All Articles Tagged AT&T

figure 1: Another iPhone Commercial Spoof. Are you sick of that music yet?

The AT&T stories, they just keep on coming. I’m starting to feel like I’m the only person that doesn’t have a 50 page bill or a $2000+ phone bill from flouncing off to Europe or some other similarly nice jaunt. First, there’s a person with a 50 page bill, and it shows up in a big envelope. Then, there’s the person with the box and the 300 page bill. The next “big bill” story will be that some dude has a 1200 page bill and AT&T will have shipped it C.O.D. in a metal fire-proof lead-lined safe.

But before we get to that point, we have to cross this point. The current bill-record-holding iPhone-commercial-spoofing guyflounced off to Europe and his bill was only $4,000. Nothing serious, you know. Pocket change. There’s a happy ending; the guy was able to talk them down to $900. I mean happy in the figurative sense, here. Also, he was able to funnel his despair into an iPhone commercial spoof, so I guess that’s a plus.

So, this link is for that guy the next time he flounces off anywhere for a jaunt, or anyone who doesn’t want to be like that guy: iPhoneAtlas has a step-by-step guide for guiding AT&T into disabling GPRS for your plan. Best of luck to you, you may want to buy an AT&T store employee a drink or soda or something to get them to do it for you. Oh, and you may want to test it while you’re still in the States.

So, AT&T employees couldn’t get a discount if they wanted to purchase the iPhone. Which is cruddy; let’s face it. I just know that some AT&T employees have been wanting to get an iPhone so they don’t have to wade through all of the complex plans, trying to figure out how many text messages they get, how many minutes, and they have to do it at an AT&T store. Is there anything worse than that? Well, AT&T now offers a 10% discount on the iPhone. It’s not as good as Apple’s discount: you work there for a year, you get one free. But hey, it’s a start. I’d rather have $50 or $60 than a punch in the face.

It should be said that those same AT&T employees can double that 10% savings by going the refurb route: $100 off (both versions). I mean, wasn’t even used for 2 months, right?

Over the weekend I received my AT&T bill in the mail - both of them. Huh…TWO envelopes? Rather than the usual slim parcel containing a handful of billing statements, I received two overstuffed packets filled with nearly sixty pages, detailing every minutia of data. While this is still a far cry from Justine Ezarik’s infamous 300 page AT&T bill, it still exceeds the boundaries of reason and is horrific waste of tree.

Somewhere in the world, birds and squirrels were made homeless to provide me with this worthless example of excess. AT&T promises to cut down on the paper trail, but I have my own solution - online billing. I pay my cell phone bill online, and have for several years now. Why AT&T feels compelled to bless me with redundant paper invoices is beyond me.

Join AT&T, kill a tree.

figure 1: the Mouth of AT&T. Note that Bill Spiegel, spokesperson for AT&T, may not look like this in real life. And the tower may or may not be a reasonable facsimile of AT&T HQ.

The Mouth of Sauron, uh, AT&T (his name is Bill Spiegel; I think he went uncredited in the movies), had the following to say about long bill complaints:

“We can always give people a summary bill. It’s little more than what you owe this month. And there’s always the online option, too, which means you never get a paper bill.”

I wasn’t aware that there was a summary option available. And this guy, he makes it sound so reasonable. I’m not really mad about their billing, but my bill is eensy-weensy: most of the data that I burn through is through wi-fi.

What are you doing, Dave?

I think we should talk this over before you do something rash.

Why don’t you take a stress pill and we can sit down and talk about it.

Dave?

You can begin popping corks off Champaign bottles and dance through the streets in your underpants. This is the moment that many folks have waited for.

In case you’ve been living under a rock this morning the internet is aflutter with news that iPhone has now finally unlocked, using an $80 tool called Turbo SIM card.

The feat is said to be 100% effective, meaning that it unlocks all of iPhones features and functions, allowing users to make and receive calls, SMS, access GPRS readio (data), browse the web, send email, download porn, over any GSM network. Viola!

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Justine Ezarik from Tasty Blog Snack got an unexpected surprise in the mail today - her first phone bill from AT&T, after purchasing an iPhone and switching carriers. Nothing unusual about that, except that it arrived in a box (that would be my first clue that something terribly wrong had occurred at AT&T’s billing department), not an envelope, and…oh yeah…it’s 300 freaking pages long!

AT&T apologized sincerely for this error, and promised that in future all iPhone bills will arrive in carefully packed boxes stacked on wooden palettes, delivered by forklift to your front door for your convenience.

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Haha, just kidding, iSuppli. Actually, it was more like… hmmm, what’s $26 million (cost of iPhone development) divided by 270,000 (# of iPhone units sold). Carry the… Hmmm, $96.30! Software as a $7 line item, indeed. And of course, that’s just the software R&D. There’s many other iPhone-related info from Apple’s 10-Q.

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File this under “Too good to be true”, but one commenter and two other people emailing me claim that AT&T salespeople unlocked their iPhones after canceling service. Sound credible to you? Me neither. But according to a user named RAJ…

2 OF MY FRIENDS HAD THE CONTRACT WITH AT&T. THEY TOOK IT ON 29 JUNE WHEN I-PHONE WAS LAUNCHED, TODAY ON 1ST AUG JUST AFTER ONE MONTH OF THEIR CONTRACT THEY SIMPLY CANCELED THE CONTRACT BY PAYING EARLY CONTRACT TERMINATION FEES OF 175 ( ALTHOUGH THE FEES WAS ALSO WAIVED OFF FOR THEM FOR SOME REASON). THEN THE AT&T HAD UNLOCKED THEIR I-PHONES BY PUTTING SOME CODES. NOW THEY SAID THAT THEY CAN USE THEIR I-PHONE WITH ANY OTHER CARRIER TOO….

Now, this has to be true because it was typed in All-caps. Anything typed completely in uppercase characters must be taken seriously.

So there you have it. Whether this is true or not I cannot verify, so don’t shoot me - I’m just the messenger.

Dave Stolte had a nasty surprise in store for him, upon returning from a trip to Eurorpe (with his iPhone) - a $3,000 bill from AT&T. It seems David learned the hard way that AT&T does not offer international roaming with its iPhone data plans.

Two weeks of travel with sporadic AT&T EDGE network usage off and on mixed with wifi when available… $3000. Doing some research, I learned this morning that AT&T offers unlimited international data usage at $70 per month to its Blackberry customers. Here’s my bottom line: I want this same usage plan to be made available to iPhone customers and to be applied retroactively to my account.

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There’s a spate of stories (my favorite was from Om Malik) out there about the dip in AAPL stock, how analysts originally thought there were up to 700,000 activations, but AT&T’s Q3 earnings report indicated a different story, 146,000 activations that first weekend. The stock dipped quite a bit on this news, something like 8% at its peak, but I’m sure Piper Jaffray remains confident that Apple stock will hit $205. Anyway, one thing that I’ve realized from AT&T’s earnings report is that their 40% of iPhone activations that came from other carriers is in line with the 40% of non-AT&T subscribers on their iPhone email notification list.