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If I had a Motorola, that’d be different, but my situation is that I don’t have a phone to begin with.
I wish I could have an iPhone, but it’s AT&T, and I’m not crazy for their service. Cripes, I work for Sprint!
rob wrote:You are. You just can’t force it. Relax. Clear your mind of questions…hmmm…you will know, when you are at peace…passive…YOU WILL BE!
Thought leads to thinking, thinking leads to observing, observing leads to questioning, questioning leads to discussion, discussion leads to argument, argument leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering, suffering leads to papercuts, papercuts lead to adhesive medical strips
Yoda.
Shut. The fuck up.
Pa-ul wrote:I’ll just cut out a picture and stick it over my Motorola.Until they come out over here, then I’ll press my face against the shops window.
Not much longer to wait. Less than 2 months. 🙂
rob wrote:I wish I could have an iPhone, but it’s AT&T, and I’m not crazy for their service. Cripes, I work for Sprint!See, that’s where I can’t give a toot. Everyone seems to have a preference, and that one service that they hate, but I can’t find the common trends to know if one is truly worse than the other. Since I don’t have any service, I can’t claim which one sucks. So I say AT&T, SchmayT&T. How long is that exclusivity deal going to last, by the way?
5 years, from what I heard. But I don’t know if it’s set in stone — I heard there was an exclusivity deal, but wasn’t sure if it was publicized to how long it would be.
I did hear that they’ve hacked the phones already to unlock them. When you do, the only thing that doesn’t work is the ‘visual voicemail’. I don’t even know what visual voicemail is. Either way, like I said, I’m not hell-bent on using another provider, so I’d be willing to shoot AT&T some greenybacks. I’ve heard people say Sprint sucks as much as I’ve heard any other. Why do you prefer Sprint (taking out the fact that you work for them of course)?
Because the call quality is better, and it’s pretty much all he’s used for years. 🙂
I like their service, hate their plans, their customer service, and the how CDMA handsets are ID’d on their networks (or any CDMA network for that matter).
However, their call quality is absolutely better, the handsets respond much better to a low level of service, in the early days their battery life was generally better, the handset power is possibly less likely to cause cancers/tumors and such and the networks in use in the US are generally higher in speed than the networks in place for cellular providers.
Bryan, you are using AT&T for your iPhone, or have you unlocked yours and are using whatever you have? If it’s the first, how do you like it? If I get an iPhone, I’m probably going to use whatever is offered, but I’m curious how you’re holding up with what you’re using.
I know a number of people that have Cingular (which I think is basically the same thing as AT&T now) and their calls drop all the time. It’s not just a matter of location, as these people are all over the country, but on an average phone call, the call will drop at least twice. This doesn’t happen with any other provider I’ve dealt with.
I use AT&T and was a Cingular customer for a couple of years prior to buying my iPhone. During the course of my Cingular contract, I was also a repeat Sprint customer and a T-Mobile customer. We’ve had a lot of Verizon phones, so I’ve had some experience using them as well.
1) Cingular and T-Mobile are going to suffer many more dropped calls than a CDMA phone, simply because of the way the phones communicate with the network and the network’s basic design coupled with network load. This is a greater problem because of the higher power, lesser frequency (in terms of deployment not operating frequency) of cellular based networks. CDMA (PCS) technologies from the start have employed lower powered ‘towers’ at more frequent install points to maximize signal, handoffs and minimize the median output of the handset. The higher operating frequency of PCS is another part of the reason for the network design… but the side affect is the same, handsets don’t have to operate at or near peak power as often to handle network reception, and tower communication.
That said, you are going to hear FAR more complaints about Cingular because they massively outnumber T-Mobile (and the regional carriers for that matter) in subscribers (they were #1 in subscribers until being very recently overtaken by Verizon. More subscribers also mean more complaints. Cingular has a far superior overall network to T-Mobile.
Now, I live in a city where Cingular not only has spent a lot of money on a very high level of performance (particularly the higher speed 3G stuff), but geographically it’s ideal terrain and other conditions for a cellular network. If towers are farther apart, then penetration of terrain, hills, mountains, canyons or whatever are going to be more difficult. More frequently placed towers in a standards type deployment will give you better ‘beginning’ coverage to supplement… so PCS networks by standard design are already closer to being setup to handle varied terrain and such. I’ve also read many times that PCS equipment (towers) cost less than traditional cellular, especially the 3G stuff. The last thing to consider in the design is the less frequent towers with high power mean two things for ‘no-capture zones’. They are generally larger, and harder to position outside of widely affected areas. For those not as geeky as me (or not in the telecomm industry) a no capture zone basically is what happens when signals of the same frequency and near the same output collide and cancel each other out. So if a tower in a 2-D view transmits in a circle, anywhere the blanket coverage circles intersect, you have the potential (and likelyhood) of a no-capture zone. In good network design, they try hard to add triangular patterns to the layout to minimize these zones, and try to position them in locations that hopefully don’t affect their subscribers as much. So, you drive the same route once in a while, and you’ve noticed that you always drop calls in the same general area, but you’ve got a decent to good signal? Yeah, you probably just passed through a no-capture zone. Not so much the case if it’s random locations.
