Plateau Wireless and what's wrong with all CellCos.

Plateau Wireless is a small regional GSM cell provider in the southwestern United States.

I ran into someone who happened to be employed there and was boasting about how great a place it is. Now, I’m not in the southwest, so it’s unlikely that I’ll ever be their customer. Even so, I can make a few comments on what I see as some of the deficits in their service offerings.

First, the phone service.

(1) They have no nationwide plan. So it’s impossible to roam outside of the area without paying exhorbitant roaming fees. The website lists them. The employee tells me they don’t have them. Someone is ill-informed.

(2) They DO have no nationwide long distance plan, which is why so many people buy cell phones instead of landline phone service. But they charge for airtime out the wazoo.

Carryover minutes are good.

Loyalty minutes are really low offerings. Seriously, if I as a customer can burn through 450 minutes, giving me 30 minutes after a year isn’t boosting things really. Waiting around five years to get 100 extra minutes isn’t much of a reward for loyalty either. Do better, or come up with different rewards.

Now, onto the data service.

(1) The data service is slow. It’s GPRS and on a good day if everything is right and you’re sitting in the location they did the field test in, you might get 40kilobits per second. You might not.

(2) The rates for the data service are exhorbitant.

(3) These are all bits. All data is bits. There is no difference between the bits in email, the bits in instant messages, and the bits in SMS. The bits in SMS cost 10 cents a message for outgoing messages, and incoming are free. Unlimited SMS are 4.95 a month. This is the best, most sane SMS plan so far. But it’s not good enough.

(4) the tiers for data make no sense.
4.95 - 100kb
9.95 - 500kb
14.95 - 1mb
tethering to a laptop for unlimited, 59.95
unlimited mobile phone usage with 1mb storage for picture messaging, 69.95.

This can’t really be based on usage - we know that when you tether, you use a laptop browser way more than you would use a mini, reduced functionality browser on a mobile phone. Yet the mobile browser plan is more expensive.

Additionally, no one in their right mind who wants data is going to want 100kb of it. They want it when they want it, and no one pays attention to the kb you pull down when you’re trying to load a page. Here’s the deal: Every cell co. gets this wrong. Plateau gets it very nearly right on SMS, and very very wrong on internet. They’re the same bits.

Sell one plan for phone use, and another for tethering. $20 for unlimited SMS and unlimited internet, $30 for the same, with the additional ability to tether.

Cell companies are voice and internet service providers. They just don’t know it yet.
People don’t shop for them based on their portals. People don’t shop for them based on their ringtone sales site, or their music store that sells music you can only play on the phone.

People buy cell phones to communicate. If that means communicating via voice, or data (remember, it’s all bits. SMS and MMS are just broken forms of email. browsing is bits.) that’s why we buy. So sell us what we want. Reliable service where we want it, when we want it, and without nickel and diming us to death over the quantity we want.



WebPage: http://www.plateautel.com/GSMRates7.pdf

There are two voicemail options. The one that costs double the price lists voicemail notification as a feature. the cheaper one does not list that feature. Yet it also has voicemail notification. So they’re misleading people into paying for the more expensive option for nothing.

There are two slogans, “A Closer Connection” and “Way to go plateau!” -- which is it? Which message am I supposed to care about? Honestly, neither. “A closer connection” sounds more family friendly. “Way to go plateau” sounds like they have self-esteem issues and need to pat themselves on the back for doing a mediocre job.

There is no means to alter plan service online, the customer must go into physical brick and mortar store to alter plan.

There are way too many options. People can’t discern the right option for them when there are too many to choose from. There needs to be a “good, better, best” with three options among those delineations. Separate out the pages into Good, Better, and Best, so that you’re never exposed to more than three at a time, and you’ll be able to make a decision easier.

Plateau could do so much better. As it is, there’s no challenge to pick out what could be improved upon. Sure, some of the complaints are complaints about the cell phone companies in the US in general. The complaints remain true.

CellCos are walled gardens. As long as they all abuse their customers about equally, they can maintain this kind of business. But someday, one of them is going to tear down some walls, and all the others will be forced to respond. The two parties that win in that case are the customers and the one company that opened up first.

