scobleizerTag Archive -

The iPhone is not a phone

Note: some minor corrections based on comments.

Robert Scoble hits the nail on the head when he says that, “On my phone I only use voice about 5% of the time I use my iPhone.” He was responding to Louis Gray’s post on how he switched from iPhone to Android.

It amuses me to hear the ongoing debates about call quality on AT&T vs. Verizon vs. Sprint, etc. My personal experience is, of course, nearly irrelevant (since my personal experience may have little to do with how you or someone else experiences it), but I’ve been with AT&T for 10 years now and cannot yet find a reason to change.

I live in a house in the hills east of the Santa Clara Valley. The nearest cell towers (of any variety) are over 3 miles away. I get one bar of signal strength no matter which carrier I use. When I had an Amazon Kindle (which uses SprintVerizon for its “Whispernet” service), I often had difficulties downloading books to it. Recently, I’ve installed an AT&T 3G Microcell in my home, and I now get 5 barsstars. Likewise, at work, there is an AT&T repeater. In addition, since AT&T is a partner of Yahoo!, we get a substantial employee discount on service. So, you see, I have a huge number of incentives to stick with AT&T. In addition to that, however, is the fact that I’ve almost never had connectivity problems; I suppose that, if I lived in downtown San Francisco where I competed with tens of thousands of other users, I might have problems, but I don’t.

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