360 Degrees on iPhone

Service Call

First, let me just get it out the way -- the AT&T service is beyond horrible. The ads where the company claims they have the "fewest dropped calls of any wireless carrier" are insulting to those of us who actually suffer through trying to use the so-called "service" they provide.

Frustrated by the lack of smartphone options at Verizon, I recently switched to AT&T, even though I knew how bad their service is in my apartment in rural, er, I mean New York City.

I almost called it rural because the quality of service in my apartment in the middle of an island with an addressable audience for AT&T services of some 10 million people per day is less than the quality of service my parents get from Verizon in Ruidoso, NM, which has more deer per square mile than people.

And that's just the voice-service side of the equation. AT&T's ridiculously outdated EDGE data services, which they promise can run at speeds up to 200 kbps usually works slower than a dial-up connection to Compuserve from Albuquerque, NM, in 1995. Trust me, that was sloooow. The EDGE ain't any faster.

Integration Begins

The good news is that AT&T is finally getting the Cingular/BellSouth acquisitions integrated and rationalized. The debt on the balance sheets, at $55 billion, is nothing to sneeze at, but this company's going to be generating tens of billions of dollars in cash flow over the next 12 months, and they're actively ramping up spending on their wireless-network data technologies.

While I was in Dallas a month ago, I met with several suppliers to Cingular, and all were scrambling to add people to meet the scaling demand for network-building services from AT&T Wireless.

The Evolution of Macintosh

The iPhone itself is going to rock, though. Apple's packaged a great product that will be more functional and easier to use than any phone this world has ever seen. That's because they're building on the Apple software platform that's been developed for consumers for the last 30 years. Don't kid yourself into thinking that the iPhone's a new development. That iPhone, for all the hype of being a "revolutionary" machine, is really just the MacIntosh PC after 30 years of evolution.

As for the "virtual" keyboard and all the hype about whether corporate techies will allow these devices into their networks and so on, I have to tell you that if you're even thinking that will be a topic of discussion in June 2008 or, more to the point, June 2009 after the world has spent two years further developing new hardware and software add-on features to the iPhone platform, then you're completely missing the point.

Apple's going to be rolling out new bigger versions of the iPhone and other smaller versions of the iPhone. Some will be optimized for video, others for music. Some will come with keyboards, others will have keyboard attachments that fit into your wallet in case you want a hard keyboard.