Some of my best friends and colleagues are succumbing to iPhonemania and switching to the popular Apple tool. Cory Bergman at Lost Remote bid a tearful goodbye to his Blackberry in announcing he was switching. Don’t look for me to be making such a change.

I think the hardware and the web applications are stand-out and game-changing, but I will not give a dime to at&t, or as Dan Gillmor calls it, “the company that calls itself at&t.” I’ve had two horrendous experiences with the company, and that’s about all I give anybody. When I was on Cingular, I experienced relentless and highly irritating dropped calls, so much so, that I actually laughed out loud the first time I saw one of their “fewest dropped calls” ads on TV. Cingular is now at&t. ‘Nuff said.

The second bad experience is more appropriate to the iPhone. When I first moved to Dallas in ‘06, I landed at an apartment complex that had an exclusive contract for at&t to provide “cable.” It took six weeks to get it installed, only to discover it wasn’t cable at all, but a split signal from DirectTV that wouldn’t accept my TiVo. The lack of cable meant I needed an at&t DSL line for the Web, and that also took a month to get installed. The service was awful, and in investigating a problem once, I discovered that the “line” at&t was using actually belonged to Verizon. The point is that at&t was building its business on the backs of others, companies that if I’d had a direct relationship with would’ve given me better service. The only reason I stayed with them was my landlord gave me no other choice. I find this business practice to be deplorable, but I blame the company that calls itself at&t.

So now we have arguably the best mobile device ever to come down the pike married to at&t with overpriced service agreements built on Cingular’s lousy network. I may be nuts, but I cannot bring myself to do business with them.

I’m completely a Verizon guy now. Wireless, landline, and FIOS, and I’m a very happy customer. So while I’d certainly enjoy hands-on experience with an iPhone, I’ll leave that to others until the device supports other carriers.

Of course, there’s renewed talk of a gPhone coming…

This entry was posted on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 12:23 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.