Many potential iPhone customers in the US have been irked by Apple’s exclusive deal with AT&T, but that marriage is now coming under pressure from another source: small, rural cellphone providers. At issue is the the fact that AT&T does not offer the iPhone for sale in many rural areas where they only offer roaming service.
And, since the exclusive deal prohibits the local cell providers from selling the iPhone, that means that inhabitants of those areas—like much of Vermont, and rural areas in 15 other states—will not be recipients of the iPhone love.
So it is that the Rural Cellular Association, a trade group of 80 small rural providers, plans to petition the FCC to look into the legality of exclusive deals such as the one between AT&T and Apple. According to the Wall Street Journal, most of these small carriers serve 500,000 people or fewer, though those numbers do add up. Ars Technica highlights the case in Alaska, where residents had trouble legally using the iPhone, due to service restrictions imposed by AT&T.
The FCC has apparently intervened on similar issues in the past, as Ars points out, such as forcing Direct Broadcast Satellite providers to offer their services in Alaska and Hawaii. Whether or not that precedent will cover the RCA’s request remains to be seen.
On the many, many, many lists we’ve compiled of missing iPhone features, the lack of Instant Messaging has consistently been towards the top. Among the theories (conspiracy or otherwise) behind the lack of IM on the iPhone is the suggestion that IM would cut too much into AT&T’s revenue from text messaging: while the provider includes 200 text messages in all the iPhone plans, extra messages sent or received cost a subscriber anywhere between five and twenty cents.
Of course, that can add up, as parents of frequent text-messaging kids have quickly learned, especially for messages that are limited to 160 characters—marginally longer than your average Twitter thought. In fact, as Dr Nigel Bannister of the University of Leicester recently concluded, sending SMS messages in his home country of the UK costs roughly four times as much as data sent back from the Hubble telescope.
So it doesn’t seem very surprising that here in the US, a class action lawsuit has been leveled at seven major mobile providers—Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, Alltel, US Cellular, Cellular South, and Virgin Mobile—about the price of text messages. While the specific focus of this suit appears to be on unsolicited text messages that subscribers receive (and are charged for), there may be implications beyond that.
Personally, we think the Mississippi federal judge who ends up with this on their docket should take a look at Dr. Bannister’s findings. Or at least let us send text messages to outer space.
I’ve heard a few people searching for a solution that would make the iPhone audibly speak the name of their contacts. So I thought I’d pass on this tip from a reader over at our sister site, Mac OS X Hints. While it’s not automated, it does offer a somewhat streamlined process, taking full advantage of OS X’s built-in speech capabilities—though, to be honest, depending on how difficult your contacts’ names are to pronounce, you may need to do some tweaking. Also, depending on how many contacts you have, this process may be prohibitively long.
You’ll need Garage Band and a brief foray into the Terminal in order to make this all happen, but it’s not to complicated, so don’t fret. The full instructions are over at Mac OS X Hints. While the process could probably be automated, I think that’s going to take someone with more AppleScript/Automator skills that I possess.
So, with all of this hubbub over Apple’s non-exclusive carrier deals in many of the countries they’re moving into, what does this mean for the countries where Apple’s already got deals in place?
According to the CEO of T-Mobile, Hamid Akhavan, it doesn’t affect the happy marriage between Apple and its German provider:
“We have a very good relationship with Apple…at least in Germany it is exclusive, and we expect it to remain as such,” Akhavan told the Reuters Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit in Paris.
And though Apple’s US partner, AT&T, has not been shy about touting a future 3G iPhone, T-Mobile is taking a more circumspect route—which Steve Jobs would no doubt approve of:
“If and when there is a 3G iPhone we expect to have it exclusively in Germany as well,” [said Akhavan.]
T-Mobile is, of course, also currently selling the iPhone in Austria, but as we noted late last week, France Telecom announced that they’ve also struck an arrangement to sell the iPhone in Austria. If Apple’s Austrian extramarital fling is causing strife in Germany, there’s certainly no indication of it.
The iPhone Central Depart of Statistical Analysis and Strategic Systems (yes, we do have SASS) brings you some more fascinating numbers, courtesy of Rubicon Consulting (the same firm that told us last month that iPhone users are young, rich, and technologically savvy). It seems that getting in the iPhone game has, rather unsurprisingly, been pretty sweet for AT&T.
