1. The Tethering Convenience Fee

2. The iPad Bait and Switch

My only thoughts are that maybe, just maybe, Apple has a way to rectify this before June 7th during the WWDC keynote. I mean, I cant imagine Steve Jobs being happy with this considering AT&T is the only option for people who buy one of his fancy 3G iPads.

Update: I totally missed John Gruber’s take on this, same as mine. (link)

This is great, except for the fact that nobody I talked to today knew that this feature existed. AT&T has spent most of their time trying to prove that you can download Luke Wilson faster on their network than on Verizon and no time at all showing you how to save money. Thanks AT&T!

I would also like to point out that if you’re paying $59.99 you could just pay an extra $10 every month for unlimited calling and just forget all about the whole ‘minutes’ non-sense.

I must say, the most annoying thing about AT&T in the past few years is not the obviously bogged down network and their inability to really make their service of any quality at all. This video seems to be a step in the right direction, at least for me.

As their network keeps getting drowned in more iPhones, they really expected people to do the New Years Resolution thing, where theyd get bored with the phone and stopped using it as time went by. Sadly for them, the iPhone is the one device that really makes the internet completely accessible and people just keep using it more and more.

The video, I thought was a joke at first, but it seems legit. Lets hope it is a sign of things to come, a new, more open AT&T that mans up to its shortcomings and stops treating its customers like children that just wouldn’t understand their complicated network.

Oh… MMS on iPhone, September 25th. An actual date! amazing!

Well that was then. Now we have the app store and I have purchased more than $50 worth of apps helping Apples profit margins that much more. It is really a shame that I cant justify supporting Apple anymore even though they were the ones that finally cracked the smartphone code. The reason for this is once again AT&T.

Ive been talking to a few people in the last few weeks and I completely understand the argument that they have to defend their network and ward against bandwidth hogs, but there is no excuse if theres a cap. Additionally where are the upgrades they’ve been promising? As Apple keeps selling iPhones, AT&T has positioned itself as the paragon of mediocrity from the start by failing to keep up with network demands.

If you have a Blackberry on AT&T your sling player works through 3G, on iPhone they waited until the app was in for approval to change the T.O.S. and disallow apps like those and then tapped Apple. If you have a Blackberry on AT&T, you got Google Voice as an app a few weeks ago, on iPhone they asked Apple to go on a witch hunt for anything that said Google Voice on it. The idea that people might find that their prices are artificially high and might switch to an innovative new service scares the shit out of them. This however will be AT&T’s undoing.

The reason why the problem is with AT&T and not with Apple is because I am sure Apple doesn’t care.
Apple’s main problems are with apps resembling each other and causing confusion. Other than that Apple should want all these applications to run on their platform but AT&T has been meddlesome and has created more problems than Apple could have ever imagined. That is why Apple’s inability to come up with a fair approval process that rewards innovation and doesn’t punish it has made many uneasy and has spawned competition. Cydia.

Cydia is an app store for jailbroken apps that spawned after the team behind the original jailbroken app store Installer.App took their sweet ass time releasing the code as open source (as they had promised) and sparked fears of another walled garden. They have a pay model that accepts Paypal and Amazon Payments. There is no approval process and if one repository goes down there’s a million more.

The best part of this is that AT&T has no power to do anything about it. They disallowed GVmobile on the App Store? It went FREE on Cydia the day after. They don’t allow bandwidth hogs from using the 3G network? There’s an app that disables the switch that tells apps what network they are on and always claims you are on WiFi.

AT&T needs to know its role as a dumb pipe and give up its sad excuse for an argument that they bring anything to the table. This would allow them to stop concocting plans that limit the iPhone’s true potential and gives them a strategic advantage of having the most open network for a nominal fee. The iPhone runs great on T-Mobile and would run great on any other GSM carrier if we had any others. Others will come however and once LTE starts rolling out this illusion of competition that the CDMA and GSM carriers have been able to keep up for so long will slowly fade away.

AT&T either positions itself as the first open carrier or it dies when somebody does it and leaves them in the dust as the antiquated steam of shit that they are.

Stop developing for the App Store, start developing for iPhone through Cydia.

I never actually purchased GVmobile because I thought that Google would release an official app and it would be free in no time. That app was submitted to the App Store 6 weeks ago. Now we know it was denied. The GVmobile people have said that the Apple statement was that it “Duplicates functionality” with the iPhone… which is complete utter bullshit because the iPhone does not have Google Voice integration and thats all that the App did.

Additionally, if its that the iPhone already has SMS… theres a ton of other Apps they have to ban. Same situation with the dialer, there’s a billion of them already.

Now, last time I remember that they just lied like that to everyone that I can remember this vividly, where a high-profile app got denied access to the App Store was with Podcaster. For the same reason “it duplicates functionality”. This didnt turn to be true, until the next update in which Apple did include very similar functionality straight into the iTunes App. Hopefully this is the same deal and Apple integrates it straight into the phone and while they’re at it they should also enable Google Latitude.

Of course, these things are not likely to happen and they make me wish I had an Android phone. There… I said it.

