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AT&T Is A Big, Steaming Heap Of Failure

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Re: AT&T Is A Big, Steaming Heap Of Failure

#41

Post by skorgu »

tsetse-fly wrote: post #10
spoondan wrote: post #3

I loathe AT&T. It mistreats employees and customers. It overcharges and delivers astonishingly poor service. It makes regular billing "mistakes". It willingly, almost gleefully, assists in the violation of its customers rights and privacy. It is a paragon of inefficiency. It fights against progress to keep its anachronistic business model relevant. It uses the legal system as a club. And it ensures that any actions b…

Most of what you're saying also applies to the other carriers in the US. Verizon has a history of crippling its phones. Sprint has horrible customer service. T-Mobile has very little coverage. There are no good carriers.

I'll take a crippled phone any day over the other complaints (and if my Tour is crippled it's subtle enough that I haven't seen it). There are no perfect carriers but there are less-bad ones.

Re: AT&T Is A Big, Steaming Heap Of Failure

#42

Post by [deleted] »

jrockway wrote: post #31
maukdaddy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No this isn't about picky Apple fans. AT&T is truly shitty. I also switched from Verizon to AT&T for the iPhone and I loathe every minute I have to spend on AT&T's shitty network. Here in Chicago I drop every other call on average, and the ones that manage to stay up are usually full of garbled noise. No signal inside buildings that I used to get full strength on Verizon. Still no MMS even though their other phones h…

I live downtown and have AT&T. I've never had a problem. Maybe it's just the iPhone that sucks?

[deleted]

Re: AT&T Is A Big, Steaming Heap Of Failure

#44

Post by 4buot »

Xichekolas wrote: post #7
spoondan wrote: post #3

I loathe AT&T. It mistreats employees and customers. It overcharges and delivers astonishingly poor service. It makes regular billing "mistakes". It willingly, almost gleefully, assists in the violation of its customers rights and privacy. It is a paragon of inefficiency. It fights against progress to keep its anachronistic business model relevant. It uses the legal system as a club. And it ensures that any actions b…

This is also the company whose sales reps swear up and down, to this day, that they don't offer dry loop DSL "because there is no demand". Of course, if you know the magic phone number, you can call the dry loop division directly, and they are as helpful as can be. I asked one once why they were so hidden... she answered: politics.

i never had a problem getting stand-alone dsl...the phone numbers are secret because local carriers never really integrated into Bell Mobility, and Bell Mobility never really integrated into ATT...they are basically separate companies all named ATT to confuse you.

Re: AT&T Is A Big, Steaming Heap Of Failure

#45

Post by Shooter »

skorgu wrote: post #41
tsetse-fly wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of what you're saying also applies to the other carriers in the US. Verizon has a history of crippling its phones. Sprint has horrible customer service. T-Mobile has very little coverage. There are no good carriers.

I'll take a crippled phone any day over the other complaints (and if my Tour is crippled it's subtle enough that I haven't seen it). There are no perfect carriers but there are less-bad ones.

Any complaints about the Tour? I'm thinking of getting the Tour on Verizon (and an iPod Touch for 'iPhone' apps and wifi.)

Re: AT&T Is A Big, Steaming Heap Of Failure

#46

Post by stcredzero »

derefr wrote: post #24
jsz0 wrote: post #19

Apple should seriously consider buying Sprint. When they first struck a deal with Cingular one of my first thoughts was they were picking a carrier that was within their reach to purchase down the road. Obviously AT&T had the same idea though. Given Apple's position in mobile electronics it would make a lot of sense to own their own data network. EVDO data in every device. iTunes Store over EVDO on every iPod. Extrem…

Apple would enjoy many benefits from buying a telecom company, but there's one factor that would almost certainly prevent it: anything bad the telecom did would then be blamed by the public (even if completely irrationally) on Apple. Apple makes most of their money from being the "sexy consumer electronics company", and no matter how you try to spin a telecom, you can't make it sexy . The only way Apple could success…

Apple makes most of their money from being the "sexy consumer electronics company", and no matter how you try to spin a telecom, you can't make it sexy.

They could buy Sprint and have it "spin-out" another company whose job it is to provide the communications for Apple's products. Apple would be hands-off the old Sprint, so long as the Apple-communications company got all the resources it needed.

Re: AT&T Is A Big, Steaming Heap Of Failure

#47

Post by 3dFlatLander »

spoondan wrote: post #3

I loathe AT&T. It mistreats employees and customers. It overcharges and delivers astonishingly poor service. It makes regular billing "mistakes". It willingly, almost gleefully, assists in the violation of its customers rights and privacy. It is a paragon of inefficiency. It fights against progress to keep its anachronistic business model relevant. It uses the legal system as a club. And it ensures that any actions b…

"It fights against progress to keep its anachronistic business model relevant."

