Introduction:
If you’ve been reading my blog or listening to my various podcasts, you’ll know that I love my iPhone, but have been very unhappy with my AT&T service the past year. Three years ago, when I bought my first iPhone, I was living in a large city and fortunate to have excellent cellular coverage. I paid my $175 early termination fee to switch from Verizon to AT&T and was as happy as I could be with my new iPhone and AT&T.
About a year ago, I made a job change and moved back to my hometown. While I love my new job and being closer to family, I’ve been plagued by poor AT&T coverage. My current city has multiple dead zones in highly populated areas and in general suffers from poor connectivity. It’s quite common to be in an area with 5 bars of coverage yet calls go directly to voicemail or text messages are delayed, sometimes hours. Making matters worse, I live in one of those dead zones and literally have no service inside my home. Outside isn’t much better, I can usually only maintain a call for a couple of minutes before it drops.
My AT&T contract is up on July 11th and I knew that a new iPhone would be released about that time. With AT&T unable to provide me any kind of answers, I was really struggling to decide what I was going to do. Short of the iPhone changing to another carrier, something that I think will happen but will be later rather than sooner, my only hope was the promise of the AT&T 3G MicroCell. I watched the WWDC keynote with mixed emotions. Lured by the appeal of the iPhone 4, but at the same time dreading signing a new contract and committing myself to two more years of cell phone purgatory. But something else happened on June 7th that was perhaps more appealing to me than anything Steve Jobs had to say in his Keynote address, the mythical 3G MicroCell came to my city.
Click to continue reading: Review: AT&T 3G MicroCell
In just a couple of days Steve Jobs will get up on stage and share with the world the newest addition to the iPhone family. I was an early adopter of the iPhone and upgraded to the iPhone 3G on day one. However I skipped the 3G S last year because I wasn’t eligible for subsidized pricing and wasn’t sure there was enough to justify paying a premium for the new device. With the exception of iPhone 3G S launch day and the surrounding hoopla, I really haven’t regretted that decision.
This week I decided to suspend my Netflix membership after continuously using the service since 2005. I’ve been mulling over this for the past several months but finally decided it’s time to try something new. It’s a combination of several factors that has led to this decision. First, my lifestyle and job have changed and I have less free time to devote to watching movies. Second, rentals from other sources such as AppleTV, Amazon Unbox (via my TiVo HD) and services like Red Box or Blockbuster Express offer additional options. Third, and perhaps most significantly, a growing delay in the ability to rent popular titles.