Tag: iphone 4

Archaic Telecom

Afternoon in NYC with Galaxy, iPhone, and Droid

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Why not see three of the newest smartphones during a hot Saturday in NYC?  Since the  Apple store on Upper Broadway is a five-minute walk from where the Samsung Galaxy S was receiving visitors in the Time Warner building,  we could hop from one air-conditioned venue to another without getting broiled.  Along the way we could also check out the Motorola Droid X at a cell phone shack.

It seemed like a good idea when my friend, let’s call him Dr. Smartphone, suggested it to me this past weekend.  He was anxious to see how Galaxy’s 4” super AMOLED 800×400 display performed, and I had yet to gaze upon the iPhone 4.  Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Dueling Headlines on iPhone 4

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Duct tape: also helps iPhone reception

I’m getting a little dizzy reading the opinionating and newsitorials on Apple’s antenna problem in its newest iPhone.  The latest data point that’s being argued about is Consumer Reports’ lab test. The venerable pro-consumer testing magazine couldn’t recommend the iPhone 4 after detecting signal degradation in their radio frequency isolation chamber.  And  CR placed the blame on the iPhone rather than the AT&T network.

However, they did suggest a quick fix: afix duct tape or another non-conducting material to the lower left hand corner of the iPhone.

In any case, the Consumer Reports story has generated some amusing  headlines.  Take a look at two Dan Frommer’s pieces today in Silicon Alley Insider: Suddenly, Everyone is Talking about an iPhone 4 Recall (this morning, 9:51 am) and Sorry, But This Whole iPhone 4 Thing is a Non-issue and Will Blow Over (11:17 am).Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

The AT&T-Verse

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Waves of bad news coming out of AT&T recently stand as a reminder of what life would be like if the crown was restored to this former monarch.

First there was the iPad security escapade wherein a group of hackers fooled a very insecure AT&T web form to display email addresses of iPad owners. Then the pre-order web meltdown in which customers for Apple’s iPhone 4  were faced with an AT&T back-end order entry system that stopped working. Then there’s the customer who received a terse cease-and-desist voicemail response after he emailed AT&T’s CEO Randall Stephenson to complain about the new caps on data—Zappos’s Tony Hsieh is probably smiling and FedExing a copy of his latest book, Delivering Happiness, to Randall.

Add to this brew the usual problems with AT&T’s 3G coverage (see TechCrunch’s  wireless frustrations) and barely acceptable customer service, and you’ll get a pretty good sense of how telecom was delivered in the Middle Ages (circa 1970s) when AT&T and the Bells were the only games in town.

And to rub salt into our wounds, AT&T is threatening to cut off investment in its U-verse/IPTV cable rollout if the FCC doesn’t reconsider its reclassification of cable broadband as Title II telecommunications.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

From AT&T Picturephone to Apple FaceTime

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AT&T Picturephone

It’s been a long standing journalistic practice that when writing about the failure of yet another video phone product, you march out AT&T’s Picturephone launch at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. I believe it’s a pretty safe bet that Apple’s new FaceTime will break the long losing streak of this concept and make video chats as natural and popular as, well, a cell phone call. Even though we finally have a video phone winner, it’s still instructive to look at that early Bell product, if only to understand why it will take a company like Apple to make it a mass success.

AT&T gets credit for pushing the idea of a two-way video conversation back in the 1960s. They understood that this intrusive technology meant a loss of privacy, but thought it would be counterbalanced  by the public’s just-under-the-surface narcissism. Their original advertising slogan was “Some Day You’ll be A Star” (see P. Coburn’s, The Change Function). This was a  bold call to arms for a pre-Internet, pre-Facebook, and pre-Youtube America.Continue reading