All Articles Tagged AT&T

It looks like the unlocking service of UniquePhones.com is ready to unlock the iPhone, but AT&T lawyers have slowed down the process. Their unlocking service was supposed to have been available today; instead, all that is available at their iphoneunlocked.com site is an opportunity to give them your IMEI and your email, in what they call an invite.

It is now 12N EST – the time when we said we would be offering iphone unlocking software to our customers.

We have the software. It works. And we are ready to go.

Seems AT&T is a bit annoyed at the idea. A middle of the night phone call from a Silicon Valley law firm is slowing down the release of the software to you.

Stay tuned.

On their blog, they mention the difficulty of knowing what to do with the code in the event that AT&T bans them from operating an unlocking service. The lawyers will figure that stuff out fairly promptly, I would imagine. I figured this site to be legit, it’s too much work to be a fake and do the linking with uniquephones.com, so I registered for an invite. It looks like they expect to be up and running within the week:

Your details have been stored, expect an invite code in the next few days!

I just received a text message earlier today from AT&T, notifying me they are eliminating itemized details in billing, which has been the cause in a recent massive bloat in billing from the wireless carrier.

At&T free msg: We are simplifying your paper bill, removing itemized detail. To view all detail go to att.com/mywireless. Still need full paper bill? Call 611

Nice to see AT&T going green. And it only took public humiliation to change their policy. Who knew?

Thanks to Scott Berks for tipping me as well.

AT&T has made a change to my bill, and I didn’t ask for it. I just received this text message from 604-1:

AT&T free msg: We are simplifying your paper bill, removing itemized detail. To view all detail go to att.com/mywireless. Still need full paper bill? Call 611.

Awww, no more 300 page box bills. Hooray for the environment! Also, and I’m sure this is totally unrelated, but this will save AT&T a wad of cash on postage.

Let this serve as a warning to all readers about the dangers of unexpected international roaming charges. Heric Silva shares his experience and illustrates why you need to keep an eye on your iPhone while traveling overseas.

I recently went to Europe for 9 days. I used my iPhone over there and it seemed to work very well. I received my bill the other day and it was over $1200, yes $1200. When I had my Treo I usually get a bill for about $400 to $500 when I was in Europe. Now the problem is that the iPhone does not have anyway of controlling the amount of data you receive, unlike the treo where you can limit the amount of email data you download and giving you the option to download the rest if you like and letting you know the size prior to downloading it so you can see if it is worth the money. When I used my iPhone and press any of the applications that require updating to retrieve stock, weather, email or whatever it needs…you get hit really hard on the $ per KB international roaming charges. Also the email client does not store the downloaded/viewed emails it always has to pull them down from the web so even if I already looked at it it would download it again and incur roaming data charge!

This is a major flaw that will cost users a bundle. Why do they bother to give you 8GB of memory if they don’t even use it for email storage and downloaded files. The iPhone is essentially an iPod with a phone and the phone portion is very limited.

I called AT&T to complain and they said “sorry these are all legitimate charges, give Apple a call.” I have called them but I was on hold for about 45 minutes so I gave up and will try again. I think they should pay my bill, their poor design causes the users to incur unnecessary data charges.

This flaw should be made public and they should re-reimburse all users that have incurred these massive charges.

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!

ReadSource

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.

Read