I promise this isn’t going to be an iPhone blog, but since that’s all anyone wants to talk about, and everytime I load up my homepage I see at least 3 stories about that damn thing, I’m going to post about it again.

 Today’s Topic:

Why Possessed The People At Apple To Sign An Exclusive Deal With AT&T For It’s iPhone?

In my life I’ve had four different cell phone providers - Cellular One, Sprint, AT&T (Cingular at the time), and Alltel.  I liked three of them - hated one of them. 

Any guesses as to which one I hated to the point I broke contract?  You get a gold star if you guessed AT&T. 

 Where I live, despite that fact that their website says they have service in my area, the reality is that they have rather sparse coverage in the city.  In some parts of the city it works like a charm, and in others you get no coverage.  My home happens to be one of those places where you get not coverage. (I live in a city of over 200,000 people, so it’s not exactly like I live in the middle of nowhere.)

Depsite the fact that they have those commercials claming the fewest dropped calls, if you look at their track record in customer service you’ll find that they consistently rank at or near the bottom. 

So let’s go back to this iPhone deal, and Apple signing an exclusive deal with one of the worst cell phone companies - why?

Well, one of the reasons likely has to do with the fact that Apple was allowed to control the promotion of the phone and AT&T was to provide the service - a rather unique arrangement in the cell phone industry.

Another has to do with Apple’s Visual Voicemail system.  It probably wasn’t feasible to get all the carriers to work together and have the system work the way Apple wanted, so they had to go with one company who would work with Apple’s take on voicemail. 

But still, why AT&T.  I mean if you’re Apple and you have this hyper loyal crowd who will buy anything you produce simply because of your reputation for innovative and easy to use products, why would you go with a cell phone company that is pretty much the opposite - a lot of people *hate* AT&T, and trust me, they’re not a lot of fun to deal with.

Apple was smart, they made the process of getting a phone and signing up pretty easy.  You go to the store, buy one, go home and activate it through iTunes.  A great idea because you don’t have to sit in an AT&T store for half an hour while they get your phone setup - can you imagine the lines then if everyone had to wait - you’d be in line for days.  However, while Apple did their job, AT&T dropped the ball.  A lot of people are reporting that activiation is taking quite some time, up to 24 hours or more which is completely unreasonable since nothing on the phone, not even the music, will work until the phone is activated.

How I Plan To Surive Without The Latest Must Have Gadget

I’ve typically been an early adopter of cell phone technology - I got my first phone in 1996, this was before minutes were even included in plans (although at $9.95 a month I wasn’t complaining.)   When the first smartphones came out, I bought a Kyocera QCP-6065.  When the RAZR was released, I was instantly in love and had to get one.  But since as mentioned in my previous post, I don’t want an iPhone, what am I going to do?  And if you’re on one of the other cell phone networks that doesn’t support the iPhone, maybe you’ll do this too, but the RAZR 2 looks to be one hell of a phone, and it hasn’t forgotten the fact that it needs to function as a phone. 

And my carrier (Alltel) doesn’t cripple it’s bluetooth features like some others *cough* Verizon *cough*.  So that’s what I plan to do since my current RAZR is getting old and everyone and their brother has one.