All Articles Tagged AT&T

Apple’s fiscal fourth quarter ended in September, and the bean counters in every investment firm are hard at work following the money trail, speculating on Apple’s quarterly results. Bear Stearn analyst Andrew Neff, the man most well known for his crazy but prophetic predictions about the implosion and consolidation of the PC industry, believes that iPhone could be the start of something big. He tells investors that while deferred profit sharing with AT&T won’t have an immediate impact on Apple’s bottom line, he sees iPhone being a money machine, driving profits. Doesn’t it warm your heart to read those words?

Of course, what really drove profits this quarter were the purchase of two iPhones by one Kent Pribbernow. Yeah, don’t think I won’t be wanting stock options in return Apple. It’s time I start seeing some greenbacks. Capiche?

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In case you were living under a Palm tree today, AT&T is airing three new ads on the tubes (TV tubes, not internet tubes). The ads depict three common plebes burbling on about how iPhone impacts their life, in various real-life situations. Perhaps the meaning of these spots are lost upon me, or maybe I’m still hungover from that bottle of Cotes du Rhone I downed Saturday night, but I’m not moved or engaged by what I see. iPhone is only vaguely referenced, and done so in a very casual way. The characters lack depth, and serve as typical uninspiring stereotypes aimed at demographics; a businessman, an average “young guy” (or wuss if you will), and a rough cut tattooed mechanic designed to appeal to car thieves working in a chop shops. Yeah, they’re going to move truckloads of iPhones with these ads. I can feel it.

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The New York Times has a neat article on third party applications and how the iPhone is currently the only device on AT&T’s network that doesn’t support them. The article has some good things to say about Palm too, which I always welcome. The big gist of it is how Jobs’ quote from a January Newsweek interview doesn’t jive with reality:

“You don’t want your phone to be an open platform… You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”

Whereas the reality of the situation is that Cingular/ATT welcomed development on every single other phone they had on their network, whether it be Java/J2ME, PalmOS development, Windows Development, or Flash Lite / whatever. This is backed up by Mark Bercow, Senior VP of Development at Palm. Talk about your David vs. Goliath situations here; I feel like Steve Jobs’ famous reality distortion field just failed for a second or something. But, there’s another quote that the Times dug up that I’d forgotten about from his video conversation with Walt Mossberg at the All Things D conference in July:

“This is a very important trade-off between security and openness. We want both. We’ve got good ideas, and sometime later this year, we can open it up to third-party apps, and keep security.”

The more I think about this quote, the more I think he’s talking about widgets here. You only really have to worry about a widget’s security if there’s a browser bug or exploit, and HTML/CSS/AJAX is definitely open. He probably doesn’t want to open up a full native SDK until the software and hardware platforms are stable and proven, much like he did with the original Mac series. That is, if he wants a full native SDK available to the public at all.

There are a few other interesting tidbits from the article that I can’t help but mention:

1. Two-thirds of Treo owners have purchased 3rd party apps
2. Ten percent of Treo owners have purchased 10 or more 3rd party apps
3. AT&T has a website to get developers on all of their development platforms except the iPhone.

The honeymoon is over between AT&T and Apple, or at least the romance has gone. Today the wireless carrier takes the wraps off its new flagship smartphone product for business and pro customers; the AT&T Tilt . Better known to the world as the HTC TyTn II. Now granted, carrier branded Windows Mobile smartphones are nothing new, and AT&T has offered these johnny come lately devices since before the name changed from Cingular. What makes this product unique is the promotion and positioning it’s receiving. Noticeably absent from AT&T’s website is any reference to iPhone. I searched high and low and uncovered only one mention of iPhone, obscurely located in a section called “Learn.” Perhaps the partnership between the two companies isn’t as strong as we might think, eh?

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AT&T has modified their Terms of Service to bar their customers from griping. Their new terms of service now includes language that states they can terminate your connection for doing things that “tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries.” An important distinction: the threat gag is just for the DSL portion of AT&T, aka BellSouth.

I don’t expect it to work; actually, I expect it to backfire. Case in point, I’m going to slur the name of AT&T in this very sentence when I would not have otherwise:

the halls of AT&T are nothing more than a powder room for dandies, johnny-come-latelies and fops; the same is equally true if not more so for AT&T’s parents, affiliates, and subsidiaries.

According to an exclusive by macapper.com, picture messaging and AIM could be in the works with the so-close-you-could-stab-it 1.1.1 update. I’ll grant that it could just as easily be a screw-up by AT&T, or maybe he’s got his iPhone on some non-iPhone plan and just temporarily forgot about it. Maybe, though, it’s the real deal. You never know.

What is up with you, AT&T? Seriously, are you singling me out for some reason? Am I a special needs case? Didn’t you announce to myself and the rest of the world that you would put an end to unnecessary paper carnage for iPhone data billing? More importantly, didn’t I already disable printed invoicing in my account profile…months ago? So why do you do me like this?

I go to my mailbox and discover that you’ve sent me, again, not one…but TWO impregnated billing envelopes, packed with over 60 pages of invoices, like two overstuffed burritos. This makes the third consecutive month that you’ve sent me these love packs by mail. What have I done to deserve this? Have I not paid my bill, loyally, on time each month? Enough is enough. You’re starting to creep me out, as though you are stalking me. I can almost feel Stan Sigman standing outside my window, holding his cue cards.

While browsing today I found Dobson’s coverage map. Dobson is the wireless company that AT&T is in the process of gobbling up. It’s not a huge network, but it’s enough to make Dobson #9 or so in the US. As you see above, it will at least bring a bunch of coverage to Alaska, Kentucky, West Virginia, the Texas Panhandle region, and the Great Lakes region. If you want to check out the overlaps in coverage for yourself, here’s AT&T’s coverage map.

figures 1 & 2: some iPhone backgrounds that relate to bricks or bricking.

So a bunch of display iPhones were stolen. Not really news; they took the Treos too (good call on that). The AT&T store guy is unconcerned that the iPhones were stolen, since Apple can brick (deactivate, render useless, turn into a heavy shiny thing, etc) the phones remotely by their serials.

Wait, what?! I can’t decide if I should be discomfited by this or not. I wonder if he’s posturing for AT&T’s sake, or if this is something that Apple can really do.

But for real, if Apple can do this to stolen phones, they can do it to hacked or unlocked phones. Again, that’s if they can do this at all. Or should I perhaps say, if they’re willing to do this at all. Bricking phones willy-nilly across the internet would burn through a lot of the goodwill that they currently enjoy, so I doubt it would happen. Maybe the remote bricking process requires AT&T to ask Apple to destroy the phones really nice. So yeah. No discomfiture.

On the internet, no one can hear your bluff. A blog claims to be offering a $100,000 reward to anyone who can produce a free software unlock solution for iPhone, and deliver it by the chimes of midnight tonight. Of course, no information whatsoever is given to back the legitimacy of this claim, such as who its underwriters are so I’d wager this cash payment is coming from someone’s HP deskjet printer. Nothing more than a single email address is available for correspondence, which doesn’t instill confidence.

My favorite quote from the site, which gives good insight into the minds behind this project…

Me and my friends are very involved in the open source community and yet everybody who worked on IRC, now is concerned about getting paid and charging everybody for an unlock software. I can’t believe it, it’s like Linus Torvalds would start charging for compiling the kernel.

Imagine that…expecting payment for your work and talent. Why, it almost sounds like Capitalism!

Yeah, these are a bunch of kids.

I’ll make a counter offer for anyone who can produce such a solution; one shiny wooden nickel. Any takers?

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