Yes, after over a year of you being able to buy the iPhone on eBay and jailbreaking to have access to even better applications through Cydia and Installer.app, now you can actually go to a store and purchase it right then and there. You can even pay their excesive $30/mo for unlimited internet and 0 text messages. While if you had just jailbroken it you could have added the MediaNet 200 and gotten unlimited internet (yes, including 3G) and 200 text messages for $20.

I am sorry if I sound bitter, but honestly, these news are a year too late. Puerto Rico has had capacity for the iPhone for all this time and now suddenly they decide to launch and its really anticlimactic.

I disagree that this has anything to do with the T-Mobile G1 but I’ll take whatever excuse they give us. There you have it, if you enjoy giving money to companies that obviously don’t consider you a priority, AT&T will be selling the iPhone 3G in every one of their stores starting October 17th, expect there to be shortages and for service to be abysmal (like always).

The iPhone Availability chart that Best Buy has setup clearly states that the iPhone will not be available in the Caguas or San Juan locations.

This does not mean that they will never sell it. It just means that AT&T has, once again, missed a perfectly good oportunity to release the iPhone in Puerto Rico.

I have gotten confirmation from them (as I have said before) that they will be releasing it before the end of the year, but there is no set date yet.

It has taken AT&T well over a year to finally bring any version of the device to the island. The same prices that apply in the United States apply in the island as expected. As of right now I have not noticed any differences that will make the plan any different than just getting the phone in the United States right now and moving your AT&T number to the new phone.

Another piece of news that broke last week is that by the time the iPhone is available in Puerto Rico it will also be able to be purchased through Best Buy. This being a big change from Apple’s current sales model which is only through AT&T Retail stores and Apple Retail stores.

There you have it, even more confirmation, of the worst kept secret since Area 51. AT&T wants your money this christmas season.

I’ll update this post as soon as they make a press release.

Today’s procedure went without a hitch. I gave them my information, told them my phone number, and even told them my current billing address (in Colorado). The interesting thing about this is AT&T did not complain about my number having a Colorado billing address. But that is just a different kind of issue that I am so glad they finally got over.

So there you have it. iPhone 3G, legally activated with a Puerto Rico number. If you are visiting the United States and decide to stop by an Apple Store, you can upgrade your AT&T account with confidence before heading back to Puerto Rico. As a quick note, AT&T did confirm by email that they have plans to offer the iPhone in Puerto Rico in the near future but there are no dates set yet.

Today is July 11th. There is no iPhone in Puerto Rico. Apparently some people were upset enough with that to start sending emails to Tecnetico and he had to write a ‘editorial’ about the subject. In this editorial he (Wilton Vargas) explains that it was just rumor and speculation and that it sucks that he didn’t get it right.

Trying to show some proof that he has actually researched the subject of the iPhone in Puerto Rico he has posted a email ‘conversation’ between him and Patricia del Carmen Ramirez at America Movil (Claro) and she reinstates what I had said in my previous post about the subject.

Claro has no say about the iPhone in Puerto Rico because AT&T has the contract for ‘The United States and its Territories’. End of the story.

It is interesting that Tecnetico has chosen to update his site the way he has. Making the words ‘I am proud that our track record is still untouched’ bold Instead of highlighting his new September prediction, also from ‘sources of entire credit’.

So there you have it, Tecnetico reporting rumor and speculation leaves their track record intact, they are now rumoring and speculating that September will be the new date.

Since Wilton Vargas is a radio and television personality and apparently his ‘sources’ are about as reliable as my sources. I will now rumor and speculate the following:

• The iPhone 3G will be released in Puerto Rico at some point within the next year.
• The iPhone 3G will be on AT&T’s network
• The iPhone 3G will work just like it does in the United States (it already does >.>)

There you have it. They are the only 3 things I know for a fact. The reason why this is such a problematic issue is that AT&T is huge. There are various departments that are involved in bringing a product to Puerto Rico and therefore there is a lot of rumor, speculation and in the end delays.

AT&T representatives in Puerto Rico have been awaiting the iPhone since it’s launch last year. The iPhone has had various launch dates internally and something always goes wrong in the last minute. I am sure that Apple’s revenue sharing also came into play. There is really no competition for a phone like the iPhone in Puerto Rico. Sure all the big carriers are down there, but most people are still on the regional carriers like Centennial who’s phones are just now getting color screens (NOTE: this is obviously hyperbole, but seriously their phones suck). This means that AT&T expects to get a flood of sales when it finally launches.

I am sorry to be the bringer of bad news, but that is the state of the iPhone right now. AT&T is getting ready, it might take a while.

Thank you to everybody who emailed me about the Tecnetico story.

Update 1 (7/11/08) :

An example of a news bit is the first comment on this thread. According to ‘Obsessed iPhone 3G Researcher’ AT&T is ready to take orders (Which would be weird since they did not do this in the states) and will launch it a week from today, July 17th, 2008. If this turns out to be true, you heard it here first people . Thanks for your comments everyone!

Update 2 (7/18/08) :

As expected, there was no iPhone launch today in Puerto Rico. I just wanted to point out how these rumors get started and show that by leaving your sources unnamed you are basically taking responsability for what you say.

Update 3 (8/18/08) :

El Nuevo Dia has posted a date range ( September – December 2008)