was Cingular.

While the phone companies "war" with each other and two companies share the majority of the US market, that's highly deceptive. For many customers, there really is no choice. It's not that we're not in the market yet. It's that the alternative sucks where we live, and there's just no changing that.

Tying itself to a single provider means that Apple will not compete in any meaningful way in huge swathes of the country, because that single provider covers probably about 75% of the country well enough to be competitive and already dominates in about 50% of the country.

In any case, as I said, the iPhone becomes officially dead to me if this statement is true. I don't know what phone I'll be buying in five years. I might be thinking about my "next" phone (in about six months probably) or vaguely about the one after that (2.5 years) ... but five years out? That's three or four phone replacement cycles (for me I suppose I could stretch it into the third in about four and a half years)! Why even think about it? It's dead.

So, like I said, I'm hopeful LG really can come up with something to blow Apple's iPhone away, and resigned to the fact that I won't be using the iPhone, ever (assuming that whatever is called an iPhone in five years will bear little significant resemblance to the iPhone of today).

 

[bigmc6000]

Umm.... No...

No CDMA version for 5 years? That pretty much discounts me getting an iPhone for 5 years. GSM is garbage in this country, anyone living in a city will tell you that. Ya know, areas with buildings where the GSM reception drops my an order of magnitude when you step inside? Yeah.

In my office building (over a mile long massive structure) Cingular (AT&T) is the ONLY company that gets service inside the walls (a full 5 bars). I had Verizon and I got nothing, T-Mobile gets nothing, Sprint gets nothing, you get my point.

Come up with a legitimate complaint - not just because the tower near your office is a long @ss way away.

 

[johnee]

seriously, at $500, i don't see this being a very big deal. i'm glad verizon passed on apple. apple is pain to work with.

no matter what happens, at&t will get screwed in the deal and apple will get all the money.

 

[johnee]

In my office building (over a mile long massive structure) Cingular (AT&T) is the ONLY company that gets service inside the walls (a full 5 bars). I had Verizon and I got nothing, T-Mobile gets nothing, Sprint gets nothing, you get my point.

Come up with a legitimate complaint - not just because the tower near your office is a long @ss way away.

that's cause at&t has a tower close by. your phone isn't setup to use any available service or you would be paying lots of money to get high signal strength.

 

[DavidLeblond]

So, like I said, I'm hopeful LG really can come up with something to blow Apple's iPhone away, and resigned to the fact that I won't be using the iPhone, ever (assuming that whatever is called an iPhone in five years will bear little significant resemblance to the iPhone of today).

Verizon also needs to drop that slow, ugly, useless universal interface too. GOD do I hate that thing.

 

[slffl]

If you don't think there is a cultlike following to Apple products, then you are VERY dense.

Ok Mr. Know-It-All, how about you back up your unfounded statement? I would just LOVE to hear your reason(s).

 

[SiliconAddict]

What basically means I won't be owning an iPhone anywhere in the near future. Way to hang yourself Apple

 

[jettredmont]

Verizon also needs to drop that slow, ugly, useless universal interface too. GOD do I hate that thing.

Absolutely agree. Although it's not a big deal on my Treo (the only input from Verizon is the network connect and disconnect logo), the Verizon UI is a horrid mess on my wife's phone.

Still, an ugly/non-intuitive UI I can live with a lot easier than a lack of service.

 

[xfiftyfour]

Ok Mr. Know-It-All, how about you back up your unfounded statement? I would just LOVE to hear your reason(s).

Read the thread. I already did.

kthxbye.

 

[SiliconAddict]

Ok Mr. Know-It-All, how about you back up your unfounded statement? I would just LOVE to hear your reason(s).

You are kidding right? When you have people posting pictures of unboxing ceremonies....Seriously dude. Dense as a neutron star.

 

[bigmc6000]

Missed the point

that's cause at&t has a tower close by. your phone isn't setup to use any available service or you would be paying lots of money to get high signal strength.

The argument as presented was that GSM doesn't go through walls and CDMA does. I got 4 bars the second I walked outside my office building when I had Verizon. With Cingular I ALWAYS get 5 bars. I was just pointing out the fallacy involved in saying CDMA goes through walls on big buildings and GSM doesn't.

Just takes one fact to prove a theory false

 

[johnee]

What basically means I won't be owning an iPhone anywhere in the near future. Way to hang yourself Apple

not true. apple will make money hand over fist on the phone AND contracts AND rebates from at&t. I guarantee it.

at&t will be the loser here, that's why verizon passed it up, cause they saw it would hurt them in the long run.

 

[DavidLeblond]

Still, an ugly/non-intuitive UI I can live with a lot easier than a lack of service.

Yeah... my contract is up next year but I may have to stick with them simply because I'm told Cingular isn't that hot in our area.

*sigh*

 

[mhouse]

Seriously?

Given there's no way in HELL that I'm going to use AT&T, I think the term is "resigned" and "hopeful". Hopefully Verizon's answer is better than what's out there.

With this news, the iPhone is officially dead to me. There's no way I'm signing up with AT&T, both from past corporate practices and from current network suckage.

IMHO, this is a major mis-step from Apple. I hope it is being mis-reported. But, barring that, I hope the iPhone at least inspires someone to build a better phone and offer it in conjunction with a less disgusting service provider.

