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I’d been counting down the days for the last 1.5 years and it finally arrived….iphone day! We’ve been Verisign Wireless customers for about 6 years and have had no reason to consider switching to another carrier, as the services was great, albeit a little overpriced. Here’s the story of our switch to AT&T…
Okay, I admit it…I’m an Apple fanboy. But I’ve used everything from Windows 3-Vista, MacOS 7-10 and even Linux and I have to say that the new MacOS has it going on. It’s more stable and reliable than Windows in my experienced. And Apple hardware is equally impressive. I switched to Mac again after years of using Windows a couple years ago and haven’t looked back. I don’t miss the blue screens of death or the slowness after 3 months of buying the computer, because the OS needed to be reloaded.No more daily reboots…
Okay, with all that said, when Apple released the iphone, sure I was like "That is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen and I have to have one." The big problem was dropping $600 on a phone….a PHONE! So I put it out of my mind, and counted it as unreasonably expensive. Of course, then Apple cut the price shortly after, but we were under a 2 year contract with Verizon, so we couldn’t really switch anyway.
Well, our contract with Verizon ran up about 2 weeks ago, and I made the switch to AT&T, dragging my wife and parents along, since we are all on a family plan. I do have to admit, that we are getting more for our money with AT&T…400 extra minutes, rollover minutes, and a data plan for our iphone all for about the same price we were paying at Verizon. But the "More bars in more places" slogan from AT&T is simply not the case – big surprise. I host a guys outdoor adventure trip every year to the middle of nowhere and consistently it’s always ther Verizon customers who are the only ones who get a signal…and from what I’ve read, Verizon has the best network…so I wasn’t all that surprised. I’ve had 3 dropped calls with AT&T in 2 weeks and probably had 5 in 6+ years with Verizon…and there are times I get NO signal in my home, which is about a mile from DOWNTOWN Raleigh….so that wasn’t very impressive. But all in all, the signal seems clear and I usually have at least one bar. Most everywhere else I’ve driven in Raleigh I get a great signal with AT&T.
So on to the switching part: I knew that if I switched carriers, it had to be economically sensible…it couldn’t only be because I want an iphone. And I was particularly annoyed that AT&T decided to up the data fee for the iphone to $30 a month, AND get rid of the 200 included text messages that came with the old iphone. Sure the new 3G iphone is cheaper, and the sales reps were quick to point that out, but with a 2 year contract, any reasonably intelligent person can see that paying an extra $15 a month for the new 3G data and 200 text messages means the customer loses in the long run – big time. And when I’m sitting next to wifi 90% of the time, why would I want to pay $10 more a month for the 3g network, when many cities don’t even have 3G yet anyway. Sure, the new iphone has GPS too, but the old iphone has a clever way of getting your location figured out via looking at the data from the nearby wireless routers…so again, not worth an extra $15 a month. So, I pulled up trusty Craigslist and found a nice guy who sold me his old 2G iphone for $300…which is more than the new one, but again, with the lower monthly plan, was still worth every penny.
So I went to 3 different AT&T stores and it took multiple conversations to get a fair deal. First of all, I’m used to getting a $100 credit towards new phones every 2 years with Verizon, so I usually got a cool phone for myself and usually they would throw in up to 5 free phones for other family members – and not just 2 crappy phones….they usually had about 10 to choose from, all for free. This is not the case with AT&T. They have 2-3 free phones, at the time I was switching, and they were all dinosaur phones with no features and bad ratings. They didn’t even come CLOSE to the free phones we got at Verizon two years earlier. So, after a rebate, I had to pay $20 each for Motorola CU515 phones, which had a good rating on CNet, but honestly my wife’s phone was a downgrade from her 2-year-ago-free-Verizon phone. The camera had no flash, the phone was substantially bigger and the front outside screen was in monocolor rather than full color…..and NO VOICE DIALING…you have to pay $5 more A MONTH for that feature with most AT&T phones…HELLO….why has that feature been standard on every phone I’ve owned since 1999, but now I have to pay more for it!?! Lovely.
So that, combined with an $88 new customer activation fee (which is ridiculous anyway – carriers should be encouraging me to switch to them, not charging me extra, shouldn’t they?) and lack of features, the switch wasn’t looking so good. And my attempts at negotiating with the Garner AT&T location was futile. They kept telling me they had to clear any "special deals" with heir manager, and he’s out at the moment…blah, blah. And when I called their manager, he never returned my phone call…Gee, you guys really want my business, huh? *Tries to not be bitter* 
Anyway, after them telling me that there is no way to waive the activation fee, I want to the Cary location and the first sales rep I spoke to waived the activation fee like it was no problem. Yay. 
So we get the phones and switch….my wife got a bum CU515 so the call quality was bad until we switched it out, but now that it’s all done, my wife does actually like her phone.
Now comes activation and number porting. Switching over my wife’s phone went flawless and was quick. Activating the iphone was a pain, as the first sim card didn’t work, but luckily the sales rep gave me 2 just in case….then I could make calls but not receive, but a call and 20 minute wait with ATT porting fixed that….had the same problem with my mother’s phone too.
So in the end, was it worth it? Well, the iphone is unbelievable. it is so easy and FUN to use…it’s not a chore to send emails…browsing the web and viewing maps is very easy and intuitive…it has tons of space on it for music…and the new app store is awesome…there are a lot of free add on programs and games that are really fun to play with. I love this thing. But if it wasn’t for the iphone, I never would have switched. And after talking with other people who switched for the same reason – and believe me, the AT&T store is constantly full of people switching to get the new iphone, AT&T’s deal with Apple to sell the iphone had to be one of their smartest moves in years.
We have used the services of Tranquil Hosting many times over the years and I must say that they are an excellent company. I am plesantly suprised by how quick to respond and knowledgable they are when it comes to web server maintanence.