Updates to AT&T handling corporate accnts, and AT&T edge network failures

Apparently AT&T found out they had a problem on their hands.

They assisted my friend in activating his iPhone. They also mentioned to him that they were proactively looking for blogs that mentioned the frustration with activating a corporate account, and finding ways to assist those people.

THAT’S unusual.

Meanwhile,

On this, the first weekday after the iPhone launched, there are widespread reports of EDGE data outages all across America. It isn’t just iPhones that can’t get data connections, it’s every form of phone on the AT&T network.

They had said how much they were investing in beefing up the network. Apparently they didn’t use kosher beef.

AT&T: meet the new boss, same as the old boss

AT&T was once upon a time a powerhouse, dominating communications.

They owned the handsets, they owned the copper, they owned everything. They dictated what you could or could not use with the phone, whether it was an answering machine, or a hush-a-phone - and until 1976 you had to rent a protective coupler to ‘prevent the network from harm’

Well, Judge Harold Green might have wondered what he accomplished by splitting up AT&T and creating the RBOCs. SBC re-branded as AT&T and is buying up all the old AT&T children.

I have the suspicion (no confirmation) that the reason the only applications available for the iPhone are web applications is because AT&T is attempting to ‘prevent the network from harm.’ Fine and well, an application is different than a hush-a-phone. Still, it falls a little flat, knowing that third party apps are written for the Sidekick, Blackberry, and Symbian based phones. Or anything that can run Java.

Tonight a friend of mine purchased an iPhone. He’s a corporate account as a small business owner. Essentially a corporation of one. He’s individually responsible for the account. The phone failed automated activation and linked him to a FAQ he hadn’t seen before which said that corporate accounts could not activate. In the small print at the bottom of the page was a phone number to call to activate manually.

So he called.

And the number failed. The voicemail system and phone queue fed back an error.

“they play this excess hold time error and then xfer to the error
they say please hold. then it borks”

This is AT&T. The phone company. And they can’t handle keeping their phone system working.

Ouch. I’d suggest they should be embarrassed, but any company that uses the Death Star as it’s logo has no shame.

Radio Shack, or "it's cell phones and remote control cars"

I went into Radio Shack to kill some time.

I was immediately accosted by the assistant manager who had to show me the latest in Sprint cell phones.

It was a samsung, with some mildly interesting features. The biggest of which was it’s case.

It comes with a leather or plastic case that has a dock in it, a second battery in it, and can fold open to reveal LCDs on either side of the device.

What’s more, the battery / case unit was flat, comprising all the width of maybe 2 to 3 mm.

It came out that in fact, I’m waiting for an iPhone to start seeing what happens to the existing cell market, and the assistant manager gloated that Radio Shack would have it first.

“First?” says I,

“First.” says the fellow. “We’re Radio Shack. Cell phones and remote control cars are what we’re known for, not capacitors anymore.”

“Really. And I’ll have an employee discount for myself and family - my family’s going to be very happy,” he said.

“Pass that on to me, brother,” I told him, and then he realized that he maybe ought not have mentioned that.

“Why would I do that?” He asked.

“What else is it that will get me to come in and get it from you in this store instead of elsewhere?”

“We’ll have them first. First! Radio Shack’s been working really hard to get them ahead of everyone else!”

Then he had to take a call on his phone, and I excused myself.

Wife Acceptance Factor and the Nokia Symbian OS

So, I gave my wife the Nokia 3620.

Her aging SonyEricsson T616 has begun to act badly, not remembering its SIM card, or powering off mysteriously.

She hates the Nokia. HATES it. She can’t navigate the phone book, the button placement is odd to her, and overall the whole experience is frustrating.

It is so frustrating that she’s at a loss to describe how revulsive it is. It’s that bad.

I know she’s not making this up, and I know that she’s intelligent enough to own a cell phone.

So I spoke with a friend of mine whose wife uses the 6682, which I also use.