What in the world did AT&T possibly do? I cannot, for the life of me, see any significant difference among the carriers.

 

[mick4394]

The assumed qualifier is "in my area". It is assumed in any and all conversations about cell phone service quality. It's why "least dropped calls" is meaningless, even if a respectable third party could give us a verdict.

I live in northern California. I have never, ever met a person happy with Cingular's coverage anywhere between the Golden Gate and Tahoe. As crappy as Verizon's interface-mangling is, their network works perfectly in at least 95% of the places I go, and passably well in all places I go. Cingular works barely-passably in the vast majority of places I go. How do I know? Because I pay attention to people when they lose their calls places, or are holding their phone out trying to "raise the bar" on the screen. They tend, by and large, to be Cingular customers (or RAZR owners ... yes, crappy phones get crappy reception too). And Cingular's market share in this area is significantly below Verizon's, so if it's a noticable majority of service failures that means that the percent of dissatisfied customers is huge relative to Verizon. Therefore, in my area, the AT&T service sucks. Period. Nothing is going to change about that until they buy more quality airwave bandwidth here (and who is going to sell that to them?) and start putting up towers in the slightly-remote areas.



Yes, all great marketing ideas start off with excluding all hope of reaching huge portions of the market for an artificial five-year period. You're right.

The point is this: just purely from a service perspective, in different regions and sub-regions of the country there are clear winners and there are clear losers. My understanding is that if you look at the company who bought the first low-band licenses in an area then you'll et a pretty good idea of the best service providers (assuming tower saturation, certain bands provide better reception) ... I'm too lazy to look up the details again, but suffice to say: hereabouts that was Verizon (well, the company that was bought by the company that merged into the company that was renamed Verizon). Elsewhere doubtless it was Cingular.

While the phone companies "war" with each other and two companies share the majority of the US market, that's highly deceptive. For many customers, there really is no choice. It's not that we're not in the market yet. It's that the alternative sucks where we live, and there's just no changing that.

Tying itself to a single provider means that Apple will not compete in any meaningful way in huge swathes of the country, because that single provider covers probably about 75% of the country well enough to be competitive and already dominates in about 50% of the country.

In any case, as I said, the iPhone becomes officially dead to me if this statement is true. I don't know what phone I'll be buying in five years. I might be thinking about my "next" phone (in about six months probably) or vaguely about the one after that (2.5 years) ... but five years out? That's three or four phone replacement cycles (for me I suppose I could stretch it into the third in about four and a half years)! Why even think about it? It's dead.

So, like I said, I'm hopeful LG really can come up with something to blow Apple's iPhone away, and resigned to the fact that I won't be using the iPhone, ever (assuming that whatever is called an iPhone in five years will bear little significant resemblance to the iPhone of today).

I couldn't have stated this better. Millions of us are in this exact situation.

Cingular, simply, is not an option in my area. I'll change my mind when I can consistently understand conversations with my GSM friends.

 

[slffl]

Why would I be such a long-term member of a Mac forum if I was anti-mac?

And I'm sorry, but although I agree that Apple is often at the top, there IS a cult-like following.. oftentimes MANY (myself included) excuse Apple's shortcomings "just cause".. we find ourselves excusing blatant mistakes or oversights, where we would normally accost another.

Take, for example, the QC problems of the MB, the RAM and HD prices via Apple (even moreso in the past), the lack of a fuller lineup, the cost of their displays, the cost versus specs of the mini, the Leopard delay (Vista, what?)... it goes on and on. Every company has these, but somehow Apple's followers (again, myself included), overlook these and just accept them - and just continue tying ourselves to our computers and looking for rumors about what's around the next corner.

It's cult-like.. and has ALWAYS been a factor of Apple.

Wow. Still, absolutely nothing to backup that most/all mac users are 'cult-like'.

Someone else mentioned unboxing pictures. Are you serious? People take pictures with their cars after they buy them all the time. Are Dodge drivers considered 'cult-like'.

There are 'fanboys' of every brand. Why is it that mac users are 'cult-like' while Sony or Windows users are just 'fanboys'. There's no good reason to use 'cult-like' other than that's what you heard through the media.

 

[jettredmont]

In my office building (over a mile long massive structure) Cingular (AT&T) is the ONLY company that gets service inside the walls (a full 5 bars). I had Verizon and I got nothing, T-Mobile gets nothing, Sprint gets nothing, you get my point.

Come up with a legitimate complaint - not just because the tower near your office is a long @ss way away.

IMHO, that's the most legitimate complaint. This guy isn't going to be changing offices to your building next week (most likely). If he can't get coverage where he lives, where he works, and a significant portion of the journey between, then that provider is not a valid alternative for him.

They say all politics is local: in the cell phone industry the #1 rule is that all service is local. Either you get a signal or you don't. It doesn't matter that someone in Pennsylvania gets a great signal.

Note that given your anecdote I'd bet that Cingular has repeaters inside the building. "Five bars" through a mile of concrete walls ... improbable to occur naturally. Of course, "five bars" is a rather meaningless indicator too ...

 

[docpsycho]

And I'm still not exited.........

Ain't drinking this cool aid.

ANd for all you newbbage types... I've been on apple products when Super Steve was in the house. Wozinator ][+ 48k. all you is latecoming hacks