Ever since I bought an iPhone several months ago, I’ve noticed something: AT&T is scared to death of the iPhone and its popularity. They do everything in their power to hamstring the iPhone, whether it be limiting its capabilities on their network or forcing Apple to drop apps from its app store, they do what they can to protect their precariously built network. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, let me give you a few examples.
Slingbox
There is now a slingbox player app in the iPhone store! We all say “Great! Now I can watch TV on the go!” (which is the purpose of Slingbox). “Oh no you can’t”, says AT&T which forced the makers of the Slingbox app to limit its use to wifi only. $30 was a bit pricey for an iPhone app, but you could justify it if you wanted to watch TV anywhere. Since it got kneecapped, I (and many others out there) wouldn’t even consider buying this app for a second.
3GS
Apparently this version of the iPhone is supposed to be faster over the air. We’ll never know, because AT&T has this service blocked, allowing it to act no different than an iPhone 3G on their network.
MMS
This follows on the heels of 3GS because the two were released together, with the same result, for the same reason.
Netflix and Hulu
There have been rumors of official Netflix and Hulu apps recently that will allow you to watch Netflix and Hulu on your iPhone. Again though, speculation says that AT&T will force these services to work over wifi only so their network isn’t crippled from the traffic.
In spite of all the hack and slashing they’ve done to what the iPhone does on their network, AT&T’s network still is one of the worst networks I’ve ever experienced. What this is doing, is making the customers frustrated with AT&T. Seriously, what were they thinking when they signed the exclusivity contract with Apple? That everyone would buy the phone, pay for the contract and then never use it? They should have put some serious effort into beefing up their network before the original iPhone was released, and continued improvements thereafter. The marketshare the iPhone takes up will only increase, as will network usage and consumption. It’s only a matter of time before the contract between AT&T and Apple is up, and if AT&T hasn’t shaped up, you’ll see a flood of ex-AT&T customers swarming every other service provider in the country begging and pleading to get away from AT&T as quickly as possible.
The reason the 3GS isn’t faster than the 3G is because it has to be on a different wireless spectrum, which AT&T doesn’t have up yet. To be fair, no one else in the US does either. In fact, I think it is a fairly new standard; to the point that I’m not sure it’s deployed heavily anywhere.
But the point is, AT&T had to have been in on feature discussions on this on some level. It seems like they didn’t even try to get it set up. How great would that have been to have Apple release the iPhone 3GS and AT&T say “Oh by the way, starting on the release date of this phone we’ll be using this spectrum.”
I guess my only question is, if 3GS isn’t available, why did they market it as if it was? That is another point to bring up. People scampered out to purchase a 3GS compatible iPhone (and paid out the ying yang to do so) and it really does nothing extra? That’s frustrating and annoying. So the response you’ll hear about that is, well, the phones themselves were upgraded and better. Not really. You get what? A compass? Anyone with a brain can figure out where north is. I suppose my point is that people are better off buying an older model and upgrading than splurging on the rip-off new one.
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