He said he thought his wife was just being incompetent. Then he tried to use her phone. “It takes six steps to do what I do on the Palm Treo in two. THIS is a bad phone.”

And that’s really the problem: By going with Symbian, there’s a large established platform, very customizable, but very little forethought in giving the user the best possible interface by default.

Nokia 6280 Shortcomings

I've had a Nokia 6280 since September, and unfortunately the initial excitement of managing to make it sync with my Mac has worn down. Here's a round-up of what works, and doesn't work.

The phone is pretty, it's the right size to fit in my hand, and the keyboard has a very nice touch (particularly important to me as I have RSI). The sliding mechanism is fun to play with (specially to answer calls or hang up), and it overall behaves quite correctly as a device to call other people and be called.

However. Not all is well.

One of the reasons I bought this phone was the 2Mpx camera. Well, to put it simply, it's crap. Too much compression, artefacts, patchy colors, and an overall impression of digital zoom.

As I said, the phone works over iSync to sync contacts and calendars. When it works, that is. Half the time computer and phone are unable to recognize each other. (Yes, it could have something to do with the computer, but for the sake of this post, I'm going to blame it on the phone.)

The T9 dictionary works fine until you want to teach it new words. It remembers them for a little while, and then forgets about them. Obviously, instead of being permanently added to the dictionary, they are kept in some kind of short-term memory of very limited capacity.

Flooded with many unread SMS, maybe because you use Twitter on your mobile and forgot to turn it off? Fear not, you will be given the chance to trudge through those 30 messages one by one to mark them as read. You can "mark" them individually and then delete them all in one go, but you can't "mark as read" in a batch.

There also seems to be no way to set the volume for SMS reception and incoming calls separately. This means that the "beep-beep" announcing the arrival of text messages is way too loud, and the ringing for incoming calls is still not loud enough.

The alarm has to be reset each day. Learning this involved quite a bit of oversleeping, until I understood that just checking the alarm time was right and then exiting was not sufficient. The "OK" button needs to be pressed each day to reactivate the alarm.

The icing on the cake? The customizable "Go to" menu (for easy access to frequently requested functions) sports a shiny shortcut to the web portal homepage of a carrier which happens to not be mine. Hard-coded. First position. Unmovable.
Crossposted to Climb to the Stars.

Telecom Italia and rollable displays

http://www.polymervision.com/News-Center/Press-Releases/TelecomItaliaandPolymerVisionannouncetheCE.html shows that Telecom Italia and Polymer Vision are working together to release a cellular book with a display that can roll up.

USB, 4GB drive, HSPDA, and DVB-H all make it an intriguing device, and touch-sensitive LED user interface adds to the mix.

The display currently doesn’t do moving images well, so we’re talking about all that storage for documents, emails, and music, with internet browsing thrown in the mix.

They say that a color screen will follow, but one of the advantages of a grayscale screen is the low power requirements, which mean you could probably use this for 10 days between charges. Or at least, that’s the marketing promise ;).

Crossposted to Climb to the Stars.

Sony Ericsson and Motorola go for the shallow end of the pool

Australian IT reports that Sony Ericsson is going for the affordable cell-phone market. That is, a phone that doesn’t do much more than be a good phone.

The low-cost phones, with colour screens and two of which have a basic digital camera, will be available in the second quarter of 2007.

The company has a policy to sell devices with features and prices slightly above those of its competitors.

Sony Ericsson's head of Nordic operations, Johan Mathson, said he expected the four basic phones to sell somewhere between €50 ($84) and €100, well above models priced as low as $US30 ($39) and $US40 from Motorola.

European head of marketing Ben Duffy said Sony Ericsson would not go as low as $US40 at the launch.

Contrast this with Motorola, whose motophone is a simple device with digital paper screen (efficient!) And it’s a phone and nothing more. Expect longer battery life.

The comment I have here is that the Apple iPhone appears to have had an interesting effect on marketing timing. Obviously these plans were made months ago - but just as Apple takes the high market (debatable) Moto and SE release for the low market. Are they ceding? I doubt it - but it’s interesting to see.