I'd like to comment on that. I live in a city in which AT&T started a test of bandwidth caps. Depending on your connection type, you can download anywhere from 5 gigs to 60 gigs, and it's $1 per gig after your limit.

I watch HD video, stream music, download games from steam and software from the apt repositories, etc etc, and I've used 50 gigs this month.

Sadly, the only other ISP in town is Charter, and they have notoriously bad service in my area.

Re: AT&T Is A Big, Steaming Heap Of Failure

#48

Post by skorgu »

Shooter wrote: post #45
skorgu wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take a crippled phone any day over the other complaints (and if my Tour is crippled it's subtle enough that I haven't seen it). There are no perfect carriers but there are less-bad ones.

Any complaints about the Tour? I'm thinking of getting the Tour on Verizon (and an iPod Touch for 'iPhone' apps and wifi.)

Well its my first blackberry and I've only had a week or so to get used to the platform so YMMV of course.

tl;dr: It's great at its core competencies: voice and email are great. Everything else is a bit unfinished.

The bottom line is that so far it's good enough for what I use it for. I'm still crap at the keyboard but getting better, the EVDO is fast enough but not spectacular, the roller ball works well almost all of the time but the horizontal sensitivity seems a bit wonky sometimes, I haven't figured out why yet. (There's no way I'm that bad at brickbreaker so I choose to blame RIM)

Email integration is about 8/10, I push email from my gmail account and Exchange at work to it and that workflow is very well executed. However, reading mail on Gmail or Outlook doesn't mark the messages read on the blackberry. It's possible I'm doing something wrong here and I'm not on a BES but it hasn't annoyed me enough yet to really dig for a solution. Also Gmail IMAP sync doesn't respect your filters/tags so if you get new mail it all hits your blackberry. I ended up unsubscribing to a few mailing lists that I never really read anyway because they were just too high traffic to be buzzing me all the time.

There seems to be a bit of a compatibility issue with the Tour and the Storm, most apps that require unrestricted TCP access don't seem to work [1]. I can't get jmirc, midpssh etc to connect, they just die with "Invalid URL parameter." It'll be fixed at some point I'm sure but for now there's nothing app-wise that's useful to me. Viigo is acceptable as a podcast client but not much else. Google Voice client is alright, doesn't integrate as well as I'd like but it's workable. AIM works well, Flickr works well. The apps in the app store are great if you're obsessed about a) the weather b) financial news c) sports scores or d) playing card games, outside of that there's not much there. Then again every "must have app" my iPhone friends show me has me rolling my eyes so I suppose I'm just not the target market.

The voice quality is top notch. I was on a four hour conference call last night and I set the speakerphone up and forgot about it, no issues either hearing or being heard. That took my battery life down from full to about half. The camera is frankly barely adequate. Plenty of pixels but too much grain. [2]

All that said I'm buying my wife one to replace her free-and-worth-every-penny phone in a few weeks so it's safe to say I'm pleased with it. The warts just aren't in places I care about.

[1] http://forums.crackberry.com/f35/tour-9630-irc-266165/ [2] http://www.flickr.com/photos/skorgu/3737195762/

Re: AT&T Is A Big, Steaming Heap Of Failure

#49

Post by Shooter »

skorgu wrote: post #48
Shooter wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any complaints about the Tour? I'm thinking of getting the Tour on Verizon (and an iPod Touch for 'iPhone' apps and wifi.)

Well its my first blackberry and I've only had a week or so to get used to the platform so YMMV of course. tl;dr: It's great at its core competencies: voice and email are great. Everything else is a bit unfinished. The bottom line is that so far it's good enough for what I use it for. I'm still crap at the keyboard but getting better, the EVDO is fast enough but not spectacular, the roller ball works well almost all…

Thank you for taking the time to respond. That helped me immensely.

Re: AT&T Is A Big, Steaming Heap Of Failure

#50

Post by skorgu »

Shooter wrote: post #49
skorgu wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well its my first blackberry and I've only had a week or so to get used to the platform so YMMV of course. tl;dr: It's great at its core competencies: voice and email are great. Everything else is a bit unfinished. The bottom line is that so far it's good enough for what I use it for. I'm still crap at the keyboard but getting better, the EVDO is fast enough but not spectacular, the roller ball works well almost all…

Thank you for taking the time to respond. That helped me immensely.

Any time.
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