Living in the city I do, I actually have pretty good GSM coverage and performance. However, the iPhone is not known for the highest performance in call quality. This is part the handset, and part the older EDGE network (high load = lower call quality). T-Mobile was worse on my EDGE Blackberry. I’ve travelled a lot lately, and my AT&T phone performed pretty well overall, but had 2 markets where it consistently sucked. Philly, and LA.
2) Enough of that semi-techy stuff… Cingular no longer ‘exists’ (blue or orange) it’s now all AT&T Mobility (seems to be officially shortened to AT&T again).
3) In all, carrier selection is a subjective thing. It depends on what’s important to you, and what you notice as a user. You may notice call quality, you may notice handset selection, you may notice lack of new technologies, shit customer service, high billing rates, retarded rules for upgrades, features or who knows what. There will be issues with all of them, some of them, or a well known issue with one of them. There is good news. All of them offer a period in which you can ‘get out of’ a contract with him. It’s either 10 days, 14 days or something. So if it really sucks, hopefully you’ll notice it and can make a decision.
4) What you buy for. If you are buying for the iPhone you are probably not buying for the phone’s call functionality necessarily (as long as it works as a phone, it’s good enough now give me the iPod shit!). AT&T may not annoy you much. But, you need to see who excels at what you think is important to you. You should also check with power PHONE users, not gadget dorks on their feelings about their carrier. There are 6 trillion outlets to get good opinions on the gadgets, but if you are asking carrier questions, ask people who actually use their phones.
Generally: If you are in the NorthEast, Verizon does really well. AT&T has lots of coverage, and a strong presence, but those are some of the markets that drop call complaints tend to originate from. Verizon is back to being really strong on the West coast, but that’s also one of the places that the value priced T-Mobile does well. Regionals actually do pretty well in the midwest, though I’d never get on an Alltel or whatever.
Personally, I don’t like T-Mobile, but you get a lot for your dollar. AT&T is a decent balance of huge compatibility, fairly global compatibility and they are not the highest priced (fast if you get a UMTS phone). Sprint would be a second choice… I think the call quality is far superior to AT&T, the speed is fantastic and they work really well most places in the US. However, they are probably the most expensive service, have the most screwed up billing break-downs (followed very closely by AT&T) and don’t seem to understand that new customers cost far more money than keeping customers. I’d say all of the carriers have some learning to do of this simple rule, but Sprint is damn near proud of it’s subscription rates, vs it’s overall subscribers. Verizon is a really strong network, a decent value and a really fast large network. They are my absolute LEAST favorite network, because limit the user experience on the handset, force a klunky interface standardization on the manufactures (that results in slow phone functionality) and limited phone features. They (like Sprint) have more frequent GPS availability, as well as other GPS services (like tracking family phones and such).
Okay, water mudied. 🙂
I’d say just about everything Bryan said is correct. The one thing that I’ve always said is that it’s not about the phone as much — it’s about the service (and I mean coverage, dropped calls, all that). A phone can do all this crazy stuff, look great, and still be a shitty phone, you know? Another example — my phone can get email, access the internet, play games, mp3s, has a pretty nice document reader (so I can get attachments in Word, Excel, all that), all this great stuff — but the phone part kinda sucks. It almost makes me want to get a plain-jane phone next time.
By the way, howardforums.com is a good non-biased place to look around.
True… but again, that applies to someone who sees the foremost function of their phone as a basic phone. For me, if it makes calls, and doesn’t drop constantly (AT&T does not for me in this market, or any market but the two I identified above) then I can move on to the things that make me wan to carry a personal device all day. Phones (for good or bad) have evolved past being a simple voice communications device, they’ve become one of the single most important personal assets in this country. Wallet/Purse and Cellphone are like the only two items a person will turn around (being late for work) to go home to get. Mind does all of those fancy things, and I’d be tempted to say that it’s a phone first… but I look at what I use it for all day, and I’d say it’s a multi-function device first. Phone is one of those things.
So it’s not just about the service for me. As long as the service hits a certain standard (of which Sprint AT&T both surely do) then it IS about the handset and the service options for me. That’s why I suggest that he identify what’s important to him. Since he doesn’t have a cell phone now, he’s lived without the need to make phone calls on the go. The device functions might actually be more important.
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