Dr. Dobbs does a round up on phones and phone-like devices

So, Dr. Dobb's Journal is running a wi-fi phone round up. I’ve got a few of these devices and can speak to their utility in my life.

Netgear’s sph101 and Belkin’s F1PP000GN-SK

Both of these are Skype only phones that use wi-fi to get network.
Neither of these have a browser, so they are nearly impossible to use at a public wi-fi hotspot like the coffee shop or airport. Which sadly makes them of limited use unless you’re on your home network or stealing someone else’s wi-fi.

Belkin tries to get around this with a hotspot manager, which allows connection to Boingo hotspots - for 8 dollars a month. And that’s on top of whatever Skype credits you run through dialing landline and cell SkypeOut numbers.

SMC has one of the devices as well. They do Skype right, with the correct interface - but they just aren’t useful.

Sony Mylo

I have one of these that was given to me. It’s a nice device in many ways, but I admit I was more excited about the promise of what it could do, than what it does.

On the up side, it does Skype, Gmail, Gtalk, Yahoo, and some light web, mp3, mp4. Oh, and it comes with one free year of T-Mobile hotspot access provided you got it before the end of 2006. It’s a Linux device, so it should be flexible and expandable.

On the down side, the keyboard is atrocious, the handsfree headphone connector is proprietary and costs 60 bucks to replace, and the T-Mobile access only works with genuine T-mo spots, not ones where T-mo is a partner. That means no airport. Starbucks only. Oh, it’s a Linux device - but it’s also a Sony device. No expandability.

UTStarcom f1000.

I have this. I got it for 50 bucks so I wouldn’t be tied to a cordless phone tied to a linksys vonage router. It’s sole advantage is being able to recharge it by USB instead of having to go to a cordless phone base as I was before. The screen is awful, the management of received/missed/dialed calls is horrible, and the buttons are too close together, so misdials are frequent.

It also suffers from the no-browser problem, so it can only work on networks that don’t require browser auth.

Nokia 6136 and Samsung SGH-T709

Both of these are cell phones, so they have their own cell phone interface problems - on top of that, the wi-fi only works with T-Mobile hotspots. Gee. Talk about limiting.

It kills me. So many companies are making devices that fall short. I can understand Netgear, SMC and Belkin making a purpose-built Skype phone, but leaving out browser auth kills it.

I can understand Sony making a communicator, but the keyboard, the connectors, the T-Mobile limitation, no AIM, no IRC, no room to improve it... well, it’s painful. It’s almost good, but falls short.

The UTStarcom F1000 works. It’s better than having to charge a cordless phone and being tied to that phone. But darned if it isn’t annoying. UTStarcom makes real cell phones, and they’re not a lot better, although they have better looks.

Nokia and Samsung both got limited by T-Mobile - this is another case of a provider taking functionality and lessening it to abuse the customer. US providers are like this, whether it’s Verizon turning off mp3 ringtones so they can charge for ringtones provided by them only, or other nasty practices.

What do I use a phone for, anyway?

So, I was challenged by a friend, who said that my needs were not common, and could only be fulfilled by an open source phone like the Neo(FIC) openmoko.

So I decided to outline some of my tasks.

• there are a few tasks I want to do which are common for many people:
• make calls, manage missed calls, voicemail, address book.
• slightly less common is managing calendar / syncing calendar.
• I also like to use the camera and sync those files. Added bonus if I can sync them to flickr / blog.
• some form of gmail app (they have a java one)
• some form of rss reader (non essential)
• some form of skype app (fring or iskoot currently)
• (yes, diverging away from most users here)
• and I'd like to use the camera to ocr pictures of text and then use that text.