Out of the 460 iPhone users that Rubicon surveyed, nearly half (47%) switched from other carriers just to use the iPhone. And in average, going to the iPhone meant a $19 price hike over their current bills.
As a switcher myself (and, let me tell you, haven’t really found myself missing my old friend Verizon), that sounds right on to me. In particular, that $19 figure is conveniently about the cost of the iPhone’s additional $20/month unlimited data package. Makes sense to me and that makes dollars and cents for AT&T.
I've got a story over at the Mothership about Google's iPhone plans, in which Vic Gundotra, the company's vice president of engineering, talks about Google's commitment to producing native apps for the iPhone. (It's part of a larger profile of Google's Mac development efforts that I wrote, just in case that sort of thing interests you.)
Anyway, there's an anecdote Gundotra related to me that I couldn't fit into the article but that I think is amusing enough to repeat here.
He told me that he and his family were having lunch a few weeks back with another family -- adults clustered at one end of the table, kids at the other. And at one point in the conversation, Gundotra's friend asks a question that Gundotra doesn't know the answer to. He says, "I don't know," which is when his four-year-old -- previously indifferent to the adults' conversation -- chimes in: "Daddy," she asks, "where's your phone?"
"What happened was, she heard me tell my friend 'I don't know,'" Gundotra told me. "And when she hears me say, 'I don't know,' she expects me to pick up my iPhone and get an answer. That's the world a four-year-old is growing up in."
I've had similar experiences with other technology. For example, sometimes when I'm in a movie theater and I miss a portion of the dialogue, I'll instinctively make a motion with my hand like I'm pressing the Rewind button on a TiVo remote -- I'll even mimic the little be-boop noise the TiVo makes when it rewinds, if I'm being especially mindless. And I always feel just a trifle disappointed when the movie doesn't rewind on my command.
But that's just me. How about you? Got any stories about how the iPhone -- or some similar electronic doodad has changed the way you interact with the world around you?
When you want to get the most out of your iPhone, there’s one app you turn to: iPhoneDrive. Er, wait. MegaPhone. Aw, bugger. PhoneView. Look: we don’t care much what it’s called; what we do care about is the fact that it lets us do things with our iPhone and our Mac that would be otherwise impossible.
Aside from a brand new name, the latest version of Ecamm’s iPhone utility has a few new tricks up its sleeves: you can now add and edit notes without having to reboot the phone after each individual change (nice!), you can search most data with an iTunes-style search box, and there’s full access to the iPhone’s contact list. They’ve also fixed a number of minor bugs and tweaked minor features, so now your exported photos will have the correct creation date, and file and folder modification dates will now be preserved.
All that for just under $20. If you’d like to try before you buy, you can grab a fully functional 7 day demo from their site.
More fun with carriers! Orange, who already has an exclusive deal with Apple for providing the iPhone in France, has now announced that it’s made a deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to other countries under their dominion.
As of “later this year” (which we are awarding “most favored catchphrase” status), Orange will be providing the iPhone in Austria, Belgium, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Jordan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Switzerland, and “Orange’s African markets.” While they didn’t spell out which countries that includes, Orange currently has operations in Guinea Konakri, Senegal, Guinea Bissau, Niger, Ivory Coast, Mali, Kenya, Cameroon, Madagascar, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Botswana, Reunion, and Mauritius.
For those playing along at home, you’ll notice some duplicates there: Swisscom has already announced a deal in Switzerland, América Móvil has claimed the Dominican Republic, and Vodafone has spoken for Egypt and Portugal. Most interestingly, T-Mobile has been offering the iPhone in Austria since February, which means they didn’t manage to snag an exclusive agreement for the country.
The country parade seems like it’s continuing unabated. Let’s see what next week brings, shall we?
If, in light of the current iPhone shortage, you were planning on raiding AT&T stores to stock up on iPhones and resell them at high prices, you might be a little disappointed to find that the mobile operator’s retail locations are now limiting the number of iPhones that customers can buy.
According to a leaked internal memo, customers at AT&T stores can now buy only one iPhone each—this was confirmed by Macworld via calls to AT&T stores. In addition, checks and cash will no longer be accepted for buying iPhones: you’ll need to use a credit card.
Well, so much for my new business plan.
