Back in August AT&T sent out a customer satisfaction survey to all iPhone owners. Well now it seems a new survey is being sent out to all of us on the AT&T network asking how the 2.1 firmware is working for us and what we want to see next on your iPhone 3G.
Now don’t get too excited yet! Just because they are asking what we want does not necessarily mean we will get it. Keep in mind Apple has stated before that certain features such as copy/paste and directional GPS take a back seat to other issues that need addressing so on and so forth. But it is better than AT&T and Apple flat out ignoring us right? So at least it is a start.
Apple Insider states:
The questionnaire asks owners to pick the top five hardware or software add-ons they’d like to see and include many of the most prominent requests made in the community, including cutting and pasting text, built-in instant messaging, Flash/Java support and MMS messaging.
So when and if you get this survey, be sure to speak your mind and let AT&T what know what you want. This is our chance… they seem to be listening. (Or at least they are pretending to be!)
No offense to any Wal Mart shoppers out there, but please Apple, say this is not so. The Radio Shack scare was bad enough, now you are threatening to bring the iPhone 3G to Walmart?
iPhone lovers really dodged a bullet when the Radio Shack deal fell apart but now Boy Genius is reporting that you will start seeing the Apple product in all Walmart stores as early as next month.
“Walmart will begin selling the iPhone 3G next month – on November 15th to be exact”.
Keep in mind that this is just in time for the holiday shopping season. I’m not even sure Walmart sells any cell phones, but the last place I’d go to buy my Palm Treo Pro, iPhone 3G, or Touch HD — wishful thinking I know — is Wal Mart! Also keep in mind you can not walk out of a store without activating the iPhone 3G. How comfortable would you be letting a Walmart employee handle your prized possession?
Let me first start off by quoting the iPhone-dev Team:
Disclaimer!! This is a purely technical post with no pragmatic use!
Sadly you will not read that they have unlocked the iPhone 3G. They have posted a few updates over the past few months giving us some idea of what is going on with the 3G unlock. It seems they have hit a snag while trying to use a specific exploit. They were able to get the baseband to stop responding to the OS. They then tried to restore the device multiple times to no avail.
Without getting too technical, they were able to fix the issue and even tried to reproduce the issue but had no luck. Reproducing this error would have been a Good Thing and possibly would have gotten the Dev Team one step closer to unlocking the 3G. So, “two steps forward, one step back”.
For all of the technical jargon please check out this the Dev Teams Blog. Good thing is, we all know the iPhone Dev-Team is still hard at work for all of you looking to use your iPhone 3G on a carrier besides AT&T. Have faith, it should only be a matter of time.
A few weeks back we mentioned a little blurb about 4G and when we may start to see it. Even though AT&T announced its decision to deploy Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology for its 4G network, they are confident they can get more life from their 3G network by tweaking it, and in doing so give them more time to perfect their future network. (I know what you are thinking… maybe they should have taken more time to perfect their current network!)
Yesterday at the 4G Executive Summit in Chicago, AT&T’s VP of Architecture Hank Kafka spoke out and put to rest any perceived urgency on the part of the carrier to push out a 4G network saying:
The introduction of the 3G iPhone at AT&T Mobility has made a huge impact in showing people how to use handsets to connect to the Internet, but it’s just the beginning of wireless broadband. Now we’re on the verge of that creativity being unleashed.
Kafka said he’d be surprised if LTE wasn’t available “within five years”. And within those 5 years, AT&T “has a lot of runway left with HSPA and HSPA-plus.” We can only hope.
So please, I beg of you, unleash that creativity on us all. I’m sure we are all ready for it.
If this is not bizarre, I don’t know what is. Customers looking to purchase a iPhone 3G in China will soon be able to do so. Just a little catch though, minus the 3G and toss in the omission of WiFi.
China Mobile does not have a 3G network so I understand them asking Apple to disable 3G but going a step further asking to disabling WiFi as well?! That leaves all of the owners of the iPhone 3G (don’t forget to take away that 3G) with a slow 2G data connection. China Mobile might as well sell the iPhone 3G as a very nice paperweight to all of their customers. Exactly why China Mobile would disable WiFi is way beyond me.