They now offer a new Virtual Private Network (VPN) solution that gives you all the advantages of having your own high power dedicated server, such as root access, the ability to install custom software, without the higher costs associated with having your own hardware. Prices start at around $40/month so it’s a great way to upgrade from shared hosting if you need a little extra flexibility. Click here to visit their website.
We just bought an ASUS eee PC for one of our sales reps and I must say I love this little thing, despite it’s flaws.
Yeah, the keyboard is tiny, the battery only holds up for 3 hours per charge, the spacebar key is unreliable (my biggest qualm UPDATE: Fixed the space bar using this easy tip) and the trackpad
button is hard as rock to push, BUT considering it comes with 3 USB
ports, a built-in microphone and speakers, a SD card slot, a solid state
hard drive (albeit only 4GB), boots very fast, has a rock solid and easy to
use linux-based OS (which is more fine tuned than I would have expected), is unbelivably tiny and portable, comes with great
preloaded software like OpenOffice, Skype, the Pidgin IM client, some
cool games, Firefox, Thunderbird and many more, and prices in at about
$350, it’s got a lot of bang for the buck.
It’s
the perfect machine to surf with in your living room or at a coffee
shop. Although I think a cheap USB keyboard and mouse is a must if you are going to be doing much typing. The
processor is pretty slow, but the Linux OS is very responsive, so it’s
not really an issue. Although you won’t be doing any video editing or hard core gaming, with more and more apps going web-based, like Google Apps and Picnik, I can see that low end, low cost, ultra portables are going to become more and more popular.
Recently a friend told me about Pando,
a program that lets you send files up to 1GB for free to someone else
that has Pando. It’s free and easy to install and plugs right in to
most email programs, so it’s very convienent to use. And due to the
limited capability of email – which takes forever to send big files and
sometimes doesn’t even work, Pando is an excellent alternative.
Also, Grisoft is releasing it’s new 7.5 version of it’s antivirus program. I’ve been using the 7.1 version for some time and it’s been great. There is a free version of 7.5 available here
for personal use. It even runs on Linux 🙂 If you run Windows and
don’t have any antivirus program, I highly recommend this one. In fact,
I recommend running two antivirus programs in Windows, since Windows
users are almost always the target of virus attacks. Don’t forget to
scan for spyware and adware too!
I’ve now seen it all…As web 2.0 apps become more and more capable with new tecnologies like AJAX and Flex, the world of computing will become a very different place. Take Fauxto,
for example. It’s a web-based photo editing tool that may give
Photoshop Elements a run for it’s money. Another promising photo
editing app is Picnik. And these apps appear to be free, although still in beta. Don’t you just love the internet? 😉
I can’t get enough of Google. They just keep on cranking out great web-based tools! I’m lovin‘ it! My most recent discoveries are Google Checkout, Google Analytics, Picasa Web Albums. While most of these services are not new (except to me), I’ve added these to my growing list of other free tools from Google:
iGoogle – a customized search start page. You can fill this thing up with all kinds of RSS feeds
from your favorite sources, and then organize them onto different tabs.
There are tons of Google widgets you can add too, for showing a daily
Bible study, local weather, movie times, your Gmail inbox, and just
about anything else you can think of.
Gmail – Simply the best free webmail around.
Google Talk – A great IM program so you can chat with all of your friends.
Google Maps – My favorite mapping website of choice. The drag around feature is great, and their new "Street view" blows me away!
The Picasa Web Albums
give you a free GB of storage for your images online. You can share any
album, and it’s a breeze to edit captions. And of course every image is
searchable. And if you are a Mac user and use iPhoto, there’s even a plugin for exporting images to Picasa web albums.
Google Analytics
is a tool that lets you track ALL KINDS of information about people who
are visiting your website. What browser they are using, what country
they are in, which search engines are bringing you the most hits,
average time a user spends on your site…you name it. And it even ties
in with Google Adwords if you are paying for advertising.
And finally, Google Checkout, which lets you buy things online more securely (similar to Paypal)
shop faster and even sell items. When you checkout from your favorite
online vendor, if they support Google Checkout, you can keep your email
address private and Google will relay emails to your account and if you
start getting spammed, you can turn that store’s unwanted emails off.
All-in-all, Google gets my award for the company producing the coolest stuff on the web. And most of it is FREE! Does it get any better?
We do a lot of e-commerce websites and one thing that many people don’t
know that if you want to sell something online, you need to have what’s
called a "merchant account" with a payment company. Your payment
company might be your bank or another organization like PayPal. If you go with a bank (will will set you up with a payment processor like Verisign or Authorize.net), you’ll most likely get better transaction rates. For example, with Paypal,
there is roughly a 3% transaction fee, where as most other merchants
charge around 2.2%. BUT, most banks will have a monthly fee of around
$40, where Paypal does not. So if you anticipate moving a lot of product, or large amounts, a credit card merchant other than Paypal may be ideal. Keep in mind Paypal, as well as other credit card merchants, have several different plans, so this is a generalization, for simplicity’s sake.
An advantage of Paypal,
other than there not being a monthly fee (unless you get one of their
higher plans), is it is quite easy and quick to set up. Create a new Paypal account and then you have to link your account to your bank account, so you can make deposits from your Paypal account
to your bank (which is something you have to do manually, but there is
no charge for it). Then you verify your account by entering in the
amount of two small deposits Paypal will
make into your linked account. This is how they make sure you indeed
own that bank account. If you don’t link to a bank account, Paypal can mail you a check, but there is a small fee for that service.
So
it’s best to shop around with credit card merchants and get the best
rate you can, but also make sure it is compatible with whatever
shopping cart system you may have.