I don't know why they haven't been able to write these applications properly. Still, they aren't doing anything to check version compatibility for applications so I have to do the work to figure out what will, won't, or may run. They do addressbook badly (motorola). They run out of memory ridiculously often (nokia symbian series 2.) The file transfer is done via bluetooth-as-text message (nokia). There's just a lot of decisions that add up to a poor experience across many different handsets.

a conversation:
em0ry vmarks: file trans ... OBEX?
em0ry that isn't text messaging over bluetooth.
nelson em0ry: I'm not saying that I'm right; merely that I see no better solution.
em0ry vmarks: or do you mean how incoming files and hsit end up in Messaging?
vmarks yes, that., and browsing the device shows nothing, and it won;t appear as a mass storage device via usb.
em0ry yeah that was added in S60 v3
em0ry and everyone knows it was stupid
vmarks why should I have to know that?
em0ry you shouldn't.

em0ry that was completely asinine on their part
em0ry and the bluetooth file browser not working is infuriating too
em0ry it isn't perfect but in my opinoin s60 is the best option out there. period.
vmarks ugh.
vmarks see, that's what kills me. s60 is the best option, and it's infuriating.

phones I have loved and half-loved.

Once upon a time I hated all cell-phones. It seemed that public telephones were frequent enough that a person could just carry change and not need to be in touch all the time. Who was so important that they needed this thing!

Then in 1998, I went to another country to live for a while. There, children would walk side by side, and all of them had cell phones. The two on the ends of the row would likely be talking to each other.

So I got a phone, with a pay-go account, where receiving calls was free.

I have had my share of cellphones. Those things that we mostly all glue to our waists, pockets, and heads.

I have owned or been in possession of for long-term use:

A nokia of ancient description, TDMA. (Turns out it's a 2110.)
http://static.flickr.com/46/166436512_7f18bcfee6_m.jpg

Some moto thing that is now so long ago as to be meaningless. GSM 900.


Ericsson i888 World SCH-350, a tank. This thing is STILL working. GSM900,1900

sch-8500, a samsung flip on the sprint network, CDMA.
T61z, Sony Ericsson. A nice attempt.
T616, as hyped by the Sony Ericsson president and Steve Jobs. GSM 850, 1800, 1900.
Nokia 3620, GSM 850, 1900
Blackberry 7100g (returned)
Nokia 6682, GSM 850, 1800, 1900
(on-loan) Treo 680, GSM 850, 900, 1800, 1900.

Now, use patterns.

Ignore the very old ones for now. Start with the t616.

The SonyEricsson T616 is a fine phone in many respects. Good Bluetooth sync, decent button spacing so that you hit the key on the phone that you intended to hit.

Let me say that again, the button spacing was perfect. Good for texting (which I never did when I used this phone) but no mis-dialling. Unlike later SE phones like the k700i, where the buttons are jammed next to each other.

The camera was horriffic. Postage stamp photos, with tons of color artifacts whenever it was too low light for the thing (meaning, anything less than direct sunlight bleaching out the subject.)

Java took forever, and was only used for simple games.

Still, it worked as well as could be expected for what it was attempting to accomplish. I never did attempt to use web on this device.

Blackberry 7100t

Borrowed this from a friend for a few weeks.

Scroll wheel overshoots due to lag of matching rate of scroll.
Thumb for trigger of wheel is always in wrong position after having scrolled.

Bluetooth syncing. Blackberry? Wha?
Bluetooth vcard exchanging. Blackberry? Hello?

Nokia
3620? 6682?

Why should I have to know the difference between symbian s60-series1 and s60-series2?

Why should I have to know that when I leave an application that it hasn't quit it, and that leaving more than one application open will cause "App. closed, out of memory" errors?

And why can’t the thing be viewed properly when browsing the device in bluetooth? Sending a file to the computer has to be initiated from the phone, sending to the phone receives as an SMS. It’s absurd.

Ringtones. So I transferred an mp3 ringtone to the phone via bluetooth. In Profiles, I go to set the ringtone for the meeting profile. It doesn’t show up. Not allowed.

Two different skype apps on it, fring and iskoot. iSkoot looks like a proper skype application. Fring is pretty good about adding googletalk, and fairly good about being a Skype citizen. It does however launch on boot and log in all the time. Have an unlimited data account.
lifeblog and shozu for getting to flickr.
gmail. Thank heavens for gmail.
jajah. jajah arranges voip calls. internationally cingular charges me 1.29 to 1.99 for a min of voice and $0.019 for data. So I’ll make the voip call.