Apple ships the iPhone all over the world, so it is highly doubtful that a hardware change would be made simply for China Mobile. So how would these features be disabled? Software… Which means potential customers could still turn to hackers to gain back access to at least WiFi. It would only be a matter of time…
Yesterday at Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia XVII conference, AT&T’s chief technical officer John Donovan stated that iPhone 3G users have used much less data on the network than expected.
No explanation was given, but aren’t the reasons pretty obvious? All of the connection issues along with 3G reverting over to the Edge network is what I’m guessing. Donovan later went on to say that the iPhone’s 3g data usage is still “relatively higher than any other phone on the network”. He also went so far as to downplay that AT&T just may have underestimated the network demand following the iPhone 3G launch on July 11th. He did say that improvements made since then were all planned to help meet the anticipated demand. Sorry folks, I’m not buying that one. How about you?
The last good bit of information came regarding AT&T’s plans for 4G: it’s coming and testing will begin sometime in “2010″ with the service following soon there after. AT&T will be not be the first to toy with 4G but rather “leave early adoption to other companies”. (Namely Verizon who has slated launch of their 4G network the same year.)
A few weeks back Rene reported that starting September 7th Best Buy would be selling the iPhone 3g. Well that day is rapidly approaching and look what has landed on the cover of next weeks Best Buy’s circular.
AppleInsider reports that Best Buy is having a promotion for customers who purchase one of four accessory packages. Packages start at $106 all the way up to $234. What great deal have they cooked up for you? Free phone and email setup! As Rene would say… ZOMG! Last time I checked, this is something that any Apple store will do for you for free.
Come on Best Buy, surely you can do a better than that?
Engadget, BGR, and reader reports all confirm: AT&T is having a serious data outage in the east. We just received a confirmation from Derek (Hi Derek, we hope you’re not trying to read us over 3G or EDGE!) that it’s out in Washington, DC. Other folks from St. Louis to New York are getting the same. AT&T is on it, though:
Location: NorthEast ;All Markets
Elements: 2G and 3G Iphones, as well as other data devices
Start Time: 09-03-2008 07:00 Eastern
Issue / Impact: Data Customers Cannot Send or Receive To and From Mobile
Customer Symptom: Data customers may experience slowness or latency in accessing web sites or transferring of data files or making business transactions due to outage.
ETTR: TBD
Status: Open
Issue & Customer Impact: All Data applications are experience connectivity issues in the NE region. This issue is impacting GSM and UMTS Iphone customers as well as other devices. Voice services are not impacted.
So how about it — is your iPhone suddenly a very fancy looking iPod Touch that can also make the occasional call?
Here’s the backstory to what you’re looking at, above: Mobile Computing posted up a video showing that the iPhone 3G obliterated the BlackBerry Bold in a download & render test of web browsers (We just covered this, oh, hours ago). Fun stuff, except as our friends at CrackBerry noted (and MC added too) – it wasn’t a fair fight. The Bold probably wasn’t actually using WiFi and also most of the Bolds out there have pre-release ROMS on them, so the finals might be a stitch faster.
So a loyal CB reader pitched in and posted a video of the Bold loading the same page again, but this time actually using WiFi, it came in a little bit faster.
At TiPb, though, we figured it still looked slow. But since the Bold probably had a pre-release OS on it, we figured we’d hobble the iPhone 3G as well. So above, Loyal Moderator Bad Ash pits the BlackBerry Bold on WiFi against the iPhone 3G on EDGE.
Yeah, it’s closer, but we’re still ahead by 4 seconds or so. Tie the iPhone 3G’s WiFi hand behind its back, fine. Tie it’s 3G hand back there too, fine. The iPhone 3G still seems to win out — and we look forward to being able to say that about the final Bold ROM too. Hey — you guys still have (slightly) more reliable push email, so there’s that.
Have you run into any 3G connection issues? Do you notice a slower tick than expected with your iPhone 3G? Well, take a part in Wired.com’s global study so you can see if your iPhone is the slowest horse in the race or if it’s just your area. Just point your iPhone Safari browser to TestMyiPhone.com and start a download and upload test and remember your location to import into Wired.com’s interactive ZeeMap.
Maybe all this data won’t amount to anything but it sure is cool to see how blazing fast 3G is in different parts of the world. Also, it serves as good reference to see if your iPhone 3G is part of the unlucky 2%. Click the Read Link for more info.
